What you need to know:

• In an industry where product differentiation is minimal, customer experience is everything, Alinta Energy’s general manager of engagement retail markets, Cindy Vandecasteele says. And with Australia’s transition to Net Zero well underway and a cost-of-living crisis to contend with, she’s seeing a two-way exchange with customers as a more critical business imperative than ever.
• To help, Alinta Energy has enacted a top-down and bottom-up CX transformation and digitisation program, setting a new customer strategy roadmap and realigning functional teams at a strategic level, while bringing in new tech from Genesys and Adobe to set the foundations.
• Alinta scored early runs on the board, including call centre volume reductions of up to 50 per cent and high digital usage rates. It’s also brought in its first web messaging bot, enacted API integrations that streamline front and back office functionality, and is now exploring more automation through AI.
• Another win that nearly didn’t happen, however, was Alinta’s voice of customer program as Alinta shifted from post-call surveying to an email-based survey. But rather than abandon efforts, the team worked cross-functionally to usher in a voice of customer version 2 and is now seeing above-average responses and significant gains in insight for business decision-making.
• For Vandecasteele, success isn’t about blanket CX improvement however, it’s about finding the areas Alinta needs to win. To that end, she’s first focused on digital journeys such as checkout and moving – the latter winning the energy company an award at the Good Design Awards.
• Employee feedback forms, uniting sales, service, and hardship into one unified team, and introducing CX immersion days have been significant cultural wins helping improve Alinta’s efforts, says Vandecasteele.

The transition to Net Zero by 2050 is seeing the energy industry shift from a low customer engagement category centred in one-way interaction to a two-way exchange where consumers are becoming product producers themselves, Alinta Energy’s general manager of engagement retail markets, Cindy Vandecasteele says. With that comes the demand for higher touch, more informed engagement with the utility provider.

“Customers want to know when they’re using their energy, what’s using it, tariffs, what’s driving up the cost of the bill – we’re seeing that a lot today not just because of the cost-of-living, but also what are they producing, best time, and so on,” she told attendees at last week’s Genesys CX event in Sydney.

This changing dynamic proved the catalyst for Alinta Energy to embark on an ambitious CX transformation plan over the last 18 months. The to-do list has not only seen fresh tech from Genesys and Adobe rolled out to drive better omnichannel experiences, but also led to a comprehensive voice of customer program, AI-based CX use case development, tailored customer journeys, and a laser focus on front-to-back-end integration.

“We are in a highly competitive, price-sensitive industry where product differentiation is minimal. CX is everything; that’s how we differentiate,” Vandecasteele tells Mi3. “The importance of CX has always been there, but the need to do things very differently hadn’t been. It’s CX with digitisation because you just cannot surface the insights consumers will need… That's coming at us really quickly.”

The steps taken

Alinta Energy is an integrated energy provider with 1.1 million residential customers, 1500 employees, and a presence across Australia. When Vandecasteele joined early last year, she was confronted with a contact centre using Genesys PureConnect that was nearly end-of-life, plus a website sitting on Sitecore already out of date and largely operating as a static information source. While the culture within the two calls centres in Morwell and Perth was “brilliant”, it was otherwise a greenfield opportunity for CX improvement, according to Vandecasteele.

Her approach was twofold: Top-down and bottom-up. “The top-down was defining the customer strategy and defining the channel strategy. That was about painting the picture as to who and how, so we've got a roadmap,” she explains.

The bottom-up was the tech. In 18 weeks, Alinta and its systems integration partner, Datacom, shifted the contact centres to Genesys Cloud CX, going live a little under 12 months ago. It also replaced Sitecore with Adobe DXP in time for the debut of its new brand platform, ‘True Power’ in February this year.

“We did an RFP around SIs [systems integrators] to assist us on the migration from Sitecore to Adobe and we had them telling us the timeline you're proposing is just not doable. We said well, we have a brand launch and it's not going to move, we have to do it. So it was highly visible and high time pressure. But we managed it,” says Vandecasteele. “That gives us two excellent, cornerstone foundational pieces in that transformation.”

While migrating inevitably covered off like-to-like capabilities, Alinta has gained “like-for-like plus” in several areas [in its] first year out of the gate. An early win was integrating the website, contact centre platform, and the company’s custom-made billing and payments gateway.

“Straight away, this made it easier for those customers who still call us around credit card payments, and direct debits to access a much more seamless experience for them and the agent. That was a really good win,” Vandecasteele says.

A lesson in trying again: Voice of customer

Another obvious win that nearly didn’t happen, however, was Alinta’s voice of customer program. With Genesys Cloud CX came a shift from post-call surveying to an email-based survey.

“We had our fair share of challenges with voice of customer,” says Alinta energy senior manager of strategic initiatives, Sayeed David. “We didn't quite get the regulatory aspects right when we launched. Luckily, we discovered that pretty early in the piece – on day two or three. It came down to customer awareness.”

The warning bell was low response rates and realisation that in some cues, Alinta was still telling customers they'd be put forward into a voice survey that was not correct.

“We decided to suspend voice of customer. For a highly regulated energy retailer, that is not good news and Cindy was under quite a lot of pressure. That voice of customer is used prominently throughout the business and by our executives. From feedback I've gathered post-migration, most projects would have turned back after that and rolled back to PureConnect,” comments David. “We pressed ahead and basically rebuilt it, working with legal, re-recording, and relaunching this during hypercare. We also recruited a new head of CX and BI, who had a lot of experience in the industry. The results we were able to yield in version two using the native features set far exceeded anything our head of CX said she’d seen from a response rate perspective – it was actually higher.”

Given email is not as immediate as a post-call survey, and there’s time for customers to question whether they need to provide feedback, the slightest things make a difference in securing responses, Vandecasteele and David say.

“We involved our branding teams and made sure we got the brand on point, we announced it correctly throughout all our IVRs, we involved our legal teams, and we really got it polished. We're really proud of what we're able to deliver in hypercare. That was one of the hallmarks of our go-live,” David says.

Data-driven decision making through voice of customer insight is becoming a reality as a result.

“One thing we learned through voice of customer was that we had a pain point in authentication around our portal,” Vandecasteele says. “It’s only through putting the survey online, really listening, reading and picking up on the feedback, then people analysing what is going on, that we found that.

“It’s why we deployed web messaging and the bot. If anything goes wrong, we now have the bot helping people get through. Sometimes it's just user error… So the bot focuses first around eliminating user error and making sure people know where to find what. But then part of the bot decision tree goes to an agent who supports it. It’s voice of customer feedback that routed us to deploy the very first bot there.”

Other wins have ensued, including expanding the breadth and depth of service and improving call disposition, Vandecasteele continues. Simple call types have reduced significantly: Account inquiry into the call centre is down by more than 50 per cent, while payments billing enquiries are at - 20 or -30 per cent.

“Level 2 wrap-up codes was a custom add-on Datacom facilitated to give us a more granular outcome of our interactions. With sentiment and topic minor, we're discreetly launched that,” David continues. “Obviously, we wanted to get the benefits and start enriching our knowledge, particularly as a project team. So we deployed that pretty quickly. IVR is a whole new element, and we're still learning our way through that.”

Having launched its own billing platform, Alinta has built integrations allowing customer authentication. It’s the integration between front and back that’s very often the weakest link, according to Vandecasteele.

This front-to-back-end connection is one area Alinta is looking to harness AI-driven automation. During a panel session earlier in the day, Vandecasteele grouped AI use cases into four buckets: Customer and growth through deeper insights, better trends, and forward-looking data; scaling digital engagement; supporting call centre agents to support more complex inquiries; and supporting the employees who support the frontline, from workforce management to QA and R&D teams.

“We are on a very ambitious digital agenda, already seeing good results. We recently deployed web messaging and our first bot, and how we scale is super important. Many customers are engaging digitally and we want to keep them there – sometimes they just need a bit of support, and it’s their channel of choice, so let’s support them there,” she told attendees.

Measurement rethink

Meanwhile, measurement is a work in progress. Like many organisations, Alinta’s board uses Net Promoter Score (NPS) as a key KPI yet it’s limited in scope. Vandecasteele and David prefer customer effort and customer satisfaction scoring to gauge effectiveness.

“Net Promoter Score is very broad, it’s the brand, and am I going to recommend you. Whereas ‘Has this company made it easy for you’ is much more of a here-and-now question for customers. We added that to our voice of customer survey for the contact centres and we are using it on our website and web portal,” Vandecasteele says.

Even so, Alinta’s measurement remains largely interaction-based, and the next step is how to measure the satisfaction of a customer across an episode.

“If there had been such a platform in place here, you’d keep evolving with a system like that. But given the future is around really listening to what a customer does as opposed to asking the survey, my personal judgement was we have more fundamental things to do right here, right now,” comments Vandecasteele. “Also, we know Genesys Cloud CX provides some capability and episodic voice of customer is on the roadmap.

“That to the side, we're working on first contact resolution, not from a survey perspective, but by stitching together the data around someone calling us, then in the next 30 days looking at what happens from front to back office.”

Another rethink is occurring around the traditional approach of building features for the digital portal. That’s being superseded by listening to voice of customer feedback and more holistic views on the journey customers are on with Alinta, says Vandecasteele.

“What we’ve moved to is not just building features, but listening to feedback and picking up on pain points as well as really driving adoption,” she says. “Success is a lot in digital adoption: How many of our customers are now active users of our digital channels is a metric we track. We've seen that go from 37 to 52 per cent in 12 months.

“In then looking at our total interactions across all channels [voice plus digital – website, portal, IVR, and now web messaging], we track the percentage and it’s sitting currently on 71, 72 and going up month by month. That’s a reflection of how good an experience we deliver on each of those channels.”

Personalised journeys

For Vandecasteele, one point of CX differentiation Alinta needs to nail is personalised digital journeys. “We want to mimic the best human contact centre agent in digital format,” she says.

“We started with our West Coast online checkout. We don't have the same quality of portal in the west, so we wanted to do something there and we're now doing that on the East Coast. It's really step-by-step, personalised, and tailored.”  The end-to-end purchase experience won Alinta an award at last year’s Good Design Awards.

“Then we’ll move on to the moving experience, which is a critical journey for us. Moving is a moment of truth for our customers and very often if it doesn't go well, it's a turn event because we missed our chance to really shine,” Vandecasteele says.  

“We're holding your hand but now also making it an exciting, visually dynamic way of signing up. What can be more boring and intangible than having gas delivered to your house? What we’ve done is create this whole map so while you're providing us with little snippets of data about you, there's this gas pipeline and map zooming onto your house. We're trying to make this a visual journey of connecting.”

As recent data from Forrester and CBSA reveal, many industries are beginning to flatline when it comes to CX against customer expectations – a situation that suggests many companies have the baseline capabilities needed to be expected today, but not much else. Vandecasteele agrees a lot of things are about parity in experience.

“But then there’s where you want to differentiate, and how you do that. It takes time and human effort, and there's a lot of learning along the way,” she says, pointing to thorough A/B testing between the journey that initially went live and the optimised journey available to customers today.

“At every step of the way, we ask why do customers drop off here and not there. And what's happening? That to me is the next level and you can’t do that with every channel. We've got to be strategic around our next efforts.”

An immediate next cab off the rank is getting Alinta’s consumer-facing mobile app live in September. It’s in the second of two beta trials with employees and about to be tested by 2000 customers.

Scaling web messaging is a second priority. “Agent supporting AI native features from Genesys Cloud CX perspective is another one because we haven't really done that yet,” says Vandecasteele.

“Everything has gone really fast, we need a bit of breathing space in that whole contact centre. But that’s about bringing that whole customer experience back together. It's easy to create new channels. It's a lot harder to keep control over the end-to-end customer experience as you create more channels.”

The cultural impact

Alongside the tech, process, and operational changes has been a cultural shift at Alinta. Upon Vandecasteele’s arrival, sales, servicing, and support including hardship and complaints teams came together in one function. She admits to plenty of team questions on why at first.

“I tell them they're doing one or more of three things,” she says. “The first is bringing customer and market insights back into the organisation. That works for sales who see what competitors do but also servicing and complaints, especially in complaints: They see so much in terms of customer experience. We bring it back into the business along with the voice of customer survey – we listen and this informs our future products, value propositions, and processes.

“Secondly, every one of my team is in delivery of the customer experience; they’re the boots on the ground, holding the customer experience in their hands. The last one is how we improve, transform, and continuously make the customer experience better. It’s this linking back to the customer experience that has made them realise it's not that strange they’re all in the same team.”

Vandecasteele is proud to see customer thinking extending across the wider retail team. To help, she’s opened up a CX feedback form for every employee and estimates 85 per cent of ideas come from Alinta’s agents.

“We now have this closed loop system between the feedback, IDs, and pain points getting captured, triaged, and distributed to product owners or business improvement leads in the various areas across retail. Not every idea gets implemented obviously, but at least it grows from direct line with the customer to the person who can make a difference, then you get to comment back and close it out,” she says.  

The team has also started organising customer immersion days, initially as a one-day invite to the retail leadership team, and now as a biannual program.

“Digital is included and we use the customer journey. First, you get a snippet of sales, then servicing calls, then you get hardships. We really bring people along on the journey and they walk away from that going oh wow. That's been a big catalyst for cultural change,” Vandecasteele says.

“Before, a lot of decisions were being made in product and pricing then the frontline would be told. Today, it’s how we get customer-first through the frontline back into the business and then something better coming back. That's been the whole cultural change and it's a work in progress.”