An interview with Gene Alessi, Customer Service Manager, and Reama Yassine, Quality Assessment Team Manager

Can you tell us a little bit about TRUenergy?

TRUenergy is a national energy organization in Australia, providing retail energy to the mass market and to industrial and commercial customers.  We supply gas and electricity to 1.1 million customer accounts throughout the country.  We produce energy mainly through our two power stations, coal-fired in Victoria and gas-fired in South Australia.  We also have a fairly significant underground gas storage facility and trade energy on the national grid. 

With 1.1 million customer accounts, does that mean that you get a lot of phone calls into your call center?

We handle about three million transactions annually, most of which come in during peak times.

What are these peak times?

The weather here is quite seasonal.  In some areas it can get as cold as 3° or 4° Celsius (37°-39° Fahrenheit) in the winter.  And in the summer peak temperatures can exceed 35° Celsius (95° Fahrenheit).  Most households heat their homes with gas during winter and cool their homes during summer with electricity.  This means that we have high call volumes during winter as a result of much larger winter gas bills and the same for electricity during the summer period.

So your agents need to be trained not only on good customer service, attentiveness, courtesy, and other “soft skills”, but they also need to understand complicated technical information?

Absolutely.  Our agents, or “service consultants”, need to understand the consumption of a particular white goods or household equipment.  For example, what sort of power usage would the average air conditioner expend, and the implications these have on usage, volume, and cost.  We are so often asked “why has my gas bill doubled in cost this month?”  Service consultants need to be well versed in how to handle these calls.  They need to know the series of qualifying questions that will bring the customer to an understanding.  For example, “have you been heating your home?”, “how often do you use it?”  And if the answer to this last one is “I heat the house all day and all night”, then the costumer even on his own can reach the conclusion that the consumption of gas has quadrupled which lead to a bill that has quadrupled.

How does NICE help you maintain high levels of service?

I used NICE when I was at Vodaphone here in Australia, and I think it’s an excellent tool.  We are very committed to it.  Firstly, we are using it to achieve our regulatory requirements.  That is, we need to have recorded evidence of customers accepting every contract they sign up for, and agreeing to the relevant exit fees and penalties.  The second, and most major need, is quality control to pick up any training and skills deficiencies and engage in continuous improvement.

Can you give an example of how the NICE solution helped your service consultants overcome a certain challenge or better hone a specific skill?

Signing up a customer involves disclosing a lot of technical detail – this can take up to ten minutes – and then to meet the obligations of our retail license we have to make sure that all terms and conditions are communicated to the customer.

NICE helps us to make sure this happens and allows us to identify and situations that require follow-up.

Our industry is closely monitored and audited to ensure that all our regulatory requirements are met.  NICE gives us the opportunity to demonstrate that compliance and to work with our consultants on any areas of their performance that need more work.

And what are some of the “soft skills”?

These include: communication skills, how well the consultants are using the opening and closing scripts, mode of speech, and courtesy. 

Regardless of the performance parameter, when it comes to continuous improvement – the best thing is for them to do their own assessment and listen to their own calls as an example.  NICE provides us with a very strong foundation for giving this important feedback in training. 

You have implemented NICE in a VoIP environment, why did you decide to go with VoIP?

We had an eight year old PBX system in place which was pretty much at the end of its life, that’s one reason.  Another reason is that we are in competitive marketplace.  Unlike most energy players around the globe that are highly regulated or government owned, we are actually deregulated and privately owned and so we face tough competition.  There was a list of things that we needed to do with our customer service function that we simply could not do with the old platform.  And we saw VoIP as a leap-frog technology; we wanted to really push the limits.

How has VoIP helped you in terms of decreasing costs?

We have been able to automate a lot more calls than we had previously.  For example, we moved from 29% to 37% of all our calls to be handled through self-service IVR functions, within the first three months.  

What would you like your next steps with NICE to be?

We are looking to have some of your fantastic interaction analytics in our VoIP environment.  We’re very excited about key word spotting and emotion detection, which we would love to get a hold of to use for customer retention activities – that is, to thaw out customers who might mention our competitors’ names, or use phrases such as “leaving your business.” 

And this is very important to us.  The market at the moment is churning at about 25%.  And while we are well below the market, we are looking at all sorts of creative ways to really speed up our retention activities.  This technology from NICE can help us in that regard. We can see really exciting opportunities.