The business energy provider used a monthly survey to map and improve customer satisfaction
Gazprom Energy entered the energy retail market in 2006. Headquartered in Manchester, its UK operation specialises in supplying energy to businesses and organisations of all sizes.
Historically, customer engagement has not been a priority for energy suppliers in the UK B2B market, with price being widely assumed to dominate companies’ buying decisions.
Questioning this approach, Gazprom Energy set out to align its offer to the specific procurement demands of UK businesses, looking at much more than simply the price of the commodity it sells.
This rationale has been confirmed by data taken from interviews with 1200 customers this year. The study found that competiveness of pricing generally had much less influence on customer satisfaction than other factors like staff knowledge, communications and customer service response times.
The survey
Taking inspiration from more customer-focused sectors such as travel, the company launched a monthly survey, as part of its ‘Voice of the customer’ programme, working with research partner B2B International.
The survey measured customer satisfaction for the business as a whole across the customer lifecycle and, more importantly, how easy customers find working with Gazprom Energy.
The survey had two key aims – to map current levels of customer satisfaction and ask how the company could better meet its customers’ needs.
The survey was not limited to end-user customers, but included many third-party energy brokers and consultants through which Gazprom Energy sells. It covered a spread of organisations of different sizes, from SMEs through mid-market businesses up to large corporate clients.
To date, the survey has collected responses from over 1800 customers and 400 third-party intermediaries, and has become an essential resource for the business. Although managed by the marketing team, the feedback gathered from the survey is shared where appropriate with teams across the company including customer service, operations, sales and finance, who can then act upon customer and third-party input.
Often, while completing the survey, customers mentioned they had an issue or were unhappy about something, but admit they may never have raised it previously. When this happens, the customer service team is notified immediately so they can get in touch with the customer. This has been invaluable and added further value to the investment.
The business analyses all customer feedback every six months and uses the findings to enhance its customer service strategy and set targets for improvement.
Learnings and results
While many of the messages to have come out of the survey support intuitive assumptions – such as the focus of SME businesses on price and larger organisations’ increased requirement for personal relationships and dedicated account management – others were less easily anticipated.
The lack of knowledge around basic processes such as taking meter readings, for example, was a wake-up call.
In light of the feedback, Gazprom Energy has rolled out an awareness-raising campaign about the importance of submitting regular meter readings and now offers an email reminder service so customers are prompted to submit a reading each month.
Another clear message from the survey was an appetite from businesses of all sizes for support services to be available online on a completely self-service basis. This message is echoed by Gazprom Energy’s broker partners, who make it clear they’re keen to minimise the delay involved in the customer contract set-up process by having everything they need available online.
In response, Gazprom Energy has stepped up its focus on providing the best online interface in the industry by holding a series of user experience labs and bringing in an ecommerce specialist to review all customer-facing systems and ensure they are as user-friendly as possible.
Gazprom Energy has also helped its third party intermediaries with the launch of BrokerQuote, a self-service online tool for generating quotes and contract documentation for SME clients.
These efforts combined helped Gazprom Energy achieve a 2.5 per cent increase in its customer satisfaction score, bringing it up to 81 per cent, as well as growing its average net promoter score (NPS) by 54 per cent – from 17 per cent to 26 per cent. Homing in on these also allowed the company to identify sectors in which it was performing well, with its SME customers showing the greatest increase in customer satisfaction and NPS – giving it division-specific knowledge of ongoing customer relationship initiatives.