We spoke with Abdul Khaled, who is Head of Digital and Customer Experience & Digital Products at E.ON Next, a Big Six UK energy supplier. Established back in 2000, after EON acquired NPower, the company has become known for its focus on customer experience. Abdul has been pivotal in turning data and insights into a robust Experience-Led Growth (XLG) strategy.
The E.ON Next team uses XLG to overcome the silos created by individual strategies. Specifically, they identify their existing and target maturity, run customer journey mapping, and get deep insight reports from expert consultants.
Key Results
- 144% increase in NPS from +9 in 2023 to +22 in 2024
- Boosted Customer Happiness Index by 48%
- E.ON Next app went from 1.1 on the app store rating to 4.8
Let’s dive right in.
Challenge
Q: What are the biggest challenges that E.ON Next faces?
I think the biggest challenge that EonNext and actually all energy companies would face in the UK is first of all to earn trust. So we've just come on the back of an energy crisis with the cost of living crisis. Energy prices have never been higher for customers and consumers. There's a real negative connotation about how people view us as an industry, whether it's taking too much money. Greedy. These are all negative connotations we have to deal with. The only way to really deal with that is by understanding and listening to our customers; viewing them as who they are, not just as a number, but as humans.
What we're really trying to do - and that's where the challenge is - is to work out how to connect with customers at a human personal level in an industry that is low interest and not favourable, and where sometimes people feel that they're forced to pay for a service.
Q: What are the most important metrics for you?
For me specifically in my role, the most important metrics that we really try and uncover are customer experience and customer engagement metrics. We believe that if you get the customer engagement and the customer experience right, all of the other metrics that are a necessity for a business to operate and run will naturally fall into place.
So whether that's your margins, your cost to serve, your operational efficiency, or your profits, if you focus at the heart of what customers need and the value that you're trying to create for them, those other metrics will naturally fall into place.
Q: It sounds like CX doesn't come to mind when we think about utility providers. So why is it so important at E.ON?
Where we feel we could invest our energy - to really differentiate - is the customer experience layer. That's the differentiator for us. The tech could be great and there's multiple companies who use the same tech in our industry, but the difference is how do you take that technology, present it, and connect it to the customers.
So we've made a conscious decision to really invest in-house in customer experience and be that layer where customers have that first moment and interaction with us and that's what sells it to them, not anything else.
To enable us to really achieve our ambitions across the organization, top-down, bottom-up, being really customer-centric, we really wanted to tap into some of the key services and offers from Experience-Led Growth. I think that was one of the reasons we thought that this is a partnership that we could really follow and will help activate our own ambitions and goals.
Solution
Q: What led you to look for Chattermill Experience-Led Growth services?
One of the reasons that led us to the experience-led growth services from Chattermill was to get more from the engagement that we have with the customer experience specialists in the industry. We've benefited quite a lot from the tool and the platform, and it's enabled a lot of customer insight and data within the organization, and we've had a lot of success from being able to utilize that data.
The expertise that we saw within Chattermill in-house, because they've always provided us with that consultancy service regardless, I wanted to tap into that to accelerate our in-house capabilities. What better way to do that than go to the source? So we decided to discuss this opportunity with Chattermill around the Experience-Led Growth model.
What we were really trying to solve here was we had pockets of great customer experience within the organization. But as an organization at the size and breadth of Eon Next with a customer base of nearly 6 million customers we wanted to work out how to scale that model. I think this is where XLG really comes in and pivots our whole strategy. So we really wanted to tap into that and utilize the expertise to get oversight of our whole customer experience strategy end to end.
Q: Which Chattermill XLG services have you used so far?
So we first started off with the maturity model. And that was a great way for an external partner to come in and evaluate where we are in our customer experience maturity. I think that really helped identify the gaps that we have and also allowed us to see where the target model is and really be able to fill the current status quo and what's needed to get to the target model.
So that's been massively helpful - massively useful - and forced us to challenge ourselves in terms of what we, in some areas, were aware was a problem, to really be able to quantify that. In some other areas where we thought were not a problem, we’ve actually realized there are better ways of optimizing. So having that outside-in perspective has really helped us sort of gauge what our strategy should be and how we can fill the gaps.
We've also done some customer journey mapping, which has also been really useful to be able to not just see how a customer goes from A to B but also to really embed the customer insight and feedback that we get from the Chattermill platform across those touchpoints.
I think that is a game changer for us because it's not just looking at a customer journey A to B. It's looking at what are the different sentiments and the different feedback at every single touchpoint that we have. And so how do you enable that? So getting the right data sources, plugging those gaps, getting the right quality of data, and then visualizing it has been an absolute game changer in driving our strategic approach on the back of it.
Q: How do the monthly deep dive insight reports help you?
One of the reasons we took the monthly insight deep dive service from ChatterMail was to get that outside-in perspective from neutral people with a customer experience specialism that can identify patterns and trends that maybe we're not able to in-house.
When you're in the detail sometimes you notice things that don't actually scream at your face as a problem that needs addressing because you've seen it so many times and you've become victim to the curse of knowledge. Whereas when you have an outside-in perspective, you're able to spot those trends.
One of the examples that has really gone down well in one of our previous reports was identifying the issue of office noise. Now, office noise for us was something that we started seeing in the reports, but it wasn't a large volume of people complaining about that issue. So it was things that would always get low prioritized because you'd always go after the items that had the highest volume.
Now, what Chattermill was able to identify was despite it having a low volume of complaints, the fact that people were complaining about it shows that there's an underlying root cause. And so we were able to take that, understand what the reasons for it was, and those insight reports really act as a trigger for us to then go and deep dive into a specific topic. We were able to understand the specific drivers and the root causes behind those and then able to rectify them. But it’s something that we probably wouldn't have noticed or identified if we didn't have those monthly insight reports guiding us.
So we took that data and then triggered further discovery within our internal teams. It acts as a trigger point for us to then pivot to a topic which we know is then grounded on some sort of analysis and data, which means we're already confident in that approach and investing time and resources within it
Results
Has XLG had an impact on your CX?
Since having the XLJ services really embedded in, we're now in a situation where we have everyone from the organization, regardless of what level you're operating at, having access to customer data.
That's the first fundamental thing we wanted to achieve was to get everyone access to the same source of customer insight and data, to be able to really implement and impact those customer-centric decisions on a regular daily micro-level basis. So rather than having customer experience as a one-off event, we really wanted to make it an everyday part and parcel of everyone's role, micro-level, macro-level. So that's the first step. That's the first thing that we've managed to enable. And that's allowed people to be really focused on customer-centricity and customer excellence.
Q: How has using XLG services or solutions enabled you to change the customer experience of your company?
The biggest benefit that we've seen is really forcing us to be customer-centric in our decision-making and our approach to solutions; we've seen a great benefit.
One of the key areas of the business - that's a really important measure for us - is the NPS around our billing services. Billing is the key touch point for customers. It's also the most difficult touch point to get a great customer experience.
You can make it as enjoyable as possible by making sure that it's as easy to use, it's personalized, there's less friction in there, and if you need support and guidance, it's easily accessible. We can make sure there are really important solutions in place to help you manage your efficiency around your energy better. We've gone from plus 9 last year to plus 22 this year, which is an incredible 144% increase, which again, for that touchpoint, is extremely, extremely difficult.
We've also seen a great increase in our app. It went from really bottom of the pile in the industry, 1.1 on the app store rating, to 4.8, which is now the joint highest-rated app in the marketplace. This is phenomenal growth, again, for an energy app, which is, again, not something that you're going to be utilizing with the same enthusiasm as you would with a shopping app, for example.
So to be able to get that experience right and the satisfaction right has been phenomenal. It’s rooted in the customer insight and feedback that we get to guide us towards what we should prioritize, what we should build, and how we should react to customer issues and problems.
We've also introduced billing solutions and an interactive digital bill, which has seen an increase in Customer Happiness Index by 48%. Again, this is a very difficult touch point to create that experience from and make it something that is at least somewhat satisfactory for customers.
So by introducing a digital bill that tackles all the key issues that we've seen from our customer feedback, they want more clarity. They want to be able to understand what the reasons behind the charges are. They want quick actions that they can follow up on. We've taken all of that and allowed it to prioritize our digital bill, and the growth has been phenomenal in that metric.
Q: How has XLG helped the culture around CX in the business?
One of the things we wanted to do was to put customer experience at the heart of the organization. Not just so that it’s driving decisions, but also allowing us to implement strategic drivers and to understand the root cause behind everything that we do. By implementing a CX roundtable, we can bring different people from the organization around a specific point to discuss our customer experience metrics and topics and look at the performance,” explains Abdul.
That's one of the things we really wanted from the XLG program, is to enable that type of conversation to happen. It’s just a conversation, but you need the right format, the right data, the right insight, and the right strategic approach to make the best out of that conversation.
We have that regular cadence now with CX roundtable … So you talk to anyone in the business now, top-down or bottom-up, they'll all know what the key drivers and the key issues and the root causes are behind the strategy. I think this has been a phenomenally impressive thing to do and also a difficult thing to do.
Q: How do you plan to expand your use of XLG and what additional results do you expect?
So for the next phase of our XLG services, we want to take our relationship a little bit further. So what we've seen is great activity in enabling those core fundamentals to allow us to be a customer-centric organisation.
We now want to supercharge to really meet our ambitions of being the customer experience excellence within this space. I think to do that, we've now talked about a relationship where we have embedded resources from Chattermill within our organization, working day to day, living and breathing the same values and strategies that we do within our teams.
I think that will be a great way to, really set ourselves up for the future, to embody some of that knowledge and expertise from Chathammill within our teams, and to really set them up for success to take on the baton so we can be more independent in the future.
Q: If you don't use XLG services, what is that risk?
I think the biggest risk if we don’t continue this relationship with the XLG services is that we lose a lot of momentum. We slow down in our ambitions. There are different ways to get to a target, and we're in a rush. We're in a rush because our customers need our services and they need great customer experiences.
When customers have a problem, they need it solved rapidly. So we’re not here to play the long game. We need to get to our goals and objectives as quickly as possible. The best way to do that, if we want to do right by our customers, is to find ways to turbocharge that. XLG services allow us to get from A to B, not just in the quickest way possible, but in the best way possible.
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