More Than Another Bill: Why VoC Programs Improve Utility CX

When did your utility provider last ask you to rate your customer experience (CX) with them?

With rising competition, energy costs, customer demands, and regulatory and stakeholder pressure to improve customer services, these key factors drive service providers of water, electricity, and gas to engage deeply with their customers.

Old traditional business models must be changed to adapt to the times, and utility brands must prioritize CX more than ever before. 

Customers are calling their electricity/gas provider every day, whether it’s an outcry over a building outage over the phone, an inquiry for a light bill by email, a question about the utility app, via Facebook comments, etc. All of this makes up the utility customer experience.

In recent years, customers have been demanding more – they want to stay longer with one utility provider rather than repeatedly switching brands until one provides great customer care. For instance, 6 million customers in the UK transitioned to a new electricity provider in 2020. Also, customers are becoming increasingly environmentally conscious, wanting to know how much energy they consume and how to reduce costs and consumption.

So, with the ever-changing competitive landscape and increasing consumer awareness of what defines superior CX, energy providers are rethinking their online and offline efforts to better engage the customers, including technological solutions that better unify and analyze customer feedback to make smarter decisions.

You, as a utility provider, may think you already have the best voice of the customer strategy in place, but think again. A truly effective and strong VoC program does more than collect customer reviews; it scours the web, day and night (automatically), for relevant data, from 99% of all source types and deeply analyzes the feedback.

Such a tool also organizes all the unstructured and structured feedback in a single platform and notifies your relevant team members of the right insights. Not to mention, VoC programs can now even propose product recommendations for managers to consider and predict the impact of their decisions on business outcomes.

With the aid of artificial intelligence, VoC programs can be built with natural language processing abilities to easily and quickly analyze tons of unstructured feedback and help you detect or identify ‘weak spots.’ What was the service experience like over the phone or even on your utility mobile app? What’s the most popular complained-about topic among customers and the most praised service or feature? The right VoC tool can answer all these burning questions, if not more.

A powerful VoC tool can allow utility providers to collect and analyze contact center data from just about anywhere, let it be forums, blogs, social media, call logs with your agents, chatrooms, and so on. Then the data is automatically translated into actionable insights that one can use to understand customers better.

For instance, what was really said or thought about in a particular electric outage crisis? What do customers even think about other energy service providers? You can even detect the potential chance of those customers switching to your competitors!

Customer care managers and agents alike are more satisfied in their roles because the VoC tool has eliminated the need for manual data analysis. Simply, relevant utility employees receive notifications or reports of organized insights based on customer feedback and possibly specific recommendations to specific solutions for improvements.

Some VoC tools like Wonderflow is easy to use for all departments and propose tactics to consider to improve a service or product —- all within a single dashboard. Plus, it predicts how successful (or unsuccessful) their decisions will be if and when a suggestion is selected. Such convenience allows customer reps to focus on other matters of the utility customer experience.

Utility providers have much on their plate, especially since the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic when energy costs and economic pressures skyrocketed to an all-time high. CX is at the top of many’s lists, and investing in the right VoC program is among several key solutions to truly improve customer care.

Want to know how exactly a powerful AI-driven VoC tool like Wonderflow drives higher retention, loyalty, and revenue growth for utility companies? Book a free demo with us right now to find out!