Press release

Updated on: 4^th November 2022

Insite Energy has won two awards at the coveted UK Customer Experience Awards (CXA) 2021. They were recognised with the top ‘Gold’ award for our outstanding service in the categories ‘Contact Centre – Small’ and ‘Customer Experience for SMEs’.

Transforming Insite Energy’s customer service

Since 2019, Insite Energy has transformed the quality of the customer service it provides, becoming the best performing heat network metering & billing company in the UK. In the process, Insite has set new standards for the whole energy sector. It is an achievement to be proud of and one that has been consistently appreciated by their clients and customers as evident by their over 1,000 five-star reviews on Trustpilot.

Insite’s customer experience transformation included the opening of a brand-new contact centre in Peterborough, the creation of a new customer-focused website complete with live webchat service, and an investment in state-of-the-art back-office IT systems.

These changes saw their customer churn rate reduced to 1.25% in 2020 compared to 7.5% in 2018 (with a 3% target). Insite’s residential customer base also grew by 19% since 2019.

Gareth Copland, Group Operations Director at Insite Energy, said, “We are blown away by winning the high-profile national accolade that is the UK Customer Experience Awards, not once but twice. It is testament to the huge efforts that everyone at Insite Energy has made to recreate the company as a customer-focused organisation.” 

“Importantly, we are seeing the achievements recognised by the judges, sustained by our people every day. The data was already showing a high score within the energy and utilities industry and the CXA awards process has now put that in context of all industry sectors.”

A move to self-serve capabilities

As a result of the customer experience strategy, Insite catapulted to the top-performer spot on Trustpilot, with an ‘Excellent’ rating of 4.7 stars, up from just 1.4 stars in 2018. Average call waiting times dropped from nine minutes in 2018 to just 53 seconds in 2020 (against a target of five-minutes), while the number of people registering a complaint fell to less than 1% of our customer base (against a target of 2%). We’ve conducted over 1,500 live webchats with customers between March 2020 and August 2021 and an impressive 86% of email enquiries are now resolved within 24 hours (compared to just 32% in 2018 and our target of 80%).

Head of Customer Services, Carly Freeman said: “The team is so happy to have won the award for Small Contact Centre! They have shown such resilience, empathy and commitment over the past few years, resulting in huge improvements overall in customer satisfaction, best measured by the 4.7 score on Trustpilot. A huge well done to the team!”

Figure 1: Improvements throughout our customer service team and processes has resulted in benefits across the board.

Customers are now conducting many more of their interactions with us through our self-serve website; 40% of our resident ‘move-in/out’ notifications are now carried out via webforms, 60% of welcome brochures are issued electronically, and 15% of customers have opted for e-billing.

With an investment in technology, Insite can now monitor their customers’ meters connectivity, allowing them to react to outages far more quickly. This has sped up their awareness of dysconnectivity from an average of 30 days to within 30 minutes of receiving an email alert. This information is then used to notify affected residents through temporary alerts added to microsites specific to each development. Combined with the wealth of information and services available to customers via their website, Insite Energy saw a 55% drop in customer queries through calls and emails, from 103,623 in 2018 to 46,250 in 2020 (against a target of 50,000).

A caring working culture at the heart of success

By adopting a double shift working pattern in their new contact centre, Insite have been able to extend their opening hours to the longest in the market, without increasing working hours. This, in turn, has further increased the speed with which we can respond to queries.

Insite Energy’s helpdesk representatives are also happy to be working in a high-performance team, as is evidenced by the fact that not a single person left during 2020 – a dramatic turnaround compared to our 2018 employee churn rate of 167%. This means Insite are retaining valuable skills and experience that further enhance performance, as well as delivering knock-on benefits for recruitment and retention across their organisation. Thanks to the culture of teamwork and continuous improvement, Insite Energy’s staff are now proud to work at Insite.

“It’s a testament to the quality of our people that all these big achievements were accomplished on time and under budget. The relocation of our call centre away from Central London and a change in technology suppliers have also generated substantial savings, meaning we can offer excellent value as well as excellent service to our clients,” says Copland.

“Getting an endorsement from the judges of the UK Customer Experience Awards that the quality of the customer service we provide is genuinely outstanding is the icing on the cake!”