Public Power - October 2008 - (Page 51)

CUSTOMER SERVICE Prepare Now for Complaints About High Bills By David Saxby Many utilitiesofareyear when approaching that time customers’ utility bills start creeping up, setting the stage for even higher bills down the road as winter truly sets in. Customers will be angry and the phones will start ringing. The challenge your customerservice staff faces is that customers often believe the utility made an error. Someone read the meter wrong or the meter isn’t working correctly. The bill could not have increased that much from one month to the next. The average customer does not understand that a drop in temperature can significantly increase the consumption of electricity and natural gas. There are several steps utilities can take to reduce the number of calls from frustrated customers: Be proactive vs. reactive. No company, utility or otherwise, should be in the position of having to react to an issue. It’s always better to be prepared. Customers will start calling as soon as they get their first bill that is higher than they think they should be paying. Utilities need to have a plan in place. Marketing and customer service personnel should work together to identify actions that will be taken in advance of cold weather to educate customers and reduce the call volume from high bill inquiries. Reach out to customers. Send customers a monthly newsletter with tips on reducing energy costs. If you have automatic meter reading, publish an www.APPAnet.org article in the newsletter that explains how this technology works. This will make conversations easier for your customer service representatives. When customers call and it’s necessary to put them on hold, they should hear messages promoting cost-saving ideas the utility offers. What’s in it for the customer? The average customer has no idea how easily power and gas are consumed. Pictures really are worth a thousand words and that notion should be put to use in your lobby for customers who visit your office. Educate customers on which items in their homes use the most energy. Set up a display in your lobby that shows water heaters, heat pumps, etc., and how much energy they consume. If you offer hot water heaters and heat pumps, set up a promotion for those services in the same area. List the benefits of using your products. Create a display that shows other ways to cut energy costs, such as energy-efficient light bulbs, insulation and dualpane storm windows. Enlarge a thermal image that shows how energy-inefficient houses waste money. Show the money going out the window. Educate customers on the increase in energy usage and cost when temperatures drop into the 20s, the teens and to zero. Show how much money they can save by lowering their thermostat five degrees at night and when they are not home. Educate them on the benefits of using programmable thermostats to reduce energy consumption. Share a lot of information with your customers. You might consider consolidating the best of it on a white board in the lobby. That’s a bit low-tech but it works. Create a side-by-side comparison of how much money they can save by making small lifestyle changes. In the current economy, people are looking for ways to cut their expenses. Show them how they can do that and many of them will. Training—Dealing with frustrated customers is a challenging situation for anyone, especially when customers are convinced the utility made a mistake. Supervisors should do role-play sessions with customer service staff to practice working effectively with customers who are unhappy about high bills. Employees should have a list of questions to ask customers that will get to the root cause of the high bill. They must become a detective to determine if the customer changed their energy-usage habits during the previous billing period. Did they have extra people at the house? How old is the hot water heater? When was the heat pump last serviced? Does the customer have a programmable thermostat? Online tools—If you have an online energy-audit tool, every customer-service employee should know to use it and be able to walk a customer through such an audit. Your online energy audit should be simple to use. Is it easy for customers to change the parameters and see the savings if they lower their thermostat? Does it show the savings of switching from a gas to an electric water heater or to a heat pump? Your Web site is another great place to educate your cus- tomers on how to save energy and reduce their bill. Create a list of the most frequently asked questions your customers have about energy usage and post them on the site with answers. Send in the energy-savings person. Some customers do not have access to the Internet. When the customer service representative has done everything possible to convince a caller that his or her bill is accurate, but the customer isn’t buying it, it is time to send a person to the home to assess energy use and recommend solutions for stretching energy dollars. This is a great opportunity to build rapport and educate customers on how to save money. Budget billing—This is one of the simplest solutions to high bills but one of the least mentioned. Train your staff on how to sell the benefits of budget billing. Create an example of an average customer using budget billing and the benefits. Post it on your Web site. Put it in bills as a stuffer to show customers how budget billing can reduce bills during winter months. Before the phone starts ringing, ask yourself this question: what are we doing right now as a utility to educate our customers on how to reduce their energy costs and become more savvy about energy efficiency? T David Saxby is president of Measure-X, a firm that specializes in providing training on customer service skills to utilities. He can be reached at david@measure-x.com. OCTOBER 2008 51 http://www.APPAnet.org

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Public Power - October 2008

Public Power - October 2008 Contents Perspective 10 Questions The Future of Fuels in a Carbon-Constrained World An Energy Revolution Energy Policy in 2009 and Beyond A Green Reincarnation Beyond the Green Bandwagon Reliability Green Energy Community Broadband Customer Service Hometown Connections Human Resources Parting Shot

Public Power - October 2008

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