Disjointed interactions
Utility Warehouse (UW) is the UK’s only genuine multi-service provider, simplifying the household bills of its customers by bundling household utilities including energy, broadband, mobile and insurance into one monthly bill. UW is committed to using technology to power its ambitious but sustainable growth plans, while helping serve existing customers in a timely and efficient manner.
UW isn’t like other utility companies; its customers have a range of bespoke bundles, and that means UW finds success and growth by improving its customer experience (CX). That’s the role of 1,000 agents based in the UK. But, as the world of work changed to adapt to a remote way of working, fragmented systems and aging IT infrastructure left the company lagging behind.
When its London contact center ran on Avaya on-premises technology, service regularly suffered due to outages, multiple disconnected systems and lack of insight into customer journeys. Only a few people had the knowledge and skills to make legacy system changes, which often took weeks.
“As a business, we wanted to improve employee efficiency and empowerment, by giving them a holistic view of the accounts they were working, thus reducing customer side efforts in the process,” said Samit Patel, Head of Portfolio at Utility Warehouse. “This meant giving customers the same results, in a quicker period, while improving business continuity, service levels and the ability to innovate.”
Transforming the contact center
Utility Warehouse chose the Genesys Cloud platform for its new omnichannel strategy and the ability to manage with much more ease than they could with their legacy system. “The teams have been able to build multichannel solutions, IVR enhancements and various integrations on their own,” added Patel. “It shows how user-friendly the system is and how it can empower our team to implement improvements themselves.”
In addition, the team was able to handle the complete migration from Avaya on its own without the help of a service provider. “Two team members implemented Genesys Cloud alongside their everyday work,” Patel said. “The migration took us about eight weeks.”
Leveraging the solution’s APIs to connect to the in-house CRM system meant agents retained the same user interface. And the company has replaced wallboards with Genesys reporting and customized dashboards.
“Our digital transformation was all about designing a lasting, purpose-built CX strategy — internally and self-sufficiently,” said Patel. “Genesys gave us the launch pad to do that, while enabling heavy customization and integration, to the point where the platform is invisible to our agents. They now manage all customer interactions through a single CRM interface built in-house.”
Smarter use of data, such as customer profiling and most recent contacts, has enabled intent-based routing. This has helped to reduce queues from 105 to just 10 (a 90% reduction) across the entire business. The amount of external phone numbers has also been cut from 600 to 20 (a 96% reduction). Previously, it was difficult to lessen the number of IVRs and individual menus, which could involve up to eight choices. Now, with dynamic IVRs, there are just six in total. In most cases, customers only need to press two buttons to quickly access the channel they need.
Self-service is more intelligent, allowing UW to adapt its CX to certain situations, including the type of background music its customers hear. For example, customers calling to provide meter readings are dealt with differently than those suffering a bereavement or experiencing financial problems.