Redefining Customer Care Through Social Work

Amid sustained cost-of-living pressures and a growing wave of consumers seeking deeper, more human forms of connection, organisations within the energy sector – and indeed well beyond it – are re-evaluating the benchmarks of customer experience excellence.

Nowhere is this more evident than at Octopus Energy, where qualified social workers are woven into the fabric of the customer support ecosystem. The initiative, led by Katie Orme, the brand’s Head of Service for Social Work, represents a significant strategic shift from transactional service to more holistic, human-centred, empathetic care. It’s a bold and unconventional approach to driving outperformance, yet one that is firmly aligned with the company’s broader mission to be a customer-first pioneer.

For context: Octopus Energy competes in a space marked by stringent regulatory oversight, heightened customer sensitivity, and elevated reputational risk owing to a public that is quick to challenge brands perceived as cold, extractive, or slow to support people in difficulty. Every hour, every day, the teams on the company’s frontlines are dealing with people not only struggling with bills and payments, but often managing wider, complex life circumstances that are exacerbated by economic uncertainty. As Katie notes, “Debt is rarely a standalone issue. There’s always a bigger picture.” It’s a truism that reveals structural limitations in traditional customer service models and measurement frameworks. Habitual agent KPIs – speed to answer, call-handling time – will simply never account for, or accommodate, customers experiencing mental health challenges or acute financial distress.

Against that reality, Octopus Energy’s leadership group recognised the need for a fundamentally different operating standard – one capable of addressing all the nuances of the human condition, far more than just account balances. The catalyst for this comes from the very top: CEO Greg Jackson, whose personal journey guides the organisation’s north star vision today. “For Greg, good enough is never good enough,” Katie recounts. “When he learns about the lived experiences of our customers, he demands more. He wants to do more. The Social Work team was established at his direction.”

How does Octopus Energy embed social workers in practice?

Octopus Energy launched this first-of-its-kind programme back in 2022. What began as a team of two qualified social workers is now a team of eight that sit directly alongside other customer-facing colleagues. Collectively, Katie says, “these professionals bring deep expertise from statutory social care, motivational interviewing, trauma-informed practice, and crisis de-escalation.”

The team is guided by four principles.

1. Human-centred decision-making over KPIs

Octopus Energy intentionally removes performance targets for social work cases. Katie explains: “This is about putting the customer first, always. You can’t put numbers on social work practice. The moment you start putting facts and figures on it, you lose sight of the person behind it. Does it feel right for the customer? That’s all we ask. If the answer is yes, we act.” It’s a philosophy that reframes customer care – from a compliance-driven function to an ethical service grounded in trust.

2. Holistic support that prioritises wellbeing

Energy bills are treated as a secondary concern to the wider circumstances driving economic pressure. Social workers assess the full set of factors behind the customer’s situation – mental wellbeing, personal safety, financial stability, and social connectedness – before orchestrating and coordinating support accordingly. “The bill really is the last thing we think about,” Katie stresses. “We want to unlock earlier interventions which prevent escalations and reduce the reliance on emergency services.” She points out that in three years, every time her social workers have intervened, the case has been resolved without the need to call first responders.

3. Empowerment, not dependency

Using motivational interviewing and thoughtful inquiry, the team helps customers build personal, sustainable coping strategies. As Katie puts it: “At its core, this work is about promoting empowerment over dependency – supporting individual customers to identify their own needs, and their own goals, rather than imposing solutions.”

4. Integrated staff wellbeing

This function is also built around the understanding that emotionally complex customer interactions impact employees alike. Social workers provide wraparound support internally, helping to reduce burnout, strengthen organisational resilience, and ultimately ensure frontline staff have a safe space to process difficult cases and receive guidance grounded in clinical expertise. By investing in the wellbeing of those supporting others, Octopus Energy is creating a more stable, confident, and capable workforce. “If we don’t look after our colleagues, how can they be expected to look after our customers to the best of their ability?” Katie reflects.

What business value has this model delivered?

Unconstrained by traditional reporting frameworks, the initiative is proving its worth in a whole host of different ways. It’s reshaping how the organisation manages risk, thinks about customer welfare, and builds capabilities for the long term.

1. Better crisis management

First, the wider societal impact (which can’t be overstated). With a dedicated and specialised Social Work team on the payroll, Octopus Energy is actively de-escalating high-risk situations and alleviating critical pressure on public services. Regular collaboration with mental-health charities, the National Health Service (NHS), and other local authorities is minimising unnecessary ambulance callouts. A remarkable achievement.

2. Stronger customer trust and brand equity

Investing in human-centred care in the face of high operating costs has differentiated Octopus Energy in a highly commoditised sector. In Katie’s words: “The brand speaks for itself now. Even during periods of financial loss, the company has consistently invested in customer support. Prioritising what is right has translated into stronger levels of trust and enduring brand equity.”

3. Higher-quality case resolution

Addressing the underlying social, emotional, and structural factors affecting customers enables the Social Work team to resolve more issues at their source – significantly reducing repeat contact. Complicated cases that may have cycled through multiple agents are instead handled comprehensively and sustainably, freeing capacity within the wider customer support operation and elevating the overall standard of service. Win-win.

4. Deeper organisational intelligence

Then there’s the data piece. This team of eight is generating richer insight into customer vulnerability, behavioural patterns, and systemic barriers – intelligence that traditional service channels rarely uncover. These insights now inform company policies, operational decisions, and customer support strategies – which all help to accelerate risk identification and enable more precise and appropriate responses. The knock-on effect of these advances is greater risk profiling, higher levels of compliance maturity, and better protection for both customers and the business.

What does this approach mean for the future of customer care in regulated industries?

This unique enterprise is creating a fundamentally higher ceiling for customer care performance – it demonstrates that human-centred design can be deployed at scale within a commercial environment without diluting professional ethics, regulatory discipline, or operational rigour. In doing so, Octopus Energy is transforming customer care into a source of profound strategic advantage underpinned by trust and resilience. Rather than treating vulnerability as an outlier or pushing it to the edges of service, the model embeds it as a critical design consideration within everyday operations.

In broader strokes, the approach is increasing the brand’s credibility and influence amid intense market competition. Its proactive engagement with systemic challenges positions the company as a leader in socially aware business practice – an evolution likely to disrupt long-standing assumptions about the limits of private sector responsibility. “Social workers can add value to any organisation that serves people”, Katie says. “The discipline is inherently holistic.”

Certainly, for regulated industries grappling with mounting complexity and public oversight, Octopus Energy’s care infrastructure represents a clear touchstone for the future of service delivery. It invites leaders in the realms of utilities, financial services, telecommunications, and insurance to reconsider how they provide support for vulnerable customers. Key implications include:

• Traditional KPIs are insufficient for measuring real customer outcomes in high-vulnerability contexts
• Embedding specialist capability materially reduces crisis escalation and enhances customer stability
• Trust is a strategic asset, built over time through consistent, values-based decisions that demonstrate integrity and reliability

What is the significance of Octopus Energy’s social work initiative? Wrapping up

What distinguishes this approach to customer care is not the novelty of embedding social workers, but the clarity of intent behind it. The model reflects a deliberate choice to construct the care system around human reality rather than organisational convenience – and to hold that line even when it complicates operations or challenges conventional performance logic.

“When you move beyond what is quickest or easiest and focus instead on what is right for the person in front of you, everything changes”, Katie says. That mindset may be the most transferable takeaway of all. For leaders contending with heightened scrutiny and consumer vulnerability, the next frontier of customer care may hinge less on new technologies or metrics and more on the courage to re-centre systems around people.