Utilities Deal with a New Customer Service Landscape
July 19, 2013
By Mae Kowalke, TMCnet Contributor
The contact center is changing, and this is no different for utilities that strive to deliver good customer service.
Increasingly, calls to companies are being replaced by tweets and Facebook (News - Alert) messages, according to DMG Consulting. The contact center specialist predicts that social media communications will be the dominant form of interaction between customers and companies in less than five years.
Utilities are grappling with this fact and learning the new rules of the customer service game like everybody else.
"Social media allows better communication with customers and the ability to be proactive in addressing customer service issues," said Justin Snyder, the national brand manager for Oasis Energy, in a recent article by Energy Biz magazine. Oasis Energy supplies electricity and natural gas to residential and business customers in New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Illinois.
Even if the communication is not better, utilities must engage on those platforms or have their brand hurt.
Roughly 34 percent of Americans have used social media sites to rant about a product, company or brand, according to Harris Interactive. Utilities must engage with customers on the likes of Facebook and Twitter (News - Alert) or suffer the consequences of leaving the discussion to others.
For Natural Grid, a utility that provides gas and electric services to more than seven million consumers in Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island, there is now a separate Facebook account for the utility in each state it serves. With Pacific Gas and Electric, which delivers gas and electric services to roughly 15 million customers throughout a 70,000-square-mile service area in California, upwards of 8,600 customers have accessed its Facebook pages.
Bill complaints and service problems are common topics on the social networks. At PG&E (News - Alert), these messages from the social networks are sent to the corporate communications department and then forwarded to the firm's contact center, according to the Energy Biz article. Other utilities send all social media messages directly to the contact center for resolution.
As with firms of all types, the contact centers of utilities are shifting from calls to a wide range of channels for communication. But this also is coming with costs, some find.
"There are a lot of free social media tools," said PG&E's Dustin Hoffman (News - Alert), but finding the money for the manpower to operate the tools and engage with customers is not easy. The tools are free, but the manpower certainly is not.
Still, utilities must embrace social media. The days when an organization could look the other way are past.
"Social media isn't going anywhere, and usage is only going to increase," noted Oasis Energy's Snyder.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson