5 Reasons Positive Customer Service Culture Is Important for Utilities
Your team works hard to provide utility services that keep your community comfortable, connected, and content. When everything is going great, your team members and your community are happy. But most utility customers don’t know what goes on behind the scenes to keep the lights on and the water flowing.
When an outage happens, they only know their services are interrupted and their comfort is disrupted. They will often take to social media to show their displeasure. But having a robust and positive customer service culture can help a utility; here are the five reasons.
5 Reasons to Have a Positive Customer Culture
Builds on your positive results
Takes care of the good and the bad
Makes customer service everyone’s responsibility
Provides the best proactive, positive care
Shapes the future of your utility customer service
Builds on Your Positive Results
Your team will face challenges keeping your community comfortable and connected. And it’s not always easy to be positive. But when you all work together to create positive results, your team and community reap the benefits, even during difficult times. For example, each time a customer comes into your offices or interacts with your team online, you need repeatable procedures for each interaction. Greet them with a smile, focus on the problem, and resolve it quickly, and most customers will have positive experiences. And when an outage occurs, or you have to issue a boil advisory, the practiced procedures will ensure that services are restored as soon as possible.
Because we live in a connected world, how quickly you respond to an outage determines how many positive and negative tweets, reviews, and social posts your team receives. Adverse publicity, especially on social media, is exceedingly difficult to undo. But, if your team has been working on a positive customer culture, you can draw on those positive results even when services are interrupted.
Takes Care of the Good and the Bad
Having a positive customer service culture means you and your team plan and ensure that every interaction is positive, even when services are interrupted. When every voice is heard and a plan is in place, all team members know what is expected of them. Regular routines create positive results, and practice makes perfect. Because your team’s reaction time is the difference between minutes to restore services and hours restoring them, everyone must know what to do when restoring services.
Make Customer Service Everyone’s Responsibility
When customer service is essential to everyone on your team, no one says, “Customer service is not my job.” Everyone shares responsibility for a positive customer culture. And, when something needs changing, no one says, “It’s always been that way.” Instead, everyone, from management down, has an opportunity to create the best possible service. And when something needs to improve, your team works together to effect this change.
When everyone shares customer service responsibilities, a remarkable transformation happens. Everyone feels their voices are heard and is more willing to go above and beyond to serve their community well. Ultimately, you have a positive team experience that translates to more positive customer interactions, helping your team remain focused and committed to excellence in good times and bad.
Provides the Best Possible, Proactive Care
Everyone is committed to proactive customer service when your team has a positive customer service culture mindset. Utilities used to communicate only when needed--an outage, a boil water advisory, or services being cut-off. Now, consumers demand a proactive approach, and utilities must have plans to respond and share information with their customers as soon as services are disrupted.
A few short years ago, a customer knew services were disrupted when the power went out, or water stopped flowing. Today we have so many ways to tell someone that services will be disrupted; text, email, online, and even video keep customers informed. With so many ways to provide information, there’s no reason not to give that information before, during, and after services are disrupted and restored. You provide your community with the best possible proactive service when you do.
Shapes the Future of Utility Customer Service
With so many ways to stay connected, a positive customer service culture is the way of the future. Your team is not the only game in town. Retail services and distributed energy are more common, giving customers more options. So, you must use all the tools available to keep your customers comfortable and happy.
Web portals like SilverBlaze allow your customers to be first in line every time on any device at any time. When they sign into SilverBlaze, they take charge of their accounts to pay bills, view usage history, initiate move-ins, move-outs, and so much more. They can access their accounts and you 24/7, providing the services they need when and where they want to be served.
And today, we get much of our information from sound bites and highlight reels. Text is ineffective for much of your community’s population because they have an impairment that keeps them from understanding the notifications you send. What results are more office visits and phone calls to your already overworked staff.
Personalized video, like SmartVx, is the next step in engaging and informing your community. SmartVx works with NorthStar CIS to create customized videos for each of your customers, explains bill changes, encourages them to sign up for budget billing, and much more. Customers can watch and re-watch videos to ensure they understand your message, and clear calls to action compel them to act. When you unleash the power of video, you help your customers interact with your team with a high level of efficiency that creates positive results.
Proactive, Planned, Positive Utility Customer Service
A positive customer service culture is essential to every business today. Because we live in such a connected world, all companies need a proactive, positive, planned approach to customer service. When utilities don’t, and services are disrupted, their response times are slow, causing customers to resort to social media to get their updates. When proactive, utilities offer the best customer experiences in good times and in bad.
Looking for a way to improve your customer service? Contact our team and ask how SilverBlaze and SmartVx can work for you.