How SSEN is Powering up Social Messaging for Service

Bad weather is a regular occurrence here in the UK, and with this bad weather often come downed power lines and interruption to services. Therefore, utility companies are in a constant state of high alert when bad weather hits.

But, as they aren’t able to control the weather, it’s critical that they control the fallout. These days, savvy customers will contact their DNO (Distribution Network Operator) for up-to-date information on social channels such as Twitter and Messenger. Therefore it’s critical that utility companies take social care seriously, looking to help mitigate the risk of disruption to services by communicating proactively with customers regarding potential outages.

SSEN, one of the largest DNO’s in the UK and Conversocial partner, are no strangers to power outages. What’s unique is that SSEN continues to be a market innovator in social care, being one of the first UK Energy companies to promote Messenger as a contact channel and report on Twitter CSAT as a care metric. Despite the challenges of having to meet regulatory targets defined by governing bodies, SSEN continues to successfully meet customer expectations and deliver dedicated social customer care for customer engagement.

That is precisely why we derive such pleasure in working with companies who value customer satisfaction and strive to take their social customer service game to the next level. We are proud to have the opportunity to work with SSEN to enable them to continue to build on their already excellent social customer service program.

The study takes a close look at SSEN social care journey — how SSEN recognised early on the rise in incoming volumes across social channels, such as Facebook and Twitter, and acknowledged the need to provide secure, efficient and high-quality customer service–on social–to meet the changing demand of customers seeking resolution through digital pathways.

Here are some key highlights of the study:

• Promoting Messenger as a Care Channel: Noticing that a large number of customers who visited their Power Track page also called the 0800-number directly, SSEN decided to proactively promote Messenger as a customer care channel on site. Driving awareness of social customer care to their customers, regardless of time or circumstance is one of SSEN’s biggest initiatives currently.
• Making a Digital to Traditional Comparison: SSEN has recently started reporting on CSAT as a customer care metric, with an impressive industry performance of 4.6 / 5.0 on average. CSAT allows for SSEN to truly measure the impact of true social issue resolution, and public-to-private DM prompts on site, for their customers. And in the not too distant future CSAT could have a direct link to return on investment.

CSAT allows for SSEN to truly measure the impact of true social issue resolution, and public-to-private DM prompts on site, for their customers. And in the not too distant future CSAT could have a direct link to return on investment.

And here are some of SSEN’s results for the first five months of 2017 (compared to the last five months of 2016):

• Inbound Messages: Increased by 17% from 2016
• Responses: Increased by 14% from 2016
• Response Time: Decreased by 37% from 2016
• In the first 24 days of promoting Messenger on their Power Track page SSEN had a 180% increase in customers contacting them on Messenger. On top of this, compared to last year in the same period (when there were no links on the site), there has been a 10x increase in the number of Facebook messages coming in over Messenger.

Read SSEN’s #SocialFirst story to learn best practices for staying human even when under pressure, proactively promoting social as a care channel and scaling social internally to meet the growing customer preferences for private messaging.

Originally published on the The Conversation Blog on 12/05/2017