Case study: Sumo Energy automates its customer feedback processes

Australian energy retailer Sumo Energy automated its customer feedback processes to better understand its customers.

Using a third-party system for customer feedback, Peter Perla, general manager of customer experience and growth at Sumo Energy explained to Digital Nation the retailer wasn’t able to contact customers over their recent feedback.

Sumo Energy wanted to replace their third-party system with a new platform to do two things, Perla explained.

“The first thing was to drive a better, greater survey response and then have the ability of once we got customer feedback to act on it quickly,” he said.

“We looked at a number of solutions and then working with the Genesys team we realised that what we could do is we could run our whole net promoter score (NPS) active service recovery program from the platform.”

When a customer rings Sumo, an SMS is sent after the call for them to provide feedback. If they receive negative feedback, Perla said the negative feedback will get routed through to them via an outbound campaign.

“The agent will have the ability to review the feedback and then bring it back through to that customer. What we've done is we've been able to elicit more feedback that helps us improve the operations,” he said

“But when there are those customer issues or misunderstandings, if the customer has walked away from Sumo and had a poor experience, we'll address that quickly.”

Perla said as an agent it is disheartening to report back issues with the business but they don’t get remediated.

“Now if we have an operational issue and we can identify it quickly, the agents will call it out and then that will go through another process of a round where we'll triage the operational issue, prioritise to fix it,” he said.

“In terms of prioritising which issue gets fixed, you can just look at the customer feedback and know where to focus on.”

From an agent perspective, Perla said the Genesys platform has helped them drive a bit more engagement because the agents want to do the right things.

“They want to speak to happy customers and they want to help customers. So now they've got a voice to be able to promote where the customer pain points are and they've got the confidence that it will be fixed,” he said.

Perla explained the NPS has improved since implementing Genesys.

“When I started, it was minus 27, that was about right for the industry average, we chipped away at it. We refined the way that we looked at NPS rather than one size fits all,” he said.

“We broke it down into episodes and we managed to over the time, be able to pull our score up into the thirties.”

Perla said the score is now touching 60 and they aim to get it to 75 by the end of the year.

“While the score is great, and as an organisation, you can feel good about the score, it's not about the score, it's about the system and being able to improve your business and focus on what matters,” he ended.