The energy provider leadership team created and implemented a service transformation function. The team purpose included:

• Delivering a customer-centric service

• Creating operational efficiencies

• Improving retention and acquisition

• Generation of ideas for new proposition development and partnerships

To ensure the strategy is shaped by insight and data-based evidence npower worked with Watermelon to design and implement a comprehensive suite of customer insight programmes across all touchpoints, channels and audience types.

These ongoing programmes, surveying 36,000 customers a year, provide the insight required to both determine the improvement focus on as well as the conception of ideas and service transformation ideas.

• Across all customer interactions and channels the ‘moments that matter’ to customer experience are identified (i.e. when calling npower, first call resolution, empathy and agent knowledge are the most important aspects to get right).

• Root cause analysis with the stakeholder team then identified the issues behind poor experience in the moments that matter, the fixes and implementation costs and the impact of driving up the experience.

• We created and tested propositions to design the optimum package which would have the highest take-up with the target audience (i.e. a bundled tariff).

Over the course of the last four years, we have driven and proven ROI several areas; including:

• Understanding how to signpost and drive customers to self-serve rather than call in – reducing call volume (on average by 30,000 a quarter) and saving the associated operating costs of approximately £75,000.

• Designing a bundled tariff that saw customer uptake via Uswitch increase by 5%.

• Significantly increasing customer satisfaction to target levels and reducing churn by 4%.