Challenges and cases
During the covid pandemic customer experiences across the world shifted. Customer service teams and networks had to cater to their existing customer base while trying to compete with rapidly shifting markets and customer journeys. For one of our clients this resulted in a surge of customer cases and queries.
This client specialises in low carbon heat and power solutions, such as biomass and solar. They strive to unlock the potential of decentralised and sustainable energy. As a distributed energy company, they are always focused on developing innovative solutions: this is no different with their customer service strategy.
With lockdown eliminating many of the traditional customer service options available to them our client, looked to implement a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system to help manage and automate their rapidly increasing queries. In doing so they realised that there was a lot within their customer journeys that they could learn from and optimise. With this process our client began their ‘Summer of CeX’.
Aims and objectives of ‘Summer of CeX’:
- Improve customer experience for fuels and O&M customers.
- Develop robust, customer centric and clearly defined processes, enabled via SageCRM.
- Encourage cross-functional co-operation and empathy.
- Develop overarching customer principles.
The client in turn came to our team at Fresh Nous. As a market leading CeX consultancy, we served as their customer experience and customer journey mapping expertise and helped to structure and guide their mapping. Working alongside their marketing, sales, service and support, customer service, operations, finance and HSEQ teams we began to unpack their customer journeys and assumptions.
We refereed a few workshops which included mapping various existing processes, highlighting pain points and moments of truth. These sessions were attended by 50+ team members. We ran through the cyclical process of plan > design > develop > test > release > review several times. This allowed our client to carry out numerous stages of customer learning, providing them with valuable insights which they were then able to build upon.
Customer learnings led to:
- Implementation of automated order and delivery customer communication.
- Introduction of new email templates.
- Implementation of automated customer communications embedded throughout the case process.
- Introduction of Customer Liaison and Lead Investigator roles.
- Workflows that highlighted when key information should be gathered.
- End to end transparency of customer trading history.
- Rationalising and standardising of onboarding forms and checklists.
- Emphasis on version control and lines of responsibility clearly defined.
- Customer experience authority defined and enforced.
Informed by customer journey mapping and CeX workshops our client was able to rationalise and streamline their customer experience. They were also able to navigate a period of uncertainty and rapid change while improving and building on their existing structure.
These processes and learnings had a tangible effect within their customer experience. They saw a 50% reduction in the time spent negotiating with customers. Furthermore, they saw the number of customer queries and cases fall drastically, as they had identified the pain points which were creating these areas of friction.
How we help
With guidance from our customer experience team at Fresh Nous, our client was able to revolutionise the way they interacted with their customers. Formulating and implementing customer journeys that go above and beyond are much more attainable than would appear. Through a simple process of trials and learning you can identify and adapt to markets that are changing as rapidly as those operating during the pandemic.
