When I read the news, I'm often drawn to stories of products or services that have either became resounding successes or suffered unforeseen failures. In situations like these, there is often an interesting example of success or failure to plan for the entire customer experience system. One such story caught my eye today.
Apparently in Texas and California there's been a bit of an uproar from a small percentage of customers who have had smart power meters installed in their homes and who have subsequently seen huge spikes in their power bills. For a technology that is supposed to better inform customers about their power usage and establish more awareness of how to actively lower their power bills, this is at once both a counterintuitive and fiscally painful problem.
However, considering the small number of people experiencing freakishly large deviations from their normal usage patterns, this would seem to be an easily identifiable and manageable problem, i.e. one that should easily be able to be fixed quickly without causing customers to resort to the media to get the company's attention. That hasn't happened.
Here's what did happen:
- Instead of rapidly diagnosing and correcting uncharacteristically high power bills, the power companies are treating this as business as usual. For one customer, who reported an impossibly high power bill for her small home, the customer service representative said the company would try to have someone come by within 30 to 45 days. She's still waiting. Meanwhile she's still on the hook to pay the absurdly high bill, which has directly impacted her family's finances.
- One power company seems eager to blame the issues on an unseasonably cold winter, user error, or a simple lack of awareness by customers of how much power they actually consume. That may be the case in some instances but the evidence seems to indicate there are probably some other issues going on.
- Admitting there is some blame to be had on their part, one company stated that in some cases, when taking final readings on the old meters before installing the smart meters, in about 1% of the cases, the readings were taken incorrectly."The old meters have six numbers – let's say 1-2-3-4-5-6. If the meter reader accidentally types in 1-3-3-4-5-6, your bill has just shot up from that simple typo."
In aggregate, this feels like failures across a wide range of systems that all contribute to the customer experience. You've got:
- Apparent product failure (products)
- Poor execution of the implementation (operations)
- The classic "it's probably user error/stupid users" rebuttal (customer service)
- A failure to quickly identify and resolve valid customer concerns (customer service)
Thinking of the entire customer experience as a system, all of these things would be relatively easy to avoid:
- Know that your supplier, on average, has a .5% failure rate on their readers (or whatever it is). Be prepared to hear complaints from .5% of your customer base as a result.
- Provide installers with explicit instructions to triple check meter readings before disconnecting them. Perhaps go so far as to have three line form fields into which three separate readings must be entered (i.e. triple check the reading). Follow up with very detailed employee communications on why it's critical to the adoption of this new technology that the meter readings be 100% correct.
- Watch the Weather Channel. I say that facetiously but the point is valid. Be aware of circumstances that could cause deviation in your customers' bills and be proactive in communications with them to appropriately set expectations. Do this before they call you.
- If presented with an outrageous bill scenario (long-standing customer with regular, consistent bill record calls about a bill that's 100% more than it's ever been), take aggressive action to inspect the meter immediately. Not 30-45 days later. Immediately reduce the customer's bill to the previous month's amount until the investigation can be explored further.
These are easy to say in retrospect, but that's why it's so important to have a complete view of the customer experience and a plan to ensure it's successful deployment. None of these issues was unforeseeable. Not one. But failures across multiple areas causes death by a thousand bad experiences. In the case of the smart readers, it's devolved to a very public debacle:
Last week in Texas, a state senator responding to consumer complaints about skyrocketing bills asked the Public Utility Commission to halt Oncor’s installation of the devices. This week, the California PUC announced that it would investigate similar complaints about meters installed by Pacific Gas & Electric Co.(via Inhabitat)
Perhaps the most ironic aspect of this whole situation is that the smart readers are, in principle, designed to create more transparency between the customer and the power company. By their design, they are supposed to foster open and transparent communication to help customers make more informed decisions. In sum, they are supposed to establish a partnership between the customer and the company.
As a report from IDC Energy Insights stated:
The addition of variable, real-time pricing, and home energy displays also provides a direct channel for a connection between the utility and the customer like never before. IDC explains the overall shift that consumer-facing smart grid technology will bring as: “The customer will be more engaged on a daily basis with the utility. The customer will no longer be a passive recipient of a bill, but an active partner in managing energy consumption and cost.”
The public mess that's currently underway is certainly not how this new era of transparency was supposed to start out. Such is the irony of failing to plan for the customer experience. Now, no company is perfect and you'd be hard pressed to find any company who can cast the first stone here, but that's why I love these stories. They provide excellent reminders that every company has room to improve in the way they plan and execute the elements of their customer experience. Clearly, the risk of not adequately planning far outweighs the possible near term planning expense.
Read the article
here and the IDC Energy Insights report
here
Comments [0]