Customer Corner: Monthly Digest of Insights Shared by Your Peers in the Energy Central Customer Care Group – June 23, 2022

Welcome to the Customer Care Group roundup, Customer Corner. As always, your fellow group members are paying close attention to utility customer care trends and sharing their insights. This month’s selection includes great reasons to enable digital payments, ways to enhance Voice of the Customer programs, and more. Be sure to like and comment on your favorite posts. Happy reading!

Postage and Paper Price Increases Push More Utilities To Go Digital With Payments

Esham Ahmed

Link to original article: https://energycentral.com/o/questline/postage-and-paper-price-increases-push-more-utilities-go-digital-payments

In this post, new Energy Central member Esham Ahmed, Marketing Automation Manager at Questline notes that inflation is causing price increases on a wide variety of products, including paper and postage. For utilities, those two items are key components in paper billing. The cost alone is a good reason to switch to paperless billing and there is another very good one as well: customers want their utilities to go digital. Esham points out that utilities who know their customers well can use that information to determine which of them will likely be open to initial digital billing efforts.

Top 5 Tips for Enhancing Utility Voice of the Customer Programs

Mark Wilkinson

Link to original article: https://energycentral.com/c/cc/top-5-tips-enhancing-utility-voice-customer-programs

In this article, Mark Wilkinson, SVP Products at Ibex Digital offers five tips for utilities to optimize their Voice of the Customer program. They are adding surveys to collect customer feedback on specific experiences, closing the loop following feedback collection, ensuring survey questions are the right length, setting survey expectations up front, and using social media channels as another source of feedback.

Helping Consumers Switch to Electricity at Home

Nathan Shannon

Link to original article: https://energycentral.com/c/cc/helping-consumers-switch-electricity-home

In this piece, Nathan Shannon, President & CEO at the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative describes three programs that are helping consumers go all-electric in their homes. They are an ENERGY STAR program to ensure new homes include energy efficiency, electrification, and decarbonization; an education program operated by Great River Energy and its 28 member cooperatives; and a zero-percent financing program from SMUD to help consumers electrify their homes.

Put Yourself in Your Utility’s Customers’ Shoes

Andy Gotlieb

Link to original article: https://energycentral.com/c/cc/put-yourself-your-utility%E2%80%99s-customers%E2%80%99-shoes

Here, Andy Gotlieb, editor of a specialty publication and former public relations practitioner offers some suggestions for improving customer service. They include simplifying phone tree options, always giving the option to speak to a human, hiring service reps who are easy to understand, moving away from scripted conversations, limiting the amount of information customers must provide before speaking to an agent, and providing options for communication other than phone calls.  

Thanks again for reading this edition of Customer Corner! The authors listed above are eager to hear your thoughts and questions, so don’t hesitate to engage them. And if you want your content to be featured in this spot in future issues, be sure to publish your posts within the Customer Care Community.

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