How do you reduce churn?
Did you know that one in four consumers changed their electricity supplier? The real challenge, therefore, is how you reduce churn. So how do you change this trend?
Wiraya recently did a study amongst consumers that had left their energy supplier. 65% of respondents said they wouldn’t have left, had they simply felt more appreciated. To compound matters. half of all consumers said they receive irrelevant communication and at the wrong time. What is the solution and how can utilities reverse the trend?
The answer is to invest more in customer experience, and specifically the way you interact.
According to McKinsey, companies that are leaders in customer experience achieve income growth of 5-10 percent and reduce costs by 15-25 percent within two to three years. Customer experience is not only the perception the customer gets when meeting with a customer representative. It’s the overall picture that is built up through every interaction. This doesn’t simply help customers feel more satisfied. There is significant money for you as a business to save and to increase revenues.
‘Customer Experience’, ‘Customer Satisfaction’, “on the customer’s terms,” ”Customer First”, “Customer Focused”, there are countless marketing buzzwords that cause significant challenges. Businesses spend significant budget with agencies and consultants hired to develop strategies that attempt to focus on these areas, but what people often forget is that we need to keep the approach pretty simple. It does not take much for us to be happy. A simple yet effective treatment of customer communication goes a long way to making customers happy. In order to deliver good customer communication, and as result customer experiences, it is important to start working on the simple steps to success;
Step 1. Make sure you have the correct customer data
The prerequisite for being able to communicate relevant and timely messages with customers on an individual level is to have the right data. In my experience, there are many energy companies that have large gaps in their customer data segments, making it very difficult to reach individual customers.
Many utility companies have lagged behind in the move to full digitization and still see the physical letter as the main communication channel. Every indication suggests this has moved beyond simply a channel in decline. Wiraya helps in this key first phase, collecting e-mail addresses and phone numbers that can enable personal yet large-scale communication.
Step 2. Communicate on the customer’s terms
What is the fundamental of good customer communication? It’s simple. Send the right message, through the right channel, at the right time, to simplify and serve your customers’ everyday lives
Here are my top tips on activities that you can take to drastically enhance your customer communication;
- Deliver the extra and unexpected – think personal value-driven messaging
- Contact customers on the move
- Compete with strong customer experience instead of price
- Start with the basics and the rest will follow
- Place greater focus on existing customers than new acquisitions – it’s easy money
- Communicate with customers along the entire customer journey
- Get the whole company to think from the customer’s perspective
- Start small, prove the model, then rapidly scale.
Best of Luck!
