Customer Perspectives
published on Jan 11, 2019
Report Overview:
NelsonHall's client perspective of CX Services in Energy & Utility consists of 24 pages.
Who is this Report for:
NelsonHall’s “Customer Experience Services in Energy and Utility Client Feedback and Expectations” analysis is an assessment report designed for:
- Sourcing managers investigating “the art of the possible” and the perspectives of their peers towards next generation customer service
- Vendor marketing, sales and business managers developing strategies to target digital & service transformation opportunities within customer experience
- Financial analysts and investors specializing in the IT services and BPS sector.
Scope of this Report:
As part of NelsonHall’s 2018 Customer Experience Services in Energy and Utility market analysis, in addition to interviewing soem of the leading CX services providers globally, our research extended to a survey of these vendors’ clients. These clients represented a range of geographies, sub-segments, size, scope of services, and various levels of maturity in their sourcing of CX.
Each interview was conducted to cover several focus areas, to gain a comprehensive understanding from the client perspective including their experience as a subscriber of CX services in the current marketplace. This analysis was specifically designed to understand, not only the perception of the vendor performance in meeting client needs currently, but also their ability to meet the clients’ needs in the future. The survey focused on the following key areas:
- CX services usage
- Benefits derived directly from CX services
- Vendor approach to benefit delivery
- Client satisfaction
- Client future expectations and vendor ability to meet these future requirements.
For each of these focus areas, clients were asked to rate various attributes including services used, services satisfaction, benefits sought, benefits importance, vendor approach, and overall performance satisfaction.
Key Findings & Highlights:
Service usage:
- Traditional customer care and support is the most widely used CX service with relatively high current satisfaction
- Sales generation is used by approximately a quarter of the surveyed energy and utility organization, but it scores very high in current and future importance
- Collections and bad debt management are becoming increasingly important services.
Benefits and vendor approach:
- The current effectiveness of CX services vendors to deliver benefits is relatively high
- Overall costs reduction is the highest rated benefit
- There is a gap between the required and actual delivery in improving customer satisfaction metrics
- Vendors have opportunities to improve performance through additional customer and process insights, greater used of digital technology in agent training and performance management, digital channel enablement, specifically self-service.
Satisfaction and vendor ability to meet future needs:
- The most valued current vendor capabilities are the flexible scale and availability of resources, and cost optimization through lower cost onshore and offshore locations. The quality of staff particularly cultural alignment is also among the main drivers for client satisfaction
- Sector clients rate the effectiveness of vendors’ innovation mechanisms. Areas for improvement include proactive recommendations for improving customer satisfaction
- Future selection criteria include the ability to adopt back-office automation and customer self-service, including through chatbots, single view of the customer, and enhancing agent support. Additional target capabilities include domain expertise, knowledge of the evolving regulatory environment, and increased focus on sales with new tools and models required to improve agent selection and training, and use of analytics in the segmentation and targeting of customers.