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How Economy Energy is Breaking the CX/Cost Equation with Messenger Customer Chat

9%

Traditional Volume

5 mins

Avg. Handling Time

34%

Agent Efficiency

Before November 2017, Economy Energy’s approach to social media customer care was outdated, with them primarily responding natively over digital channels. This approach did not meet the changing demands of their consumers, or align with their company culture of customer centricity. A complete social media overhaul, in partnership with Conversocial, was needed to scale and innovate their service offering for 2018!

Challenges

Creating a Social Messaging Culture: Adopting Social Messaging as a service channel requires a radical change in approach both internally and externally. Social Messaging represents a full digital transformation, impacting everything from hiring and training, to creating and tracking KPIs. Economy Energy needed a platform partner that was able to scale inline with their business needs.

Mapping the Complexity of the Digital Customer: The advancement of Social Messaging platforms (Facebook Messenger and Twitter DM) have only made it easier for customers to reach out with questions and queries. As the market has moved towards more private 1-2-1 messaging, new team workflows and collaboration were needed internally at Economy Energy.

Making Digital Care Accountable: The maturity of digital care, and customers demand for Social Messaging channels, means that it can no longer be just a ‘nice to have’. It needs to be scalable and measured accordingly, in relevance to other CX channels. Therefore Economy Energy needed a best-of-breed tool to make digital care scalable.

Platform Features Used

Social Messaging
Analytics
Auto Tagging

About Economy Energy

Economy Energy is one of the UK’s fastest-growing energy suppliers and one of over 20 independent energy suppliers set-up to challenge the market, offering more affordable prices than the ‘Big Six’. Set up in 2012, Economy Energy provides households with prepayment meters, cheaper gas and electricity prices, and better customer service. From day one, Economy Energy’s friendly team have been passionate about providing an excellent service and saving their customers money. Today, Economy Energy has managed to save their 290,000 customers across the UK, well over £12million on their gas and electricity bills.

Industry
Utilities
Location
Coventry, UK
“We have invested significantly in our digital proposition to bring more choice and flexibility for our customers. By expanding our digital and social presence, we want to offer an alternative to our established customer contact centre, bringing more convenience and allowing the customer to choose their interaction with Economy Energy on the device of their choice.”

Mick Saunders

Head of Digital, Economy Energy
EECover

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Economy Energy’s Solution

Messenger Customer Chat Innovation: On digital, agents become brand ambassadors and therefore need to possess all the skills that come with a publc facing role. Economy Energy took the decision to invest in a new team of digital customer service experts to overhaul how it managed customer conversations across all digital touchpoints. As a growing business, this team of social customer care experts were a new dedicated digital care team. The current team adhere to a very precise informative yet friendly tone of voice, with internal processes replicated from existing traditional channels and enabled through Conversocial’s collaboration workflow.

Breaking the CX Equation: Messenger, and more broadly Social Messaging, has the power to break the CX equation bridging the customer experience vs efficiency cost tradeoff. Economy Energy spotted this opportunity and doubled down on Social Messaging promotion. Initially, Economy Energy tested the role out on all website pages on a 24/7 rota. But consumer demand proved to be unscalable internally, so the business decision was taken to scale back to just specific pages where customers needed assistance, e.g. the contact us page, applying for discounts/industry funds, viewing tariff offers etc. Once successfully scaled both externally and internally, Customer Chat has delivered significant efficiency gains—with digital care agents being able to handle 33.7% more conversations than traditional contact centre agents.

Making Business Decisions with Actionable Insight: Economy Energy allow what their customers are saying, and the issues they are reaching out with, to influence their business operation. By utilizing Conversocial’s auto-tagging functionality, based on defined keywords and rules, Economy Energy is able to measure issues/non-issues extensively. This is then reported on to identify high traffic drivers, impacting website content and internal processes to help improve the customer experience.

Once successfully scaled both externally and internally, Messenger Customer Chat has delivered significant efficiency gains—with digital care agents being able to handle 34% more conversations than traditional contact centre agents.

Results

  • 5 mins
    With Conversocial’s intuitive agent workflow, Average Handling Time has been reduced to just under 5 minutes for inbound customer inquiries.
  • 19%
    After introducing and promoting Social Messaging channels, digital channels accounted for 18.95% of all Economy Energy's service volumes, with 8.71% deflection from traditional channels. Their team is handling +13K conversations per month, representing 13% of all incoming customer service volume.
  • 34%
    Social messaging yielded huge efficiencies for Economy Energy, with messaging agents handling an average of 34% more conversations compared to traditional agents while keeping average response time below 5 min.

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