Digital channels are making things harder at utility call centers

Electric utilities are pushing customers to digital channels to handle easy transactions, paying bills and checking outage status. And that trend is making call center interactions more complex. 

Utibe Bassey, the vice president of customer experience at Dominion Energy, said in an interview on the With Great Power podcast that call centers have evolved in recent years, both in response to macro-economic factors like inflation and energy costs, as well as digitalization.

“As we move more transactions to the digital channels…the nature of the remaining calls becomes much more complex,” she said. “We're seeing the mix of calls change, and so from the easier transactional ones we are now left with more complex calls that take longer.”

That increasing complexity impacts call center performance metrics, such as customer satisfaction and the average speed of answer, or ASA, calculated by dividing the total amount of time customers spend waiting in the call queue by the total number of calls answered. Bassey said her team has had to reevaluate the call center’s ASA metrics because of the increasing complexity. Another complicating factor, though, is that ever since the COVID-19 pandemic there has been a shortage of call center workers, forcing reps to take on a higher volume of calls.

“The contact center job has historically been an on-premise job,” she said, but during COVID it became fully remote, which meant that many people found other jobs. “In the past few years, we've seen a shortage of folks in [call center] roles.”

The arrival of more digital channels is a double-edged sword. While they drive customers to the call centers for more complex issues, they also reduce the volume of calls. But Bassey hopes to leverage some of the digital channels for handling more complex customer interactions as well.

For instance, with the rise of new programs and services enabled by smart meters and dynamic rates, bills are becoming more complex and creating more confusion with customers. 

Recently, Bassey’s team revamped the electronic billing system to ease some of the pressure on the call centers and resolve more complex billing issues online, with an eye toward making it “a lot more comprehensive and user friendly,” she said. 

“The more complex that the inputs are, the more complex the process can be,” said Bassey. “So we are looking at how technology can help streamline some of those things,” she added. 

But the digital channels will never completely displace the need for call centers, she added.

“You always have to be able to answer the phone within a certain amount of time,” she said. “You always have to be empathetic and listen.”

For the full conversation with Utibe Bassey on the utility customer experience, listen to her interview on season 3 of With Great Power.

With Great Power is a show about the people building the future grid, today. It's a co-production of GridX and Latitude Studios. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you get your shows.

Transcript

Brad Langley: A lot of people in the utility industry talk about the critical role of power in our lives. Utibe Bassey has lived it.

Utibe Bassey: So Nigeria to this day, it's not a secret, it's not a sob story, it's just the reality, does not have constant power.

Brad Langley: Utibe grew up in Lagos, the largest city in Nigeria. Tens of millions of people live without electricity in Nigeria. For those that have it, the service is very unreliable, and Utibe's daily life was a constant reminder of that energy insecurity.

Utibe Bassey: The sounds of generators were normal. The fumes from generators were normal. Low currents, like power fluctuating and appliances getting ruined, studying with a kerosene lantern, studying with a candle next to me, many, many, many, many nights, not knowing when there would be power so you wouldn't know when to iron your uniform for school.

Brad Langley: And then came a radical change. As a teenager, her family immigrated to the United States. She didn't realize it then, but it would set her on a path to becoming a vice president in one of the biggest utilities in America.

Utibe Bassey: I never saw myself working for a utility company. I never had. Some people may have, like, "Dear diary, one day I will grow up and I will finally get to the land of my dreams, which is the utility world," never.

Brad Langley: But before all that, she learned a critical lesson about business and it happened while she was working in fast food.

Utibe Bassey: Even though I did not know it at the time, the seed of this notion of service to people and the connection between business decisions and human response to a business, that actually started at Wendy's.

Brad Langley: To save money for college, Utibe got a job at Wendy's. She was known as someone who got it and did her job well and didn't speak out about things. But one day while she was at work, the manager started scolding a coworker in front of everyone.

Utibe Bassey: Something in me arose and I said, "You cannot speak to her that way." I still to this day don't know where it came from, but it came very viscerally. Because I remember thinking, "This is not why she's here." This woman, I remember, she was a mother. She didn't come here to be insulted, she came here to work. That was where that was first clear to me. Now again, I didn't have language for it back then, but I think what I do now have now is language for that, that sometimes how people are left feeling, how people are left seeing themselves, how people are left, seeing their importance, their value.

Brad Langley: Utibe would go on to build her career in customer experience across various industries. And during that time, she developed a personal philosophy inspired by that moment at Wendy's. She calls it love as a KPI.

Utibe Bassey: Because businesses play such a role in just people's day-to-day psyche. And I think that role is underestimated greatly. And so, should we not be paying attention to how much love we imparting to people? That's where love as a KPI came from.

Brad Langley: This is With Great Power. A show about the people building the future grid today. I'm Brad Langley. Some people say utilities are slow to change, that they don't innovate fast enough. And while it might not always seem like the most cutting edge industry, there are lots of really smart people working really hard to make the grid cleaner, more reliable and customer-centric. This week I'm talking to Utibe Bassey, vice president of customer experience at Dominion Energy, about how utilities can reshape the customer experience and their employees' own experiences at the same time. Love as a KPI, it might sound squishy to some, but as Utibe explains it, it's grounded in real outcomes.

Utibe Bassey: I'm in the CX world and I've been in this world in tangential spaces for a long time. There are metrics like your NPS and your CSAT. However, those are important, but those are actually measuring how you feel about us. That's very different from me measuring how we have left you and that's the theory. And so, one of the things I've been working on is an actual KPI. How do you measure love? You can't do it perfectly, but are there things that you could be gleaning to get an indication of how people are being left?

Brad Langley: Four years ago, Utibe joined Dominion Energy as the vice president of customer experience. She chose that particular utility because of the ethos of service within the organization and because she knows what it's like to live with that reliable access to energy.

Utibe Bassey: The moment where I, in my process of coming to Dominion, where I started to realize this company is doing the thing that I wish I had growing up, sign me up. That is 100% influence my decision to come here.

Brad Langley: I talked to you Utibe about how the utility customer experience is changing her unique management style and what impact it has on her team. Our conversation starts with the path that led her to Dominion. So you went back to Africa as an adult and worked toward an organization called Leap Africa. What were you doing for them?

Utibe Bassey: So, Leap Africa is a nonprofit focused on leadership development and instead of making sure that the youth, we all know that in societies and communities and not even in those sort of communities where the institutions don't work as they should, it really does take leadership and the acumen. We can't rely on, quote unquote, a government to solve a problem. But a person, my mentor says all the time, it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. And so that organization, it's a leadership development advocacy program for youth.

And so, I did marketing and comms, but honestly it's a small enough organization where I got to do a bunch of different things and just serve but that is my ... I love the topic of leadership is one that I'm fascinated by and I'll be forever a student of.

Brad Langley: And so you took your love for leadership back to the states and worked in insurance for MetLife, and you got promoted all the way up to a VP of customer experience strategy and design. Are there lessons you learned during your time there that can be applied to the utility space?

Utibe Bassey: Fully. I joined MetLife a few years after, just maybe a couple years after MetLife had made this significant acquisition in a company called Alico and had gone from being a global insurance company, but only in a handful of markets. The biggest market was still the US but MetLife was in Mexico. And then the acquisition of Ailco, MetLife became a true global company and purchased ... I think went from being in a handful of markets to being in 40 something markets. And I had joined shortly after, and I had several roles while I was at MetLife, but I'll just talk about CX.

This notion of going from delivering a globally consistent customer experience that's locally relevant, is one that I have ... those lessons I have applied in my role and I can talk a little bit more about that, but just more broadly in terms of lessons to be applied, it's also a regulated industries, though not maybe one can argue not as regulated as the utility industry is, from my experience. And it's also an industry where for so long, insurance has been what I call, if you build it, they will come, meaning it's been, for a long time, we are the insurance company, we are the experts, you are the customer. You will do as we say.

Also around this time I joined, there were a lot of insurance fintechs springing up. And so a lot of competition, which was leading insurance companies to think very differently about their value proposition to customers. Because before, their value proposition to customers was, we're an insurance company and you need insurance. It had to be different, it had to be differentiated. And so the threat of different business models, I would say, was impacting the posture of the industry, the insurance industry certainly of the company that was part of. I would say in some ways, not completely, but in some ways, the idea that if you build it, they will come, may have historically been the utility posture and not necessarily having to be overly customer-centric and that's, I think ... So the lessons learned from how do you get an incumbent, MetLife is almost 160 year old company, how do you get an incumbent to have the posture of being customer-centric? In many ways is what the work and the opportunity is here.

Brad Langley: And so here is Dominion, where you joined four years ago. You've mentioned you were not looking for a job at a utility. So how did you end up at one?

Utibe Bassey: That's a much longer story, but I'll give you the relevant Cliff Notes version. I think that I ended up at Dominion Energy because the more I learned about the mission, on the surface and I say this to my colleagues, they don't always laugh, but it's fine I've been here four years now, even the word utility is boring. If you just use the word utility, it doesn't tell you much about what happens in a utility company. And so on the surface it was easy for me, particularly since during COVID by the way, it's easy for someone to assume that it's rote, that it's repetitive, that there's no passion and there's no excitement and it's not dynamic.

The thing that turned it for me, and I know I cannot speak for all utility companies, I can 100% speak for Dominion, one, the mission. It's a true mission and service-oriented company, which appeals to me as you can imagine, just given the things I've shared about myself and some of my career experiences. We are here to serve the customer. We are here to provide a very needed, absolutely necessary product and service to our customers. And it's not just lip service. And so the company's mission and the values, those stood out.

Two is the people. I've met a range of people in the process and I went from, this is interesting, but I'm not sure if it's for me, to being at the end of it, at the end of my recruitment process, Brad, being like, I want to join them on this mission.

And I think three is a personal connection, which I am actually very much wired to be in direct service to people. And then I of course learned about the really, really exciting things, the innovative things, the groundbreaking things that the company is not just ... wants to do, but was already doing. It changed completely my paradigm. It humbled me completely, and I continue to be humbled, honestly, four years in at just how much happens within the utility industry that you would never think from the outside.

Brad Langley: So let's get back to love as a KPI. One of the cornerstones of that philosophy is that good customer experience comes from good employee experience. As the VP of customer experience at Dominion, what are you doing to ensure your team has a good experience working there?

Utibe Bassey: There are many things. Some of them are institutional, Dominion has family fun days. And some of it are team leadership, depending on the department of our team, I'm talking about our the customer experience team, that different departments have different committees and they have different traditions. Some do social activities, et cetera. The thing that I find moves the needle the most one is how can we take ... There's a leader who I really respect who used to say this here at Dominion, how do you take breaks out of the wheelbarrow of the employees? How do you reduce the burden for them?

And so there's the social stuff and all of those things and the fun things, and those are appreciated. But if the day-to-day is a burden ... and so I'm constantly thinking about what is burdening this team? Where is it that we, I, what role am I playing and adding to that? How can I proactively take the burden out? I think it's an act of love. So one of the things I say often is that the same things that drive our personal relationships, the same things, the same elements that make a personal relationship. So my relationship with my partner, or my brother, or friend, are the same things essentially that organizations need to build relationships with other people, like their employees or their customers. So if I knew that a friend of mine, there's something that I could do that would reduce the burden or stress for a friend, I would do it. It's not a question if I would do it. I think sometimes we think there's this, what I call in the imaginary firewall that we think in a corporate setting, that it's not somehow the same thing. It's the same thing, but we just at a different scale.

And so the number one thing, beyond the fun and the social things is what's burdening the team and how can we remove it? Now, how do you remove it? There are many ways you either say, "We're going to stop doing it," or we're going to get you all help, or we're going to see what technology can remove it, or we're going to ... Hey, we know that there's a six-week period where we're going to have to suffer through it, and so let's do it together. There are ways to help relieve that and acknowledge that, right? It's like having a friend who is going through something, but if you don't acknowledge it, you may not be able to solve it, but at least acknowledge it. So it's the same principles. I try to think about what would I do for a friend or someone I cared about and how do I do that at skill for the team?

And I think the second thing is presence. I'm finding we have a pretty large organization and we're spread out. There's not a second, even if it's a walk by and a joke that I tell, or sit down on a round table, those things mean so much to team members. You almost wonder why. But just the idea that, hey, I'm sitting here. You matter. I may not even be able to solve the problem, but share it. Let's just talk about what's on your mind. That means the world. So those are two specific things. While there are a lot that surrounds that on the social front.

Brad Langley: Your team handles one of the most important and longstanding customer touch points, which is the call center. How have customer interactions at call centers changed over the past few years?

Utibe Bassey: They've changed in many ways. COVID is obviously that point in the process where you start to see a lot of shifts. One, I'll even talk about it from an industry perspective. If the call center's in industry, well, COVID and remote work changed what that job is, which changed the supply and the availability of people to take that role, which changes of course, then your ability to have people answer the phones for your customers. And so a lot of companies, not just in the utility industry, saw a shift where the contact center job has historically been an on-prem, on-premise job. With COVID it went fully remote for some. Some companies have been doing that, but it went fully remote for some companies and also people were finding other things to do. And so basically, there was a big shortage of resources which impacted the call centers.

Two, with the advent of digital, a lot of ... as we move more transactions to the digital channels, more so these what we call the easier transactions, like transactional calls, like how much is my bill? Things like that, to digital channels. The nature of the remaining calls becomes much more complex, which requires a different skillset, which requires ... and also changes your metrics, like handle time and ASA and things like that.

And so I think we've seen all of it, honestly in the past few years. We've seen a shortage of folks in those roles. We've of course, responded to that and we're in a really good place now. We're seeing the mix of calls change. And so, from the easier transactional ones, we are now left with more complex calls that take longer.

And I think other things, for anyone really familiar with this space, other things more macro things also affect the calls. We had a period as a nation where there was inflation or at least a lot of conversation around inflation, which puts pressure on people and their bills. The weather impacts bills, and so high bill season comes and customers feel strongly about certain elements of their bills.

So there are all also these macro things that have.

Happened, where it's fuel costs, the heat ... the heatwave that we're experiencing now, that also impact the nature of the calls. And so we have to always ... There's some core principles that you have. You always have to be able to answer the phone within a certain amount of time. You always have to be empathetic and listen even while the dynamics ... there are many variables that keep changing on the contact center industry.

Brad Langley: You also oversee the billing program, and we're in a time where billing's getting a lot more complicated as we roll out time of use rates, other programs and services. What is your team doing to evolve on the billing front?

Utibe Bassey: Yeah, we're looking at solutions that we've never looked at before, where we're looking at the patterns, because I think the bill is usually a manifestation of something. And so, different programs you put in, you have new types of meters, AMI meters, everything manifests in the bill. You have net metering. A lot of these programs, everything, the moment of truth from a customer perspective, is the bill.

We've looked at our e-bill, we've looked at our e-bill, our electronic billing, electronic billing process, to make it a lot more comprehensive and user-friendly. And so that's at the bill level. But in terms of the systems, the tools that the back office uses to get to the bill, we are always constantly looking at how can technology aid our teams?

We talked before about taking bricks out of the wheelbarrow for our team. The more complex the inputs are, the more complex the process can be. And so we are looking at how technology can help streamline some of those things.

Brad Langley: Not long after you joined Dominion, Virginia passed the Clean Economy Act, and one of the goals is to reach 100% clean electricity by 2050. How does that impact your work on the CX front?

Utibe Bassey: So our team, I would say, has two buckets. There's the customer service world, which includes the contact center and billing, and then a hack that we have, what we play, is customer experience, which is neither of those things. So customer experience is more of the collection. One of the things that we say a lot here is that customer experience is impacted by all the interactions that a customer has with the company.

And so it's also our team that works closely with other departments across the company to help each department see their role in CX. Saying all that to say that these programs ... and so in terms of driving, align with the VCA or any broader goals that we have as a company, to drive customers into programs that are more on the clean front, we play a role in helping to form and formalize that. What is that experience like? What is that end-to-end experience?

This is interestingly something that I did quite a bit of in my previous world in insurance, where you have your core insurance product, but then you have all these value added services that you have to design and experience to get people to sign up for. It maybe isn't a traditional core competency of many insurance ... of many utility companies. The marketing, the design, the promotion, making sure ... because again, for this act us to be successful ... human beings, like the day-to-day people, need to understand what these programs are. You need to see the value in it, they need to sign up in it. And so partnering with our different teams who are really at the front line of a lot of these programs, but making sure that we have an end-to-end experience that's clear, that customers know where to start. We know if there are any third parties that have a role in the experience or maybe in the service delivery, that everyone has ... we are aligned on the tone and the manner and how we talk to ... So the experience part of it, we partner really with a lot of teams across the company on the design and delivery of that experience. And of course, if there's a contact center need, we also play that operational role as well.

Brad Langley: And that's not always the case in utilities or other businesses, that they tend to retreat to their silos. So I mean, how have you been successful in bringing those departments together? How do you get support internally for initiatives like that?

Utibe Bassey: This is a really important question when you think about how you make change, again in a really ... in formed culture. And so, this is where it actually is similar to what I was doing in insurance, and I don't say I meaning only I, as part of a team, as I'm part of a team here. Dominion already has that intention. And so even for me, just objectively when I was coming to Dominion, one of the things that I observed is at the senior leadership level, the idea of the importance of customer experience, there's a lot of clarity and alignment already, which you absolutely need.

So if someone ever came to me and said, "Hey, I'm considering doing CX in such and such company." Number one thing I'll tell them is look for a leadership alignment on the importance of it. Because it's much, much, much more difficult to do that ... to achieve it without that.

And so with that in mind, it makes it easier. And honestly, everyone, I am saying this not as a salesperson for the company, but genuinely as someone who's only been here four years compared to a lot of my colleagues who have been here much longer, the company has a really strong culture when the intention to do well right. and so while there's this more ... of course there's silos. I have not yet myself come across any opportunity to say, "Hey, team A and team B, let's talk more about the overall experience." And people say, "No, we're not interested." And so, I see our team's role as helping to be that bridge and helping to show the connection. We don't think of the ... So, one of the things my former boss used to say is the customer needs to be the unifier across departments. If not, we'll all be looking at it from our own views, just like you said, our own silos. But we need a common view. There's no other better common view than a customer.

Because if we have a common view, then it's not about my thing or your thing, it's about that thing. And then we all see ourselves in the context of that thing. And well, that thing has to be ... that unifier has to be the customer.

Brad Langley: We call this show With Great Power, which is a nod to the energy industry. It's also a famous Spider-Man quote, "With great power comes great responsibility." What superpower do you bring to the energy transition?

Utibe Bassey: I would say a real either understanding or intent to understand human behavior and human motivations. That's the value I bring to most settings, is thinking through how does this impact the human? How can we get a human ... if there's something that we want someone to know ... I say these four things. You want someone to say something, know something, do something or feel something as it relates to your objective. How do you get that outcome? And so, my lean is always on the humans behind the change, the humans behind ... And so in terms of the energy transition, I think a lot about what ... Different segments of customers are different, of course, Brad, but what is it that we're ultimately trying to get people to know about their energy usage or about the transition? To feel, to think or to do, let's design for that outcome. I think a lot about that. I think that superpower is a deep human insight, or at least my desire is that I get better at that. But a deep human insight.

Brad Langley: Utibe, this was a terrific conversation. Thank you so much for your time.

Utibe Bassey: Thank you. Thank you for having me. Thanks, Brad.

Brad Langley: Utibe Bassey is the vice president of customer experience at Dominion Energy. With Great Power is produced by GridX in partnership with Latitude Studios. Delivering on the clean energy future is complex. GridX exists to simplify the journey. GridX is an enterprise rate platform that modern utilities rely on to usher in our clean energy future. We design and implement emerging rate structures and we increase consumer investment in clean energy, all while managing the complex billing needs of a distributed grid.

Our production team includes Erin Hardick and Mary Catherine O'Connor. Anne Bailey is our senior editor, Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. The original theme song is from Sean Marquand. Roy Campanella mixed the show. The Grid X production team includes Jenni Barber, Samantha McCabe, and me, Brad Langley. If this show is providing value for you, and we really hope it is, we'd love it if you could help us spread the word. You can rate and review us at Apple and Spotify, or you can share a link with the friend, colleague, or the energy nerd in your life. As always, thanks for listening. I'm Brad Langley.