Getting Utility Sales Right the First Time

Getting sales agreements right the first time is a huge concern for any sales team. For utility companies, making sure that every “i” is dotted and that every “t” is crossed in accordance with local regulations regarding energy sales is especially important.

For the first time in over a decade, the largest energy providers in the UK are re-entering the market through face to face selling channels. While these providers are taking their first cautious steps back into this world, other more experienced players are also planning to re-enter the field sales domain following the halt caused by the pandemic.

For both types of providers, ensuring that the people representing you in the field are not only complying but delivering an exceptional experience is key to not only avoiding any complaints or challenges but also to win over new customers and capitalise on the very real and lucrative opportunities available.

With this in mind, here are some considerations for your business leaders:

Field sales historically has had a high churn rate, in some markets field sales reps will often migrate to the energy provider offering the cheapest product to the market. As many field sales reps are paid on commission only structures, they go where they are most likely to be successful and in turn, get paid. While price is hugely important, the level of service offered by an organisation is also key, especially considering the number of cheaper, smaller energy providers going bust in recent years due to their mismanagement of customer needs.

Training:

When you are putting a sales rep in front of a customer, they need to not only have detailed knowledge of your products and services but also of the value you offer customers that include and go beyond prices, such as service and overall customer experience. This puts a higher demand on the sales reps to develop their soft skills. Developing these skills and creating the type of customer experience that delivers at every interaction takes time and consideration.

Creating a training plan that not only offers upfront training and onboarding, but also offers continuous learning, just-in-time learning and assessment and can be delivered to the rep on their device just before and after they start selling, makes the information easily digestible, keeps the material fresh in their mind, and allows sales reps to apply their learning immediately with the results tracked.

Quality Assurance:

Inaccurate sales numbers cause headaches for both sales reps and business leaders, especially if there are improvements that can be made to your process to shore up those challenges. If there are challenges with a sale, such as incomplete or inaccurate information, or you are an organisation that does a separate follow-up to every customer post-sale, all of this equals more time and more cost, more time to rework or validate a sale and more cost both direct and opportunity costs.

To mitigate this costly consequence your organisation can implement a digital sales solution with the ability to highlight the gaps in your sales process - and add checks, validations and automated workflows to your sales process. This takes the guesswork out of selling, giving the sales reps a more accurate view of their sales commission and providing you with more accurate data to make decisions and improve your process overall.

To complement this from a quality assurance perspective, your customer can review and sign off on the sale on their device, confirming the legitimacy of the sale. You can automatically follow up with a customer satisfaction survey to ensure the rep has completed their duties as expected.

If you are embarking on a new or emboldened sales effort we’d love to hear what approaches you are taking to getting it right, the first time.

Schedule a sales MOT with the team today

by Nathan

Turn Unexceptional Customer Service Into Exceptional Customer Experiences

Customer expectations are constantly changing and many companies are struggling to keep pace with the evolving needs of consumers. Although some industries do better than others at delivering great customer experiences, in general, there’s room for improvement across the board.

Customer experience (CX) affects all industries, however, energy and telco companies are in a unique situation as they interact with their customers on a daily basis, which puts additional pressure on them to achieve customer experience goals. A recent Accenture Research Report adds to this by saying, ... an experience renaissance is afoot ˗ one that is galvanising companies to push beyond the CX philosophy and organise the whole business around the delivery of exceptional experiences. With an increasing number of organisations developing innovative solutions to exceed customer expectations, energy and telco companies need to step up their game and foster customer-centricity across the entire organisation.

 

Poor Customer Experiences: Triggers and Outcomes 

What constitutes a customer experience, whether good, bad, or mediocre? Whilst there’s not a single answer, the one thing that you can be certain of is that customers now have higher expectations than ever before.

When it comes to customer expectations and experiences, statistics are plentiful. To help bring to light the pivotal role customer experience has on your business, we’ve gathered key statistics to help illustrate expectations from the viewpoint of consumers.

The results of delivering poor customer experiences can’t be underestimated. Not only can it result in churn and diminished profitability, but regulatory fines are a real possibility, as well as the potential to harm your brand.

Now that we have a better understanding of the potential outcomes when customers are provided a poor experience, let’s take a deep dive into some of the causes. A recent study conducted by PagerDuty and Dimensional Research determined the following as the 7 key barriers to providing a great customer experience.

 

  1. Increasingly complex IT environments - 64%
  2. Increasing customer expectations around convenience and performance - 44%
  3. Hiring and retaining talent with the right skills - 40%
  4. Difficulty prioritising issues - 35%
  5. Inability to innovate quickly - 33%
  6. Siloes and bottlenecks between internal teams - 26%
  7. Increasing competitive pressures - 25%

 

In addition to the above, many energy and telco organisations are grappling with disconnected systems, complicated internal processes, cumbersome compliance processes, and an inability to keep the customer at the centre of the journey. With a number of potential issues hindering your ability to deliver exceptional customer service, you may wonder what the experience looks like through the eyes of your customers.

Let’s imagine for a minute that you are grappling with disconnected systems, complicated processes, and technology and tools that don't provide the information field reps require when they need it. While this is day-to-day life for you and your business, your customers see something else. It’s important to remember that customers don’t have a looking glass to the inner workings of your organisation ˗ they only see the aftermath of this situation which may include:

  • Repeatedly being asked for data and content that you already possess.
  • An endless stream of transfers where they need to repeat information previously provided.
  • Processes that are confusing and overwhelming, resulting in stopping the transaction.
  • Apologies from field service reps and customer service reps for the way they have to handle the transaction.
  • The inability of your salespeople to effectively provide customer guidance.

When bad experiences happen, how does your organisation handle customer complaints? If you're like 44% of UK businesses, you’re still relying on manual processes such as spreadsheets that don’t provide the swiftness needed to react promptly. With more than half of the people around the globe believing that companies need to take action on feedback provided by customers, it’s time for energy and telco providers to transform the experiences they are providing to customers.

 

Transforming the Customer Experience

When consumers were asked what impacts their level of trust with a company, offering excellent customer service is ranked number one. And around the globe, 96% of consumers say customer service is an important factor in their choice of loyalty to a brand.

What does it take to deliver the exceptional experiences customers demand? Customers don’t want the hassle of trying to figure out what needs to be done and how. Nor do they want or have the time to go through disparate processes and workflows. Customers want interactions that are easy to understand, easy to use and instructions that are simple to follow. Giving customers the experiences they crave requires automation, seamless integration, natural workflows, and data that is richly populated.

To begin the process of turning unexceptional customer service into exceptional customer experiences, there are some steps that you can take immediately. Based on our extensive experience, we recommend that you:

  • Implement customer journey mapping into your customer service processes. The mapping should include each point where your potential customer interacts with your business, e.g. signing up, address changes, billing, complaints, service, etc. Once the mapping is complete, be sure to review it for interaction flows, expected customer experiences, and how the customer will be able to engage in two-way communication with your business.
  • Populate rich data into processes for customer or prospect engagements, such as information provided to the field or telesales rep that pertains to the interaction and display known information on the application form.
  • Develop intuitive and natural workflows.
  • Make initial field sales rep training and ongoing courses a mandatory requirement and easy to digest and apply to the work they are doing

Providing exceptional customer experiences isn’t a one-and-done initiative, it’s a journey that you’ll continually revisit as customer expectations continue to develop. One thing is certain, providing customers with traditional experiences is no longer enough.

When it comes to your ability to compete, the customer experience is increasingly becoming a differentiating factor. According to Gartner, 89% of businesses expect to compete mainly on customer experience and organisations that take customer experience seriously will stand out from the noise and win loyal customers.

 

Improving the Customer Experience Starts with a Single Step

As the Chinese proverb so articulately states, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,” the journey to delivering exceptional customer experiences also begins with a single step.

As the leading provider of sales technology for energy and telco providers, we have an intimate understanding of what it takes to move the customer experience needle in these industries. Whether that's getting started with a minimum viable product (MVP) in order to plug the most critical sales gaps or longer-term plans to create an end-to-end exceptional customer experience strategy, with us helping them every step of the way.

Our ability to put you on the path to delivering exceptional customer experiences doesn’t end there. Are you saddled with legacy systems that are resulting in disconnected systems, processes, and people? Replacing these systems can be cost-prohibitive. With PSI, you don’t need to. We're able to push and pull data from multiple systems ˗ both old and new ˗ which provides you with the automation and workflows you need to improve the customer experience.

 

What are your customer experience goals? Regardless of where you are on your journey, we’re here to help. Contact us today to book a 30-minute strategy session to learn how we can help bridge your customer experience gaps.

by Nathan

Leading the Way Through Compliance, Customer Experience and Competitiveness

Regardless of whether your organisation sells energy or telco products, regulatory compliance isn’t an option. With regulators such as Ofgem and Ofcom expanding their scope on an ongoing basis, the regulatory landscape is a moving target, putting you at a distinct disadvantage.

Although it’s mandatory, how does your organisation view compliance – as a necessary evil or as a means to improve the customer experience and perhaps even gain a competitive advantage? This blog explores the intersection between compliance and customer experience, how it can improve your competitive standing, and the tools and technology you need for a customer-centric approach to compliance.

 

Compliance and Customer Experience: Better Together

For many organisations in regulated sectors, the thought is that they have to make a choice – satisfy regulators or satisfy customers. Like a needle and thread, compliance and customer experience go hand-in-hand. Although a difficult balance, there’s a direct relationship between being compliant and delivering exceptional customer experiences.

Let’s take a look at a few scenarios, one that takes a siloed approach to compliance and customer experience and the other that puts the customer at the centre of compliance.

 

Scenario 1: Disconnected compliance and customer experience

Using one of the most common reasons for lodging a complaint, billing, we’ll assume that your organisation has recently seen a spike in the number of complaints. Regardless of whether the customer wasn’t transferred to the right person or department or their complaint wasn’t properly acknowledged or handled, the end result remains the same – a formal complaint being lodged with the regulatory agency.

 

Scenario 2: Integrated compliance and customer experience

We’ll use the same set of circumstances, however since you’re taking a customer-centric approach to regulatory compliance, the outcome is much different. Not only are customers immediately transferred to the right person or department, but the first few calls set the wheels in motion to determine the cause of increased billing complaints. In this case, you had a technical issue with your billing system, which failed to notify customers of the upcoming rate increase. To rectify the situation and decrease the number of incoming calls, you immediately send all customers an apology notice along with an explanation of the rate increase.

While this situation is rather benign and easily rectified, there are others that could have a not so clear cut resolution and/or result in personal damage. It’s important to remember that the goal of regulators is to protect the customer. Put another way, their purpose is to ensure that organisations aren’t taking advantage of customers, either intentionally or unintentionally.

 

Compliance: A Continuous Cycle of Improvement

Staying compliant entails continuous improvements where any complaint, error, or mistake is reviewed and acted upon. Once corrective measures have taken place, you need to use the situation as a learning initiative and determine how it can be embedded within your processes such as workflows, training, etc., to ensure the same situation doesn’t happen again.

It’s also important to remember that the frequency of compliance changes will require ongoing enhancements on your part, from the processes, tools, and technology aspects. With sales reps in the field, you need to do everything possible to ensure they are able to deliver great customer experiences and operate within regulatory guidelines.

This means providing them with the technology and tools they need to efficiently do their jobs while remaining compliant. Technology that is making a difference includes auto-populating as much customer information as possible, delivering logic-driven questions to their device to ensure that the right product is offered to the right customer type, providing the ability to validate customer data while at the door, and delivering continuous learning electronically. In addition, when a problem arises you need the ability to access the details around the issue. This is where having intelligent insights can help to know why the issue occurred, rectify the situation faster, and reduce complaints.

 

Is Compliance Part of Your Company’s DNA?

Too often organisations approach compliance and customer experience from different vantage points, with compliance falling under the purview of your legal department and customer experience the responsibility of customer-facing employees. This siloed approach makes it difficult to remain compliant and deliver exceptional customer experiences simultaneously.

When compliance complements the customer experience, it becomes part of your processes and workflows, basically becoming embedded in your organisation’s DNA – giving you a competitive edge. You're more apt to pick up early warning signs of possible compliance risk and be able to proactively take the necessary actions. Doing this, however, requires the right tools and technology. Technology and tools that only a company that has extensive energy, telco and regulatory compliance knowledge can provide.

At PSI, we have experience in helping regulated organisations take a customer-centric approach to regulatory compliance. With us as your partner, you’ll be able to cost-effectively bridge the compliance and customer experience gap and take a leading role in your industry.

 

Do you want to improve regulatory compliance, deliver outstanding customer experiences, and gain a competitive advantage? Contact our team today to learn how we can help you make compliance a core component of your company’s DNA.

by Nathan