Jemena powers up CX in search of real-time customer feedback

Electricity and gas distributor Jemena is upgrading its capacity to measure the experience that people have when they call in seeking assistance on complex installations and fault resolution.

Jemena will today announce that it is deploying InMoment, initially in its contact centre operations before expanding the hosted software across its digital channels.

Media and external affairs manager Michael Pintabona told iTnews that the utility went to market earlier this year in search of a technology partner to uplift customer experience (CX), with a focus both on registering some “quick wins” and longer-term CX enhancement.

As a distributor, Jemena only deals with certain types of enquiries directly; most of the time, customers would ask questions via their energy retailer.

“We are not necessarily a customer interface traditionally,” Pintabona said.

Energy end users could choose whether to ask questions of their retailer - and let the retailer manage the interactions with Jemena - or to go to Jemena directly.

“Customers come to us directly generally when there's a level of complexity around the actual installation or the piece of work that they're after,” Pintabona said.

“It could be that you've built a new property, and it's a duplex and you need two connections. The retailer could facilitate that but it's often a lot easier to come directly to us because you can talk to us, talk to your case manager, and work through it that way. 

“The other unique space that we own is faults and emergencies, so if the lights go out, your retailer is not going to know anything about that. 

“You need to come to your distribution company because we will have insight into the cause, the length, duration, and when you can expect things to be back online.”

Currently, Jemena tries to measure the customer interaction after it has taken place.

“At the moment we are looking at customer experiences following the interaction, so you may phone up Jemena, and off the back of that phone call you rate it one to five,” Pintabona said.

“But that [rating] isn't a clear and accurate representation of their experiences with the company holistically.”

There may also be a delay between when the interaction is completed and when the customer survey form is sent out.

“The current state is that that interaction is delayed, so you may make a phone call and then you'll get an SMS and it could be there's a time delay on that as well,” Pintabona said.

Jemena is looking to make the gathering of “episodic” customer feedback more immediate, but then to compile a “bigger picture journey” across all episodes or interactions that are needed to resolve a customer’s question.

The company is hoping to find data patterns that point to “obvious spot fires that need to be put out”; finding those in real-time means they can “be escalated up to a team leader or manager, and then we can actually take action on it much faster before things manifest into real problems.”

Initially, when InMoment goes live in July, it will be used only in Jemena’s contact centre operations, albeit that accounts for about 90 percent of customer interactions.

At some point in the future, InMoment will also collect feedback from interactions in digital channels such as online chat or self-service parts of Jemena’s website.

Additionally, Jemena is hoping that InMoment can be used as a mechanism for field crews to capture feedback given to them directly while they might be working on a callout.

“Our long term vision, because we do have field crew that are out in the field, is how do we actually get customer feedback in a face-to-face sense but take that from verbal feedback to a digital [format] that we can actually use?” Pintabona said.

Pintabona said InMoment would largely help to automate the capture and collection of CX data, allowing Jemena to “just get straight to the insights rather than working through, evaluating and analysing the data” first.

InMoment’s APAC region managing director David Blakers said the vendor sought to “create strategic partnerships in the market with brands that are natively customer-centric, and Jemena absolutely fits that bill.”

“The way Inmoment helps those brands is giving them a capability to improve the experience they're delivering across the moments that matter,” he said.

“Effectively we're helping Jemena to listen, understand and improve experience in real-time by aggregating all of the insight that comes back [from customers], using things like text analytics powered by natural language processing to categorise and determine themes and sentiment, and even the emotional state that we've left a particular customer after interaction.”