The introduction of automation within the customer service industry continues at a rapid pace. Whilst it’s always well intentioned and designed to increase efficiency and improve the customer experience, what happens when things go wrong? We take a look at some of the potential pitfalls of automation and put forward our thoughts on how to avoid the poor use of technology within your customer-facing operations.

What’s going wrong with customer service automation?

When the customer experience is not managed well, the consequences are serious. According to Accenture’s 2018 research, 60% of customers had not made a purchase due to poor customer service, and 61% of customers had completely stopped doing business with at least one company in the last year for the same reason.

As customers ourselves, most of us can recall experiences where our interaction with a brand has been harmed by poor automation. Poor handover between automatic and human systems; confusing and over-long sequences of button-pressing either on the phone or computer keypad; excessive recorded announcements… the list goes on. It’s situations like these that are often badly implemented, which should be designed with the customer in mind to avoid potential loss of purchase or cancellation of a service.

Common mistakes include:

• Replacing a system instead of complementing it. Recognising when humans are needed is important, because it’s not practical to expect automation to address all issues and enquiries.

• Relying on a single channel. Put simply, customers use multiple channels and they expect to be able to receive customer care through the one they’re using right now. This means that information has to be available across all your channels, which need to be able to share data between each other.

• Automating complex support issues. Some issues are just too complicated to automate. Humans are better at understanding complex issues, negotiating and solving difficult problems. Good agents are also much more effective at empathising with frustrated customers. A well-handled complaint can be worth ten issue free transactions.

• Using outdated systems and information. Not maintaining data in customer-facing systems can easily result in bad information being passed to your customers. Up-to-date information allows your agents to act quickly and correctly.

Caring for your customers

From research by Salesforce and Interactive Intelligence Group – 83% of consumers need some degree of customer support while making an online purchase. The most important factors for customers who use your customer service channels are:

1. Short response times
2. Consistency across channels
3. Knowledge of staff

It’s vital that you provide an effective customer service, which addresses these factors.

Implementing robust systems to deal with the most common enquiries quickly and effectively will improve your customer experience, enabling your human agents to deal with the more complex situations with empathy and expertise, resulting in happier customers. This handover from systems to humans can also be improved with good IVR, call recording analysis and usage monitoring to enable predictive call handling.

How can your business avoid pitfalls?

There are clearly some things to avoid when implementing technology and automation in your customer service operations. If you want to improve your customer experience, not harm it, then consider the following before implementing your next automation programme:

• Automate your FAQs. The most common questions that people ask of your business should be built into an automated FAQ system, or a chatbot. This will help to solve most customer issues quickly and reduce the burden on your customer care team.

• Build automated follow up. Most visitors do not become paying customers on their first visit. By automating follow up, in the form of surveys, emails and/or targeted ads on social media, the time consuming process of sales conversion can be made much more effective.

• Predict customer behaviour. Many customer issues are predictable. By capturing data on ever interaction, repeated enquiries can be predicted and customer service times can be minimised whilst keeping customers happy.

• Design systems that are able to handover seamlessly to humans. 72% of customers blame their bad customer service experience on having to explain their problem to multiple people. This also applies to systems. Make sure that data is handed over to your agents from your systems, so that the human interaction adds value, rather than starting over again.

• Track confidence scoring. Automated systems can record words and actions which flag low confidence and negative feelings towards your brand. By redirecting selected enquiries to a human agent, customer satisfaction can be maximised.

• Update a knowledge base for every customer. After every customer interaction, update the purchases, questions, location and preferences so you can cater to their needs in future. This is as important to straightforward no-nonsense buyers as it is to customers who make frequent enquiries.

• ASK FOR FEEDBACK! Automation is not easy. Regular testing and requests for feedback from users not only helps you to improve your systems, it makes customers feel more valued while you find better ways to serve them.
While there are certainly bad examples of automation hindering the customer experience, a well-designed, tested and implemented set of systems will help you to increase customer happiness, reduce costs and improve sales. If your automation is having a negative effect or you require help finding and implementing a system, get in touch. At CCP, we have access to a network of highly skilled technology and automation experts who will be able to assist.

In the run up to Christmas, online and offline retailers will, as usual, be desperately vying for consumer attention and wallet spend. Whether you’re a fan of the phenomenon or not, there’s no denying that Black Friday and Cyber Monday are an increasingly important part of the build up to Christmas. Since Black Friday’s introduction in 2014, online sales have risen steadily from £0.81bn to £1.49bn in 2018. Black Friday falls on 29th November this year, so is your customer service provision geared up and ready for the sudden rise in demand?

How big is the spike in sales around Black Friday?

As reported in a recent article on SaleCycle.com, the last few years have seen a pattern of increasing sales in the days leading up to Black Friday, with a marked spike on the day itself. Sales have continued at very high levels throughout Saturday, then risen again on Cyber Monday and the Tuesday too. So Black Friday isn’t just one day – it’s a sustained period of high spending and activity driven by promotions, the last pay day before Christmas and consumer responses to perceived limited offers.
According to a survey by SaleCycle, 70% of UK retailers will be taking part in Black Friday in 2019. This participation will be driven by increased sales promotion by those retailers, which will have a knock-on effect throughout retail sales as a whole, as buyers react to the pressure and increase their shopping online.

How does Black Friday impact your customer service teams?

Peak shopping days like Black Friday and the intensely busy days afterwards can put a huge amount of strain on customer service. This is not just because of increased volume, according to Business Matters, but the promotions used. To make an impact, many retailers will launch new products and/or promotions increasing the amount of new information that customer service agents need to deal with during a very busy time. As a consequence, this can result in negative customer experiences if challenges are not handled well.
The potential for success is significant, but the risk of failure is also heightened by the sheer volume and variety of transactions and issues in the few days around Black Friday. The limited timescales of this huge spike in retail spending mean that there’s not enough time to respond to and recover from failures. Therefore, it’s vital that retailers prepare for this period carefully and comprehensively.

How can you prepare customer service success?

1) Plan to succeed

If your organisation has experience of the Black Friday weekend, use all the sales and customer service data you have available to make predictions for 2019. In addition to reviewing sales made and calls handled, make sure you analyse abandon rates and calls received. This also applies to social channels and any online chat services you use. Plan your resources for the anticipated inbound spikes to ensure that you don’t miss opportunities to sell more products and make more customers happy.

2) Test your transactions

For most retailers taking part in Black Friday, their website will be the most critical part of the sales process. A site which performs well will maximise sales, whereas a poorly-performing site will not only lose opportunities, but will result in customers not coming back. The whole premise of Black Friday is limited availability, so your potential buyers will quickly move elsewhere!

3) Find flexibility

Not able to grow your customer service team to cope with the increased demand? There are other options available, so recruiting new team members does not need to be the only choice. Consider working with an outsourced contact centre to cope with the spike in volume, or to handle specific parts of your business processes. This can leave your experienced agents to deal with complex enquiries, while your additional team handles the more predictable tasks and interactions.

If your data from 2018 suggests that coping with Black Friday and Cyber Monday in 2019 will be difficult, let us know. We can talk through the options available to you.

The challenges of maintaining good customer service against a background of industry failures

The UK energy industry has seen massive changes over the last 20 years. Since the energy supply sector became competitive in the 1990s, there has been an unending cycle of consolidation and failure as the largest players have sought cost savings and new entrants have miscalculated the demands of the industry.

Energy supplier failures

The advent of supplier choice for consumers was supposed to usher in lower costs, more freedom and innovation in the industry. However, new entrants have found it extremely difficult to sustain growth and maintain customer service against a backdrop of low margins driven by the creation of a highly competitive environment.

Many consumers do not switch suppliers, which means winning new customers can be expensive for energy businesses. This has driven hard sell tactics, particularly from some new entrants, which has caused complaints from consumers. For those suppliers who have won new consumers in good numbers, there has been a consequential increase in back office work, to manage the onboarding of new customers, through established industry systems and when these fail, there are consequences for the supplier. There is also the need to issue accurate and timely bills, where a mixture of inaccuracies, mistakes and consumer misunderstandings can generate high volumes of customer service enquiries.

The established ‘Big Six’ energy suppliers in the UK have a long history of supplying electricity and gas to consumers. Their systems, staff and support are well tested and their large customer bases enable them to cope with fluctuations in consumer numbers. For new entrants, however, a major success or failure in signing up new consumers can have disastrous effects on the customer service and back office teams. This can cause unpredicted increases in costs and as a result we’ve seen a number of high profile failures of new supply companies:
• Eversmart Energy – 29,000 households affected
• Solarplicity – 7,500 households
• Brilliant Energy
• Our Power
• Economy Energy
• One Select
• Spark Energy Supply
• Extra Energy
• Usio Energy
• Gen4u
• Iresa
• National Gas and Power

With the introduction of a price cap and high wholesale energy prices on top of unexpected costs, more suppliers are expected to fail over the coming months.

Suppliers of last resort

Ofgem, the energy industry regulator, assigns a new supplier to the consumers of every energy company which fails. That new supplier then has to cope with the onslaught of new enquiries from consumers who weren’t expecting to switch again so soon and, quite understandably, have some questions they want answered. Taking on a failed competitor’s customer can therefore be tricky, resource intensive and less attractive than you’d imagine.

Consolidation

The recent sale of SEE to Ovo Energy has created a new member of the ‘Big Six’ with 5 million customers. This will add around 8,000 staff to Ovo’s business, and as expected there are likely to be some cost synergies driven out of the combined business. It’s vital that to retain their status as the 2nd biggest UK supplier, customer service levels are kept high throughout the transition period.
In a further shake-up of the ‘Big Six’, Eon has moved to take on Npower’s UK energy supply business. They’ll face the same challenges as Ovo Energy as they look to transform Npower’s loss-making operation and take on their consumers.

Smart metering misery

In recent years, the roll-out of smart meters to homes has caused additional problems for consumers and the industry alike. Just last week, it was announced that the deadline for installation targets in UK homes has been extended to 2024. Alongside the delayed installation programme, many householders are unhappy with the smart meters they have received. Problems with meters failing when consumers switched supplier have rendered the devices almost useless for people who have tried to minimise their household costs, resulting in unhappy customers and customer service issues for energy suppliers.

What does all this mean for customer service?

In an industry which supplies an essential service to every household in the UK, customer service is going to remain under the spotlight for energy companies. The ability of suppliers to cope with fluctuating demands from consumers will affect their ability to win and retain business.
Energy suppliers face a number of challenges when planning the future for their customer service operations:

Customer numbers – can future numbers be reliably forecasted, especially if the supplier is bidding for new business as Ofgem’s ‘supplier of last resort’? How will they cope with large variations in numbers?

Resource planning – if a supplier has merged with a competitor, how are the conflicting demands of providing excellent customer service and realising cost savings for shareholders going to be balanced?

Systems integration and development – how do you choose which systems to adopt following a merger? Can systems be improved to deliver better service and integrated with existing back-office operations? How will this be done within the limits of GDPR regulation?

Skills transfer – can the strengths of a more experienced team be passed into the combined business? How can this be done without harming customer service and minimising staff dissatisfaction?

Outsourcing – is it possible to supplement the team with experts from experienced energy industry outsourcers?

In an essential industry which is regularly in the news, energy companies must strive to maintain not only margins and customer numbers, but high levels of customer service. The high failure rate of new entrants is testament to the unpredictability of the sector and its extremely competitive nature. Ultimately, it will be a case of survival of the fittest; effective planning and management will be necessary to succeed and to cope with the inevitable challenges of the industry and its consumers.

Not even the ‘Big Six’ have been safe. We now have a new group of companies heading the industry and who knows if they’ll still be there in five years’ time? New entrants and old stalwarts alike need to consider customer service as an integral, essential part of their business make-up.
It’s going to be interesting being involved.