Insite Energy has won two awards at the coveted UK Customer Experience Awards (CXA) 2021. The judges awarded us Gold for outstanding service in the ‘Contact Centre – Small’ and ‘Customer Experience for SMEs’ categories.We 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, we have been transforming the quality of the customer service we provide. We became the best-performing heat network metering & billing company in the UK. In the process, we have set new standards for the whole energy sector. It’s an achievement to be proud of and one that has been consistently appreciated by our clients and customers. More than 1,000 five-star Trustpilot reviews demonstrate this achievement.
These changes reduced our customer churn rate to 1.25% in 2020 compared to 7.5% in 2018 (with a 3% target). Our residential customer base also grew by 19% since 2019.
Ellie Blacklock, Customer Experience 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, we 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). The number of people registering a complaint fell to less than 1% of our customer base (against a target of 2%). We conducted more than 1,500 LiveChats between March 2020 and August 2021. In addition, we now resolve 86% of email enquiries within 24 hours. That’s up from 32% in 2018 and above 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!”
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, we can now monitor our customers’ meter connectivity, allowing us to react to outages far more quickly. This has sped up our awareness of disconnectivity from an average of 30 days to within 30 minutes of receiving an email alert. We then use this information to notify affected residents through temporary alerts on development-specific microsites. The website provides residents with more information and self-serve services. As a result, customer queries fell by 55%. Calls and emails reduced from 103,623 in 2018 to 46,250 in 2020, exceeding our target of 50,000.
A caring working culture at the heart of success
By adopting a double-shift working pattern in our new contact centre, we extended our opening hours without increasing working hours. This, in turn, has further increased the speed with which we can respond to queries.
Our helpdesk representatives are also happy to be working in a high-performance team. Not a single person left during 2020 – a dramatic turnaround compared to our 2018 employee churn rate of 167%. This means we are retaining valuable skills and experience that further enhance performance, as well as delivering knock-on benefits for recruitment and retention across the 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 Ellie.
“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!”
