Net Promoter Score (NPS) is our chosen measure of customer loyalty. It’s a simple metric which asks customers on a scale of 0 to 10, how likely they would be to recommend us to a friend or family member. They are then asked for the reasons behind the score they give.
NPS is both a simple metric which can be easily used across the business as a gauge of customer advocacy, and an excellent vehicle for providing targeted feedback. This feedback is being embedded into our business; as over 3,000 frontline employees are now regularly receiving comments from customers, and we are beginning to understand and react to the key drivers of customer loyalty.
Although we have a long way to go, we have seen a steady improvement in our NPS scores (from -21 in Dec 2009 to around -17 in Dec 2010), moving us towards the top of the energy industry. Our NPS score, measuring how likely customers are to recommend us, places us in the top two amongst the ‘Big Six’ suppliers.Our ambition is to continue this upwards improvement and to really drive a focus on our customers into everything we do.
As well as coaching our front line teams, we’ve started to take action on some of the larger ‘themes’ our customers are telling us are important: these include introducing new channels of communication with customers, simplifying some of our processes and redesigning some of the core experiences we generate with our customers.
All employees in Energy Solutions, our customer business, will receive ‘customer’ objectives from this year, a clear demonstration of our intent to be the energy supplier our customers need and want us to be.
We’ll continue to drive customer focussed improvements to our systems, process, communications and people as we have an absolute commitment in putting ourselves in our customers’ shoes and taking positive action to generate a real change in the energy industry.
We are making a significant investment to:
- Reduce the number of customer complaints
- Improve the speed with which we answer customer queries
- Enhance the ‘joining journey’
- Provide a choice of ways for customers to manage their accounts
- Provide training for advisers and managers to provide consistent, best-in-class services
- Address the needs of our most vulnerable customers
- Make our letters and bills clearer
- Make moving home simpler
- Expand our SMS & mobile services
- Speed up the swapping of customer information
- Make the ‘change of supplier’ process better
- Drive for more accurate bills, fewer late bills