Customer Acquisition Case Study

Preface

Supplying energy to homes across the UK involves three key elements: making electricity through generation transporting gas and electricity and selling it to the customer. Energy companies can work in any of these different areas, and some operate in all three of them the electricity and gas markets in the UK are privatized. This means that private companies make sure we have the energy that we need. It also means that customers can choose which companies supply their energy.

The electricity and gas markets are regulated by the Gas and Electricity Markets Authority, operating through the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets (Ofgem). Ofgem’s role is to protect the interest of consumers by promoting competition where appropriate. Ofgem issues companies with licenses to carry out activities in the electricity and gas sectors, set the levels of return which the monopoly networks companies can make, and decides on changes to market rules.

One of our very successful business processes has been the UK Energy process. It has been an interesting journey and fruitful in terms of knowledge and commercial expansion. The progress has been significant from an individual basis to a greater team at large including all auxiliary functions that worked in unison to contribute to the overall success and an ongoing endeavor to set up proper control measures to eliminate possibilities of failure.

How it shaped up:

We started the UK Energy process in the year 2016 with a team size of 10 Agents/Energy Advisors.

Hiring/Recruitment of manpower: Resource identification is one of the vital aspects to achieve high level performance. Through various sources which primarily included job-recruitment portals and media advertisements; we created a pool of applicants and segregated them on the basis of professional experience, academic qualification and other attributes that contribute to an individual as well as team success in terms of output results.
Post conducting interviews, listening tests, language tests, conducting background verifications, we arrived at the juncture to have the desired count of manpower to be put into training.

• Training: A fortnight-long training agenda was put in place and the initial training was conducted by the client. The training plan was full-bodied and included activities to enhance teamwork, individual motivation, encouraging agents to be innovative, learning to cope up with adverse situations etc.
  Along with this, the mainstream training included: –
  Product,
  UK Energy market,
  Suppliers’ information,
  Switching process,
  UK Post Codes
  Script and CRM guidelines
  Mock call sessions
  The final certification process included a knowledge test (written evaluation) and a mock call depicting a real-life call scenario. It also took into account the trainees’ involvement, reciprocation, and participation, during the entire training phase.
• Quality and Compliance: The process that strengthens the roots of a process. Quality guidelines were set up in consultation with the client. Identifying the CTQs and defining each parameter from an operational perspective along with the scoring mechanism.
  The audit sample size was defined to cover 100% of sales calls and 2% of missed sales opportunity calls. The entire coaching and feedback mechanism was built around the audits. The feedback mechanism included group and individual sessions suggesting corrective actions.
  Weekly call calibration sessions with the client were lined up to ensure a correct understanding of the process and setting up goals.
  Quality reporting was also put in place to record the findings and carry analysis to implement corrective and preventive procedures.
• Sales Target and Performance Assessment: During the starting phase, the target was based on the number of valid transfers and sales count at a very negligible level, considering the team was new and it would take time for an agent to increase the count of sales. For the first month, the average count of sales per agent, per day hovered at 0.20 to 0.25.
  To improve performance, the Operations team carried out regular real-time call-barging activities and provided feedback to the agents directly. The feedback used to be documented and improvement was tracked.
  To motivate the team and drive performance; daily, weekly, and monthly incentive plans were introduced. In addition to this, monthly rewards and recognition process was also introduced.
• Half-yearly appraisals were also conducted for performing and promising agents.
  Gradually in the successive months, the average count rose from 0.5 to 1.0
  With revenue increasing, manpower counts also increased considerably. The ramp-up plan was introduced post discussion with the client and shared with HR team. The current strength is 80 FTEs, the peak was 150.
  The tenured agents deliver an SPD of 1.0 to 1.5, on average.
• Performance Evaluation includes not only the sales count but depicts several activities that the agent performed while logged into the dialer. Universally termed as the key performance indicators (KPIs)
  Performance indicators like ‘login hours’, ‘break time’, ‘talk time’, ‘AHT’, ‘Utilization’ is accounted for along with disposition analysis to arrive at a comprehensive view to agents’ performance.
• For continual improvement, we follow a PDCA approach which is PLAN-DO-CHECK-ACT.
• Plan – In this stage, we establish objectives and processes required to deliver the desired results.
  Do – Carry out the objectives from the previous step.
  Check – During the check phase, the data and results gathered from the do phase are evaluated. Data is compared to the expected outcomes to see any similarities and differences. The testing process is also evaluated to see if there were any changes from the original test created during the planning phase. If the data is placed in a chart it can make it easier to see any trends if the PDCA cycle is conducted multiple times. This helps to see what changes work better than others and if said changes can be improved as well.
• Act – Records from the “do” and “check” phases help identify issues with the process. These issues may include problems, non-conformities, opportunities for improvement, inefficiencies and other issues that result in outcomes that are evidently less-than-optimal. Root causes of such issues are investigated, found and eliminated by modifying the process. Risk is re-evaluated. At the end of the actions in this phase, the process has better instructions, standards, or goals. Planning for the next cycle can proceed with a better baseline. Work in the next do phase should not create recurrence of the identified issues; if it does, then the action was not effective.

Our Learning Experience: 

The importance of the proper database and its positive impact on sales. The calling database needs to be structured on the virtue of certain logic. For the Energy process, we understood that

• Our target customers are within the age bracket of 30 to 65 years.
• Customers within the age bracket of 30 to 50 years would prefer online billing
• Elderly customers prefer paper billing
• Our target customers are Homeowners
• Customers mainly within the age bracket of 30 to 45 years needed to switch for higher savings, while over 50 years, mainly wants to be with a good supplier where savings maybe not excessively high, however, the supplier is renowned like British Gas, Scottish Power, Eon, SSE, etc.

Manpower attrition is a major issue and with proper employee motivational techniques, it can be controlled considerably.  For example, incentives, rewards & recognition, and appraisals, depending upon performance.

Data security norms were laid down and the IT team ensured rigid checks were carried out to prevent any sort of data breach.

Agent development: The usual time an agent would take to get accustomed to the process and get consistent sales numbers was a period of about 1 month of rigorous dialing. During this phase, the agent should be mentored with thorough feedbacks and continuously monitoring his performance to see if the agent is successfully able to implement and absorb the inputs provided to him.