UGI Utilities Uses XM Insights to Power Customer Experience and Brand Value Improvements
The Results
Improved the customer experience by adding self-service tools and driving organizational focus on overall satisfaction
Aggregated customer insights across the contact center, website, and customer portal to prioritize actions for continuous CX improvements
Shared CX data across teams to find digital hurdles and drive improvements around payment processes that reduced customer frustration and contact center call volume
The opportunity
Consumers increasingly turn to digital channels when engaging with their utility providers. To meet the high expectations of modern consumers, many utilities have begun to leverage experience management solutions that help them understand the customer experience and identify opportunities for improvements, especially on web and mobile.
UGI Utilities found itself in exactly this customer experience (CX) predicament. A wholly owned subsidiary of UGI Corporation, UGI Utilities is a natural gas and electric power distribution company headquartered in Denver, Pennsylvania.
UGI Utilities has more than 735,000 natural gas and electric customers in 45 counties in Pennsylvania and one county in Maryland. Research showed that self-service tools were becoming increasingly important features to many of its consumers.
Understanding the customer experience and identifying opportunities for improvement
To meet that need, UGI required a focused initiative to improve and build out its CX self-service functionality, leveraging journey-wide customer insights to guide its efforts.
The goals: monitor agent performance in the contact center, identify improvement opportunities, and understand how CSAT and NPS are impacted when customers can’t complete tasks via digital self-serve channels.
In addition to helping the company continually optimize experiences, these insights would also enable UGI to understand CX as needs changed and customer journeys shifted dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Solution: Verint Experience Management
Impressed by the solution’s ability to capture comprehensive data, share it across large organizations, and drive coordinated CX decisions, UGI chose Verint Experience Management to understand the customer experience across the journey, from agent interactions in the contact center to self-serve engagements on UGI’s website and customer portal.
The utility started using post-call surveys to understand customer perceptions of how representatives handled calls and to know if customers were able to achieve their goals. These scores now flow into a monthly, aggregate score and each agent’s annual review.
The feedback is used by contact center supervisors to monitor agent performance and overall customer feedback scores to compare them with broader CSAT scores.
Building on this success, a year later the organization leveraged Verint technology to further tap into customer feedback. UGI was able to gain actionable insights on digital channel usage based on feedback collected from smart thank-you pages at the end of web surveys. Issues can now be escalated for troubleshooting and resolution via alerts routed to the appropriate supervisor.
With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, many organizations saw a host of customer service challenges related to new and emerging customer needs. Like many utilities, UGI was quick to empathize with the plight of customers experiencing financial challenges, continuing to provide service in compliance with a moratorium on service shutoffs through March 2021.
The organization saw a spike in usage of its autopay and budget billing programs, as well as increased use of its customer portal, as many business customers were not able to receive office mail during the shutdown.
Thankfully, in the midst of this unprecedented disruption, UGI was able to rely on Verint CX analytics, transcending basic efficiency metrics to help understand how well its contact center was handling interactions with customers and identify areas for improvements based on impact.
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"Verint feedback has been invaluable in identifying the customer pain points in our portal. This has enabled us to dramatically reduce payment issues and calls to the contact center. Those wins, plus a newfound ability to coordinate CX priorities across the business, has helped us focus on raising CSAT and improved our overall brand reputation with customers at a critical time."
The Benefits: UGI is empowered to make smarter, faster business decisions
“Verint Experience Management has been invaluable in helping us identify the customer pain points in our portal,” says Daniel Adamo, Director, Customer Service at UGI Corporation.
“For example, we learned customers were having issues making payments. However, after looking at the data, we were able to understand this was not a technical issue, but rather because customers were attempting to make payments on our unauthenticated website.”
Adamo continues, “We were able to update the verbiage on our website to clearly direct customers to the online payment feature on the authenticated website and made sure this information was in the hands of our customer service representatives. This has enabled us to dramatically reduce payment issues and calls to the contact center.”
Verint is helping UGI democratize CX intelligence for the benefit of multiple stakeholders across the organization. The company has been able to monitor agent performance and provide an operational view of customer satisfaction from a contact center leadership perspective.
Decision makers at UGI can see and track the actions customers are taking online, what’s preventing them from accomplishing those tasks, and how those issues negatively impact CSAT.
By capturing customer feedback throughout the customer journey, UGI is empowered to make smarter, faster business decisions. And by adding rich context to every experience and combining it with advanced analytics and text mining, Verint Experience Management helps UGI facilitate timely, targeted, and decisive actions.
All these improvements have equipped the utility to make much needed CX improvements today, while also guiding its future plans and innovations.
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