Turning Customer Centricity into a Business Differentiator

For brands today, crafting great customer experiences in complex, multi-channel environments is all about the human element: putting your audience right in the centre of your organisation’s attitudes and actions.

It’s easier said than done, of course, but it is increasingly a business differentiator. Many leaders struggle to even get the process off the ground because they quickly become hamstrung by the myriad of challenges that come with driving transformation and consolidating a customer-centric culture across disparate internal teams. A failure to stay the course, though, is to run the risk of profound reputational fallout.

The good news is that successful use cases are emerging, and they tend to abide by the same principles – a crystal clear vision from the top, an agile approach to change, and transparent communication (that’s not to mention relevant products and services). Here, we speak with Abdul Khaled about how he has approached the concept of customer centricity in his role as Head of Digital at E.ON Next.

CCW Europe: First off, to set the stage, Abdul, can you explain to our audience how and why E.ON Next was born out of the E.ON Energy Group? Talk to us a little bit about your company’s foundations and values.

Abdul Khaled: There are multiple reasons why E.ON Next was born.

The biggest of those was the realisation that the business needed to make a change in light of how the competition was evolving, specifically the disruptor and challenger brands that were entering the market.

You can compare it to the banking industry when the likes of Monzo and Starling came onto the scene and completely changed the way that banking was perceived by customers – all the established banks had to, and in some areas continue to, play catch up. A similar trend was (and is) developing in utilities, whereby E.ON Energy Group recognised that as one of the traditional big six operators in the space, consumers rarely viewed the company in positive terms. In other words, something needed to change, and it wouldn’t suffice to simply rebrand, repackage everything up, and then tout the differences. Transformation was required from the ground up.

So, E.ON Next was set up as a completely new entity. New board. New Culture. Fully start-up – built from employee number one all the way up to where it is today. And the reason for that was this: If you want to do business differently and do it successfully, the journey must begin with a blank canvas. We created this startup environment complete with startup mentality, focusing heavily on the customer-centricity piece – it was important to set up a new entity to facilitate that mindset because putting the customer first requires rewiring the minds. That means training people differently, bringing new ideas to the table, bringing new people into the organisation, adopting a new culture, changing strategies, changing goals and KPIs, and changing technology. All key elements.

Looking at those ingredients holistically – you either try and somehow rework that into an established model that's been around for decades and decades, or you do something that's slightly easier, which is start from scratch. Of course, it's not a luxury every company has, but we found ourselves with the opportunity and we grasped it.

CCW Europe: In your experience, what does it take for a company to become truly customer-centric? If that culture isn’t already in place, it obviously takes time to become fully ingrained. How do you stay the course in what is ultimately a long-term branding play and how can you effectively navigate roadblocks along the way?

AK: It always starts with leadership. You can't stay the course if you don't have direction from above.

Many organisations strive to implement customer-centricity in their thinking, but it doesn’t always materialise because they haven’t got the right leadership in place. When leadership sends mixed messages – one day promoting their customer-centric credentials and then the next asking for profit numbers – you become stuck in two mindsets: do I prioritise the customer, or do I prioritise the business? It doesn't necessarily have to be this binary choice, though, and both things are important. If you’re not making money, you can’t invest back into providing great customer experiences. It’s about having the bravery to make certain decisions which may not pay off in the short-term, but knowing that by doing right by your customers, it will pay off eventually.

"Many organisations strive to implement customer-centricity in their thinking, but it doesn’t always materialise because they haven’t got the right leadership in place."

One of the great examples is Amazon and the launch of their bookstore ratings functionality which is now present on all their products. When it was introduced, there was heavy criticism from publishers, authors, and internal shareholders – there was concern that by initiating a one-star rating, they were creating a scenario whereby a customer would be ready to buy a book, see a one-star rating, and then decide against it. Essentially, they were purposely preventing consumers investing in their business.

But Amazon leadership resisted calls for change and now they have a reputation for being uber-customer-centric because they believe in the currency of credibility. And this concept applies to every business: if you create a credible relationship with your customers and show you're invested in them, they will come and they will stay. Speaking metaphorically, they may not buy that one-star book, but they will probably return and buy another. You might have lost that original sale, but you've created a loyal customer for the next five to 10 years and beyond. That comes at the expense of your partners and shareholders initially, but if you're truly customer-centric, you can ride that wave. And that's where leadership becomes so important, because people on the ground can't make those decisions if they don't have that robust, unwavering support from the top.

Leadership builds that customer-first culture, drives that strategy, brings the right people into play, and removes the wrong people. And that last part is critical. As companies scale and grow, a multitude of different cultures can sprout internally, the knock-on effect of which is people pulling in different directions. You can't get hiring decisions right all the time, so leadership teams have got to ensure that when things aren’t working, they’re stepping in and dealing with that appropriately. Otherwise, the situation may become untenable and that's how you lose the culture. Going back to the question about staying the course – that's a great way to lose sight of the goal because the organisation is infiltrated with ideas and minds that are in continuous conflict.

CCW Europe: It’s been a particularly tough time for companies in the energy sector against the cost-of-living crisis that has seen rising gas and electricity prices form the centrepiece of the issue. What strategies have you put into action to keep the customer at the core of your business, and remain true to your brand, during these turbulent times?

AK: Transparency has been one of the biggest elements. It's one of the core principles of the brand. The energy space has traditionally had this culture of keeping quiet to avoid waking customers up – playing to this notion that if customers realise they’re paying more than they could or should, they’ll just switch providers.

We're creating a new culture. We’re asking ourselves how do we build trust with customers, and how can we be different; how can we be transparent – and crucially today – personal? We've built a lot of products and solutions over the past year to help with the cost-of-living crisis – products that are informative, educational, and very proactive in terms of empowering customers to potentially reduce their bills. Of course, this means we’re going to earn less money in the short term, which is totally fine. We’re thinking long-term – if we keep our customers happy and demonstrate we’re doing right by them, we’re more likely to foster brand loyalty.

Getting close to the customer is key for us. We conducted a lot of customer interviews and enjoyed a lot of customer collaboration – we brought the voice of the customer right into the heart of our organisation and that has made such a big difference. It reminded people why we’re here and what we're doing. Across late-2022 and early-2023 when energy prices were soaring, we heard some truly heartbreaking stories from customers. And it just created an urgency within E.ON Next.

We could see that our customers needed help in the moment. In simple terms, sitting on something and trying to make it pretty and fancy just wasn’t good enough. We had to act quickly and connect with customers rather than see them as a number. It also created a sense of pride in our work and now we’ve got this close internal community that’s driven and dedicated to meet customer needs in everything they do. When you unlock that, you’ve got something powerful.

We entered the market as another disruptor and challenger, but the last 12 months were all about stability and security for our customers. Now we’re gradually coming out of that space and looking at innovation. Once you’ve got the foundations in place – once the customers know you’re invested in them – that's when you can start delighting them with a few creative tweaks and elements. That’s the road we’re on right now.

CCW Europe: Moving on to the subject of data. It’s core to everything in business today. Or, rather, it should be. How are you using data to empower decision making at E.ON Next when it comes to the customer experience and digital products?

AK: There are a couple of considerations we have around data.

The first is sidestepping the trap of data paralysis – overanalysing data to a point where you’re not actually aware of what the reality is. We collect as much data as is necessary to make some decisions and then go out and test. That's the most important thing: the quicker you can get things out to test with real customers, the better.

The second is adopting data collection practices that look high and wide to ensure we’re getting the correct and complete picture. A lot of customer research programmes start and end with interviews or surveys. That’s dangerous. Why? Because there is a big difference between what customers say and what they do. We have a lot of behavioural measuring tools and AI-powered tools that provide us with a bird’s-eye view of what our customers are doing.

"A lot of customer research programmes start and end with interviews or surveys. That’s dangerous. Why? Because there is a big difference between what customers say and what they do."

Here’s an example. Customers kept calling in to complain about a certain aspect of their bill. That’s a common occurrence. Customers often think there’s one problem, but when we look at screen sessions and heat maps, we can see it’s something completely different. But around the time the government rolled out the Energy Bill Support Scheme giving every household a £400 grant, we received a notable influx of calls relating to how this was appearing on monthly bills, and they typically fell into two buckets.

In bucket one, people were calling and asking what this payment was about. And in the other, people were getting in touch and asking where their payment was. This was confusing for us because we had the information on our website – a banner on the homepage, impossible to miss. But people just didn’t know what this payment was. They knew about the £400 grant because it was all over the news but generally, they didn’t know it was packaged as the “Energy Bill Support Scheme”.

So, when we conducted some behavioural analysis, we could see customers were trying to click the line item in their bill to find out more information, but of course nothing was happening because it wasn’t a link – they were just dead clicks. We have what’s called a “struggle score” and we could quickly determine that people were really struggling around this specific issue. Once we understood the origin of all these calls, we went out and spoke to customers about finding a solution that would work best for them.

The results of those conversations? Some changes around language and layout – we simplified it and introduced some icons. It helped to massively reduce the number of queries we were getting, which freed up the agents to focus on more meaningful tasks. And that was all by leveraging data – piecing together different sources of research and feedback to actually tell a story.

CCW Europe: The balance between the human and digital aspect of customer service is really coming into focus. Generative AI, ChatGPT, Bard – there's been so much hype around the potential of this new breed of technology that the all-important human element has often been forgotten. How do you see them coming together?

AK: We put a lot of emphasis on these tools as a means to supercharge the powers of an agent, or a designer, or an engineer.

Language is so important here because when the AI-hype first reverberated around the industry, a lot of people started to worry about jobs and ethics. We position it to our team as another weapon in your arsenal that can help improve productivity, creativity, and efficiency. It’s up to you to be a master of the tool rather than letting the tool become a master of you. AI is not an enemy – on the contrary, it’s going to allow you to explore new areas within your remit and beyond, to put more compelling ideas to your team, and to accelerate career growth.

It’s opened a lot of opportunities for us from a workforce perspective all the way to executing actual solutions for customers and there are a few things we’re looking at right now. It’s also important not to force technologies for the sake of it. There are real, valuable elements to AI. It can really transform the experience of a customer, and if we can do that, why wouldn’t we explore it?

CCW Europe: Absolutely! Do you have some examples of AI-powered solutions that are in operation right now or is the introduction of AI still very much a working progress at E.ON Next?

AK: The most common way we use AI is to empower customer support agents, which is pretty standard across many companies now.

We have an AI bot that is able to scan our whole knowledge base and leverage that in real-time for our agents. Today when an agent answers the phone, they have access to all the answers they need within just a few clicks and that's so important for many reasons:

First: They get information quickly, so the customer isn’t waiting around – a critical component in driving exceptional customer experience today.

Second: They know the information is accurate. Human error comes into play when individuals search for information from different sources – agents could be looking at a document that may be outdated, for example.

Third: Consistency. It means the message every customer receives is now constant and uniform because the agents are all pulling information from the same sources.

CCW Europe: Let’s talk about training. And this question has multiple questions within it. First – in many ways, AI needs to be treated as an employee – it's speaking directly with customers and helping you meet your business goals. So how do you go about training AI to represent your brand?

AK: That just takes time. And it goes back to empowerment from a leadership perspective – operating on the understanding you’re not going to get everything perfected immediately.

We’re in the process of trialling different tools to see which ones work best for us. Perhaps one will find an error or surface some actionable insights that another does not. Again, testing is essential. Before you get anything in front of customers, it's critical you have the right information. We’re stress testing these tools to their limit and that doesn’t happen overnight.

We've got heaps of knowledge already built up across different sources. One such source these large language models can learn from is e-mail activity. We generate thousands upon thousands of email chains per week and there's a great deal of valuable information stored inside them. We also have our internal wiki software and slack – a lot of knowledge sharing happens on those channels. Getting the information isn’t the problem – it's ensuring that we load AI with the right information.

We’ve also set up a dedicated AI forum within the organisation to ensure that quality, security, and ethics are all being considered. AI is still in its infancy, relatively speaking, both as a tool and an experience – the governance and moral pieces are yet to be refined. As a community, we’re figuring out that side of the equation as we go. This in-house group gets together on a weekly basis to discuss experiences – it's incredibly valuable to get different perspectives, and data and security consume a massive part of the conversations. We certainly don’t want to breach any trust with our customers in that regard.

"AI is still in its infancy, relatively speaking, both as a tool and an experience – the governance and moral pieces are yet to be refined. As a community, we’re figuring out that side of the equation as we go."

CCW Europe: And the second part to the training piece: how are you empowering your customer service team to utilise AI tools effectively?

AK: That is, and will be, a methodical process. Whenever we roll out something new internally, we put together small teams to conduct testing and refine our processes and our material before we launch whatever it is out to the wider company and then to our customers. We're not quite there with the AI element because work is still required from a technical perspective, and we want absolute security of accuracy. But when the time comes, we’ll have our champions and train the trainer model which has traditionally worked really well for us.

CCW Europe: Has the introduction of AI into your business unlocked value beyond the contact centre and your agents? Has it surfaced any surprising insights or driven change in another way?

AK: Yes! We’ve recently introduced an innovative AI tool within the billing experience: Billy. That’s beyond the contact centre; a customer-focused product.

We know that as soon as customers see their bill, they want to query it and dispute it. Billy is allowing customers to interact with their bill live – they can ask it any questions they want, and it will act as an assistant and offer insights into how customers can reduce their energy usage based on trends and patterns. We estimate that it will reduce contact by at least 50% because it’s an intervention-based tool.

The bill is often the only contact point customers have with our brand. Our research data shows that 54% of customers view their bill and completely exit our site. Another 34% view their bill and go directly to the contact section – and it’s that pocket of customers that Billy is aimed at. Reducing this percentage would be phenomenal because not only are we creating better customer experiences by empowering them to get their issues resolved online, on-demand, it also frees up the phone lines for more serious issues – our more vulnerable customers. Those who are really struggling to pay and desperately require our financial assistance and advice.

So, that’s how AI is having an effect beyond helping agents. It’s created an additional support mechanism online that releases bandwidth for more traditional support. And this is only the tip of the iceberg – there are a lot of opportunities out there.

CCW Europe: To wrap up, Abdul, let’s look to the future of the customer contact centre and customer experience. What trends do you see coming to the fore in these spaces as we move through the second half of 2023 and into 2024?

AK: AI is obviously the hot topic. But beyond that, I’m looking at the omnichannel experience.

When customers call in, do the support agents have all the information relating to that customer? Do they know what the caller has just viewed online to trigger the call? And speaking specifically to the utilities space – do we know if they have a boiler, and if they do, are they using it efficiently? Should we offer them boiler insurance? Do we know if they have an electric vehicle? If they do, is there a tariff we can offer them that could save on their charging costs? Or maybe they’d be interested in getting some solar panels that could help them save more. But can they afford panels?

If we have all that relevant data, we can better guide them to what they need and create personalised experiences. Across the fields of marketing and customer experience there’s an obsession with personalisation through digital channels, but can we create personalised experiences on a phone call? Every touchpoint is crucial, and you want to create an opportunity for customers to use whatever touchpoint they are most comfortable with.

Contact centres can play a big part in brand loyalty – in terms of retention and upselling – just by having information available. That's where technology comes into play. This isn’t new tech or a particularly new trend – I'm just not sure it's been fully utilised and implemented well in a lot of companies.

"Contact centres can play a big part in brand loyalty – in terms of retention and upselling – just by having information available."

For more critical insights from members of our community, check out all the other interviews in our View from the Boardroom series.