Customer Experience Award
Celebrating the utilities that have gone above and beyond in providing outstanding customer experience and engagement over the past year.
Customer Experience Award
Celebrating the utilities that have gone above and beyond in providing outstanding customer experience and engagement over the past year.
Cadent - Ratby water ingress incident response
When more than 2,700 homes in a Leicestershire village were left without gas following a burst water pipe flooding the network, Cadent led a multi-agency response. Placing customers at the heart of operations, supporting everybody in winter conditions, our commitment to customers is most evident during an incident.
Ensuring vulnerable customers were prioritised, Cadent restored gas supplies to over 2,500 properties in just days, made direct compensations payments swiftly, pumping thousands of litres of water out of its network. Having spent the following months working to support the local community, Cadent received hundreds of ‘thank you’ messages for its dedication.
Ecotricity - Doing the right thing for our customers, our people, and our planet
Ecotricity set out to be number one for service and to improve our service and engagement for customers through extending our opening hours, ensuring customer got a good outcome first time and increasing the knowledge and skills of our people. We have delivered on our promise reducing call wait times to 24.4 seconds, abandonment rate to 2.53%, responding to 95% of emails in 2 working days whilst seeing an increase in contact and vulnerable customer numbers rising by 294% and a complaint reduction of over 500%. Resulting in becoming a Which? Recommend provider and first in the CAB league table.
Everflow - Making water-saving simple with EcoMOTs
Encouraging water efficiency among the B2B marketplace has historically been a challenge, especially within the SME market, due to minimal cost savings versus comparatively substantial upfront costs, alongside a lack of awareness.
In 2024, Everflow piloted its innovative ‘EcoMOT’ service, successfully engaging over 45% of the target audience. So far, Everflow has collectively saved 26 SMEs an estimated 25 megalitres of water per annum.
The scheme is also saving an estimated 646KwH energy and 132 tonnes of carbon within its first year. This equates to £90k back into the hands of SMEs, enabling them to grow while becoming more environmentally-friendly.
Firstsource with E.ON Next - No customer left behind
Navigating the needs of utility customers right now is tough. Whilst the transition towards more sustainable energy is urgent and demands attention, the here and now presents an affordability crisis for many. In its work for E.ON Next, Firstsource has adopted a ‘no customer left behind’ strategy to ensure every single contact leaves the customer feeling happy they got in touch. Targeted support of vulnerable customers, root-cause analysis, and true investment in employees have led to a Customer Happiness Index of 80%, a 4.4/5 Trustpilot score, and an 85% reduction in wait times.
Octopus Energy - Octoplus
Octopus Energy’s Octoplus reward scheme is transforming customer experience by making mundane energy tasks fun and rewarding. To date, 1.96m members (50% of eligible customers) haved earned £12m+ in Octopoints for keeping accounts healthy and saving energy: £7.3m used for bill credits, £7.5m value of rewards claimed and £300k donated.
Boosting loyalty and advocacy, members exhibit half the churn and 3 times the referrals of non-members. Moreover, showing how much we care when many people are struggling financially, our human-first gestures, like FREE weekly drinks, eclipse rival schemes that need expensive purchases and long-term membership to benefit.
Severn Trent Water and Vyntelligence - Video and AI-enabled Severn Trent Customer Inspectors
In 2020, Severn Trent Water created a project where one of the objectives was to improve our C-MeX scores.
We converted our Water Network fieldworkers into two separate roles – one focused on reactive network leaks, the other on planned customer appointments (to be known as Customer Inspectors (CIs)).
From October 2023, we aspired for CIs to use the Vyntelligence app to record video summaries of work completed onsite for every customer visit.
We have since captured 11,577 vyns, with all customer ratings increasing favourably: C-MeX from 7 to 8, C-Sat from 8.88 to 9.21, and TrustPilot from 1.8 to 4.8!
UK Power Networks - Insight not instinct
UK Power Networks’ track record for customer service is meteoric; from chasing other network operators a decade ago, to industry-leading in the 2020s. The difference is pure night and day.
But once in the sunlight, the company had to find new innovative ways to stay ahead. Then data gave the direction needed. Teams designed new ways to interrogate customer feedback and used that data to make better decisions. Customer service now scores >94% YTD, amazing considering most people surveyed, called with a problem needing fixing! This is a story of decisions driven by insight not instinct!