Over the years, ENGIE Pro’s Customer Service has put in place a series of measures aimed at continuously improving the customer experience, making it one of the best performers in this field. This recognised quality is based on four pillars: proximity, quality, fluidity and security.
As a long-standing AKIO customer, ENGIE Pro has been at the top of the awards for best customer service for several years now, thanks to the choices it made very early on in a sensitive context.
ENGIE Pro is the branch of the ENGIE Group dedicated to professionals, with 96,000 employees committed every day to accelerating the transition to a carbon-neutral world.
As the leading supplier of natural gas and the 2nd largest supplier of electricity to professionals in France, ENGIE Pro promotes the implementation of more energy-efficient and environmentally-friendly solutions, such as the installation of photovoltaic panels, cool roofing and thermal regulation. Energy distribution is a sector of activity characterised by three identity markers, the ‘3Cs’: Complexity, Competition and Criticality.
- Complex because of the large number of players involved in the sector, the technical nature of the issues and the abundance of offers – everyone needs energy, but everyone needs it differently.
- Competition, since in July 2007 the legislator encouraged the emergence of new practices by opening up the market to competition, so that each professional can choose his or her electricity and natural gas supplier from among some thirty players and change them freely.
- Critical because the sector is one of the most closely scrutinised on the market. Since the 1973 oil crisis, energy management has been a priority for all governments, and even more so since the rise of policies to combat global warming. McKinsey estimates that by 2035, 50% of the world’s energy will come from wind and solar power, a transformation that is having a significant impact on the way energy is produced, distributed and sold throughout the supply chain. No activity is more regulated, and none is generating so much tension, as was the case with the suspension of Russian gas deliveries, with prices reaching historic levels: +33% between August 2021 and the summer of 2023.
Like households, professionals have rediscovered the impact of energy costs on their budgets. According to the Energy Ombudsman, the proportion of disputes related to price changes has doubled compared to 2021 (from 8% to 16%). In addition, all companies are now required to monitor their carbon footprint. This is why all professionals are paying close attention to measures aimed at energy efficiency.
These measures have multiplied: price caps, electricity buffers, bill spreading, state-guaranteed deposits, etc. These measures are not always easy to understand or interpret. This is especially true when combined with those offered by each distribution player. In the eyes of professionals, energy consumption appears to be both a financial constraint and a constantly changing jungle.
It is in this context that ENGIE Pro has managed to stand out. More than any other player in the sector, ENGIE Pro decided early on to implement a customer relations policy that would enable professionals to be not only well informed, but also well advised on energy consumption. This positioning is summarised by Sébastien PIALLOUX, Managing Director of the Professional Customers Division: ‘When they turn to ENGIE, our professional customers expect us to be reliable and accessible, to supply them with energy and offer them a service tailored to their needs. Our customer relations are also based on partnership: we advise them on how to save energy, reduce their carbon footprint and even produce their own carbon-free energy.’
This support and advisory role is mainly carried out by Customer Service, which is in constant contact with professionals.
ENGIE Pro Customer Service
Focused on handling requests by telephone and email, which are handled using Akio Unified software, ENGIE Pro’s Customer Service team is called upon to intervene in a variety of contexts throughout the life of a contract: subscription, connection to the customer area, consumption information, change of contact details, billing and accounting management, disputes and correction of anomalies – for example, following the opening of premises or a request for termination. Agents are also responsible for guiding customers through the various offers available from ENGIE Pro. In particular, they guide them through the many opportunities available in terms of energy consumption.
The home page of the ENGIE Pro website clearly sets the tone with several entries on the subject.
To cope with the ever-increasing number of requests in the context of the ‘3Cs’, requests whose volume can fluctuate greatly depending on the season and current events, customer service is mainly provided by two external service providers, Intelcia and Konecta. They provide teams of agents and supervisors who manage the activity in collaboration with ENGIE Pro managers.
At the heart of the system: the Hypervision unit
The quality of the service is ensured by regular exchanges between the service providers’ teams and a pool of ENGIE Pro experts. The latter, most often former agents themselves with extensive experience, play a dual role in coordinating and informing service providers. The system is complemented by a centralised ‘Hypervision’ unit within ENGIE Pro. Its objective is to improve the quality and speed of response to customers by analysing activity, flows, behaviour and anomalies reported by agents, and by implementing corrective measures.
In addition, the Hypervision unit is responsible for drawing up a provisional resource schedule based on the volume of calls and emails expected over the next three months. It produces a team planning recommendation that is sent to service providers every month. The calculation is based on the quality requirements set by ENGIE Pro – for example, email requests processed with Akio Unified must generate a response within 4 to 24 hours. Throughout the month, Hypervision remains in contact with operational staff to monitor actual activity against forecasts.
Another of its missions is to analyse customer behaviour. Can trends be identified? How can attitudes that deviate from the norm be interpreted? This is a real investigative task that involves digging deep, either into certain email threads to detect ‘weak signals’ through picking, or by listening to calls, or into consolidated statistics to deduce new behaviours from changes in volumes compared to previous years. All this valuable information can then be passed on to service providers to improve their sales pitch, call handling practices or email responses in a sensitive context – such as when the government announced the introduction of the tariff shield, which triggered a flood of calls and emails from professionals who needed simple and accurate answers in a short space of time.
Exceptional results
The advisory role assumed by Customer Service is so crucial in the context of complexity, competition and criticality that, over time and thanks to this organisation, ENGIE’s contact centre teams have developed exceptional customer experience practices, which are reflected in the figures:
- On the phone: the goal is for 85% of calls to be answered within one minute
- On the internet: 90% of emails are answered within one working day
- On social media: 100% of requests are processed within 38 minutes on average
- Avis Vérifiés: 4.7/5 (calculated from 33,168 reviews since 07/12/2022).
How can these results be explained? While the organisation put in place around Hypervision has certainly played a major role in this success, the keys to success lie above all in the way the strategy is executed, based on four cardinal virtues regularly cited by teams and customers when asked about this: proximity, quality, fluidity and security.
Proximity as the primary factor in service quality
With a considerable volume of daily interactions across many different channels, hundreds of agents who need to be able to respond to a wide range of complex and constantly changing issues with breaking news, a decentralised organisation with several external service providers, all the conditions seem to be in place to encourage the proliferation of errors, inaccuracies, omissions and duplicates, all of which are sources of customer insatisfaction. But ENGIE Pro has, on the contrary, structured its organisation in such a way as to strengthen the links between the different parties, to reinforce their proximity to each other and to the demanding cultural model that is part of ENGIE Pro’s DNA.
This close relationship begins on the agent’s first day of work, with solid initial training Provided to all new advisors – a series of sessions designed to gradually build up professional skills and IT proficiency.
It continues with the upskilling of customer service agents. As soon as a new regulation or product appears, ENGIE Pro’s ‘pilot’ managers test the responses with customers themselves before working with outsourced agents to coach them on sales pitches and instil best practices. This is a continuous training process that covers all types of topics, particularly those that are essential to master, such as managing information on the subscription tool.
The close relationship between ENGIE Pro drivers and advisors on the platform is maintained through regular exchanges of information. Weekly updates are used to communicate key news about the sector or the company. This information is first communicated to the managers of both service providers before being passed on to agents (for example, via the Arcade software for Intelcia). It may then be discussed in further meetings to provide more detail on a particular point, such as changes in energy prices or new offers. At the same time, monthly meetings (DAC for Dispositif d’Amélioration Continue, or Continuous Improvement System) address business, process and organisational issues: objectives, expected performance, organisational changes. Carefully prepared in advance by the pilots, these meetings result in an action plan that is appreciated by employees because it allows them to gain confidence in their work and relevance in their interactions.
Finally, and this is no less important, ENGIE Pro drivers are on call to respond instantly to any request from agents. They use a CRM tool called ISI (Simple and Intuitive Interface), which aggregates all the data needed to improve market and customer knowledge and strengthen the close relationship between the various players at the ENGIE Pro contact center.
Smooth communication guaranteed by a shared and efficient information system
The close relationship between ENGIE Pro teams and their service providers is based on a network of shared software applications that facilitate communication between the various parties involved in customer relations, as well as between advisors and customers, regardless of the context. Some customers use the telephone, others email, depending on the type of question and individual preferences. Some customers switch between channels.
Agents (customer service advisors) are therefore required to use several software programmes and digital tools, such as Akio Unified for processing emails, forms and outgoing text messages, Arcade for providing contextual information and business news, the website’s FAQs (which are very comprehensive), and of course SAP and ISI, which centralise customer knowledge. All of these software programs are interconnected, and their data feeds into Power BI, a software program that provides 360° visibility of the service activity.
Each piece of software has been carefully configured to offer maximum ease of use for the user. Partner publishers are asked to regularly enhance their offering and advise ENGIE Pro on ways to continuously improve processing efficiency.
For example, with regard to Akio Unified, the following aspects were studied in particular:
- The distribution of incoming forms and emails by thematic mailboxes and the creation of queues (e.g. emails related to indirect sales)
- The ability to view all emails to be processed based on the user profile (pull mode rather than push mode), allowing the most urgent emails to be prioritised
- In terms of supervision, the email stock control console, the supervisor’s ability to view rejected emails, and visibility into processing volumes to quantify daily requests
Quality measurement: a demanding task, but also one that requires respect
However, proximity and fluidity are not a definitive guarantee of achieving objectives. Have the measures put in place achieved their targets? Are customers satisfied? Are they becoming increasingly satisfied? To assess this, ENGIE Pro has implemented a remarkable system for measuring Quality of Service (QoS).
The fundamental building block is the Hubicus software, a platform that enables the evaluation of agents and the management of performance. Hubicus analyses all the data collected during interactions and identifies areas for improvement. It also generates alerts, for example following an assessment that reveals an unacceptable situation, such as rude language in a message or a call being hung up on the customer.
However, while this excellent tool is essential as a basis for measuring quality, it is not enough to achieve the highest level of operational excellence. For example, the software can evaluate the syntax of emails to identify errors and even stylistic clumsiness, but it cannot always determine whether the agent’s response is the most relevant to the question asked.
This is why ENGIE Pro has set up a specialised team (the ‘ACPs’) whose role is precisely to support service providers in their quest for the highest quality response. First, the ACP, an experienced field coach, sits next to an customer service agent – either physically or remotely – and observes them responding to a call or email. At the end of the exchange, if the ACP has any comments to make, a dialogue is opened with the advisor, always respecting opinions and experiences. Sometimes, the line between good and bad practice is blurred. Should late payment fees be waived for this loyal customer? What compensation should be given to this other customer who was the victim of an accounting error? In the event of disagreement between the ACP and the advisor, the opinion of a third party may be sought. Following these exchanges, a weekly debriefing with each service provider highlights any errors identified during the listening process and recommends solutions, such as using a ‘follow-up loop’ (calling back a dissatisfied customer after the initial interaction). It is also an opportunity to reiterate best practices, such as avoiding modifying the content of standard responses in a regulatory context.
Prior to this, the ACPs prepare their interventions through in-depth work and the exchange of ideas in an R&D laboratory setting. Professionnels As experienced customer relations professionals, ACPs are familiar with the energy market, the tools and processes implemented by ENGIE Pro, sales techniques, and above all, they know that when it comes to customer experience, what is true today may not be true tomorrow, and that constant reflection is essential to maintaining a high level of excellence. The ACPs are responsible for continuously updating the database of standard responses, partly based on suggestions from agents and partly on ideas from their own work. They also manage the classification of request types by theme, which is greatly appreciated by advisors as it facilitates their work when dealing with recurring questions.
Performance does not come at the expense of safety
Finally, ENGIE Pro puts safety at the top of its priorities. To quote one of ENGIE Pro’s advisors: ‘Digitalisation is all around us. I think it’s a positive thing and that we need to develop our activities to be more in tune with the different modes of communication, but on condition that we ensure our customers’ data is protected.’
Because the security of exchanges has become a major concern for customers, and even a cause for anxiety if it is not taken seriously enough. ENGIE Pro has therefore introduced a ‘cyber security month’ to raise awareness among all its staff, starting with customer service, of the risks associated with cyber attacks. Similarly, all customers have the right to be forgotten or to rectify their data using a secure form. Each of the software programs used by ENGIE Pro, including Akio Unified, is subject to security tests conducted by external audit firms, which ensure that all measures have been taken to minimise the possibility of infiltration, for example through the implementation of SSO or MFA authentication.
Here is a brief summary of the tremendous work carried out by a dedicated team. ‘A’ team, because even though several service providers and publishers work alongside ENGIE Pro employees, it is a coherent, consistent and, above all, united group that has been working together for years to guarantee the highest level of satisfaction for ENGIE Pro customers. Proximity, Quality, Fluidity and Security: four ‘Ts’ that echo the three ‘Cs’ (complexity, competition and criticality) which are the key markers of this market, unique in terms of its size and challenges, and in which customer relations cannot be compared to any other.