Even in the age of large scale – and often Machine Learning-driven – voice and data analytics, one of the most common questions in the world of customer service, contact centres and CX is “why are they contacting us?”. Sadly, much of the time the answer is that it’s our fault. Our broken process and confusing communications leave customers with no alternative other than to get in touch with the contact centre in an attempt to fix what’s broken or get an explanation.
Here’s a case in point. How the, no doubt very expensive, attempted visit to my house by a gas engineer recently was, in no particular order, unnecessary, poorly managed and confusing.
On the doorstep the other morning I found a card and a letter saying that a gas engineer had visited, but got no answer.
The Card
The card was from National Grid Metering, with the date, time and an official-looking Job Number hand written on. As directed by the card I went to www.nationalgrid.com/metering “to contact us… to arrange another visit”. But it transpires that National Grid Metering doesn’t exist anymore and I was re-directed to National Gas Metering*.
The site had lots of information and photos of earnest-looking people in National Gas Metering hi-vis jackets and safety goggles, but it wasn’t going to help me with arranging a new engineer visit.
“Please note that we cannot accept work requests for residential or standard commercial meters from members of the public. We can only be instructed to attend a property or site by a registered gas supplier.”
So that was both confusing and a waste of time.
The Letter
I then moved on to the letter, which was co-branded both my friends National Gas Metering (the new name, so that’s something) and SGN (Southern Gas Networks). Bizarrely the letter was headed “Classified as internal”, although it clearly wasn’t! The letter explained that an engineer had called because my gas meter “… has been identified as needing maintenance work… essential for potential safety reasons”. That definitely sounded like I needed to re-book the engineer!
However, the letter went on to say “If your meter has been exchanged in the last 12 months, please let us know and we will update our records”. Had my meter been exchanged? Possibly. I know I finally got a smart meter last summer, before the display unit was unplugged and shoved in a draw after it sat there gleefully telling us how much more we were paying for energy, minute by minute! Did getting a smart meter count as an ‘exchange’? Presumably, but surely between them National Gas Metering and SGN would know, wouldn’t they? Hasn’t the utilities industry spent over a decade trying to meet government targets and persuade consumers to get smart meters fitted?
SGN offer three contact options – phone, email or text. I decided to call the SGN contact centre as it was still in opening hours. Oddly the call rang for 30 seconds and then went to voicemail. I don’t know how SGN has set up its call routing, but it would be very strange to only allow a call to queue for 30 seconds before sending the customer to voicemail.
The Text
Next, I decided to text them. Success! With 9 minutes I had a human-seeming response saying that as I had a new smart meter then “you will not need a meter exchange and I will update our records accordingly”.
So, after spending a chunk of my morning trying to make sense if all this confusion, I finally got an answer – and a rather depressing LinkedIn post to show for it. But I’m a sad customer experience nerd; most people aren’t. As it turns out there are no safety concerns about my gas meter, but how many people who really do need to have their meter replaced just give up when faced with this tangle of comms confusion?
The energy firms have had a truly traumatic couple of years at the consumer ‘frontline’, with business failures, soaring prices, erratic market intervention by government and millions of customers falling into fuel poverty. However, it seems that National Gas Metering and SGN are daily shooting themselves in the foot, generating customer contacts and confusion with every unsuccessful engineer’s visit.
And I can’t help thinking that if a contact centre advisor spent a morning with an engineer then all of these problems could be identified and fixed.
Sometimes the solutions are easy.
*Google tells me that National Grid spun off its metering activities to a new entity, earlier this year. It seems that they are using up all their old stationery before re-branding
