Supporting ‘Big 6’ Energy firm with rising customer complaints during the ‘Cost of Living Crisis’

The challenge

One of the “Big 6” Energy firms approached us to help support them through the ‘Cost of Living’ crisis. They were expecting a huge surge of customer enquiries, complaints and a growing cadre of customer vulnerability, all of which created organisational strain and prolonged impact to their permanent staff and leaders. They had already created a workstream of outstanding customer complaints that required mediation and putting the customer back to where they should be if appropriate.

The solution

It would have been an easy and well-trodden path to simply drop our resource onto the company’s management team and let them manage the workload. However, it was clear in discussions with the Energy firm that they didn’t have the resources to do this, plus this would have acerbated an already challenging situation, so we:

• Designed a plan that included our own Team Leaders and Operational support systems to lift the work off the Energy firm’s leadership team.
• Mobilised our team of 50 FTE led by an Operations Director within 4 weeks.
• Streamlined the onboarding process by building a team that already knew how to manage regulated complaints AND the energy markets.
• Created a ‘route to competency’ RTC plan that ensured it was simple cross-training onto their policies, systems and processes.
• Ran weekly performance reviews with our management team, driven by a combination of MI and data.
• Created a flex model that meant the team could be flexed up/down and out against the changing volume levels.

The outcome

Having a combination of experience and knowledge reduced the RTC sharply and ensured our teams were delivering the right customer outcomes fast. During the 6-month project, the weekly performance review meetings ensured that when we needed to adjust the way we were working, change the team make-up, or adjust processes, this was done in the same week as the change was agreed. This created a highly agile and dynamic way of working.

We were able to successfully cut through the backlog of 8 weeks, plus complaints, during the first 6 months. A smaller, high impact team was then extended for a further three months to address a separate customer cohort which had bubbled up during the time we were engaged.