British Gas was crowned Team of the Year (Loving the Customer) at the UK Customer Experience Awards. Read on to find out how the winning team focussed on landlords to achieve a top result.
British Gas is the leading provider of energy and home services in the United Kingdom. It is divided into a number of business units of which one is Home Services – focussing on keeping our customers’ worlds turning.
Within British Gas, landlords have for a long time been able to fulfil their certification obligation and look after their tenants’ world, but there was a lack of visibility. If you consider your needs as a homeowner, landlord or tenant then there are some significant differences. Our National Landlords Centre in the West Midlands was growing, as was the customer base so we built a huge desire to really meet and exceed our customers’ expectations, leading us to form the Landlord’s Retention Team.
To start the Landlord’s Retention journey, we pulled together skills and connections from around the business then set about learning more about the customer to the point we became obsessed with Customer Insight – from whatever direction.
As a team we strove to have everything tailored to the landlord. Within the business we had a good understanding of this segment but we wanted to continue to expand our awareness of this growing base.
Our team was built from relatively inexperienced agents but by engaging them, creating bespoke training and involving them in direction from day one we motivated them to become true landlord advocates. To develop their understanding and skills, our team called previous cancelled customers but, importantly, did not undertake any win-back activity. This allowed them to gleam a real understanding of what makes landlords tick, which conversations and messages are important and helped plug some of our insight gaps.
The team started dialling active customers following their Landlords Inspection visit, carrying out a health check call and re-affirming the benefits of their agreement. We followed this with inbound call handling. Initially we were held up by a change to our telephony platform but – so keen were the team to go live – we only accepted one delay and managed to go live with calls being manually transferred in September 2012.
Performance was immediately scintillating and engagement within the team remained second to none. By Christmas of 2012 we had new propositions for Landlords in retention and had kept over 5,000 Landlords by offering a truly specialised customer service experience.
Within British Gas Retention, the vision is to move further and further upstream. Using the knowledge gained, we set up a feedback loop with our National Landlords team to start tackling NPS trending and tracking key pain points. By focussing on these pain points, we’ve been influential in shaping the customer journey to improve customer satisfaction.
The team has an exciting future too – moving back toward a proactive model. We are working hard with our data teams to be able to more accurately target our Landlords at key events to positively communicate with them in order to help them realise everything that is available to them as part of their service agreement. This will bring further opportunities for Customer Service Advisors to progress into this team.
So when we decided to enter the UK Customer Experience Awards, the team were absolutely thrilled to be nominated but to go on and win they felt honoured and extremely proud to have won this on behalf of our Retention department.
The only disappointment was that we were unable to have everyone attend. This disappointment didn’t stop with the team as we had not one but two customers keen to attend and present on our behalf – a real testament to the rapport the team have has been able to build!
We already had a sense of pride in our achievements but this award has cemented this. The Landlords Retention Team are performers – truly passionate about our customers and the reason for this boils down to empowerment and engagement. They are the frontline, the ear to the ground and therefore are crucial in driving change. Every single change we implement is driven or approved by our team which gives us an awesome safety net in terms of delivering the correct tools for customers.
We already worked with a huge sense of pride but winning this award has cemented it. Our focus now is on how we can evolve to keep enhancing the service we offer our customers as we fully intend to still be the best in a years’ time.