Becoming the preferred energy supplier in a competitive market

Luminus wants to become the most preferred energy provider in Belgium. They want to achieve that by getting a holistic view of the customer experience (CX), and by understanding customer satisfaction at different points in the customer journey. Luminus uses insights from customer feedback to define concrete actions to improve CX and to decrease churn.

Their challenges:

1. Since the liberalization of the energy market in 2017, competition has been fierce. Luminus wants to use customer feedback to understand its competitive edge as an energy supplier to improve retention.

2. Luminus used to send out long surveys with a lot of questions which didn’t always have the desired effect. They want to capture feedback in a user-friendly and structured way so they can define actions from the insights.

3. Luminus wants an easy way to share customer feedback with their 2000 employees to continuously improve CX across departments.

1. Insights driven by artificial intelligence 

Pricing is the main driver for most customers in the energy industry. Hello Customer helps Luminus understand how they can make a difference with other service aspects next to price. “Pricing is a big driver for both satisfied and unsatisfied customers. But the human aspect and a personal approach also have a big impact on the customer experience. That is where we want to make a difference as an energy supplier,” says Sofie Lambrechts.

From the feedback they learned that customers don’t churn because they are unhappy with the service, but they make their choice based on price perception. “That is why I am thoroughly convinced that our employees can make the difference by asking the right questions and giving the right arguments to the customer, so it relates to the customer’s personal situation. Hello Customer supports our agents to do that. It’s also why we invest heavily in capturing insights. We want to support our employees in that process so they can really let the consumer experience that they get a good deal at Luminus."

2. Easy measuring and real-time analysis

The previous tool Luminus used laced text and sentiment analysis. “We could ask open and closed questions, but our analysts had to manually extract the insights, feedback per feedback. We asked a lot of questions, so it was a very time-consuming task. Now our employees add value by analyzing the insights from Hello Customer even deeper.”

Luminus sees a positive evolution in the way they capture feedback. “Today we really have a conversation with our customers. We just ask them for open feedback. Thanks to the flexibility of the tool we can measure different touchpoints along the customer journey. We quickly detect what is going on with our customers, what they miss and which actions we should take.” As Luminus operates in a highly price-related market, the billing process is a so-called moment of truth which they monitor closely.

3. Use data for targeted coaching 

“We share the insights from Hello Customer with our team coaches. They receive information about their teams and individual colleagues to provide the necessary training. At Luminus we have several teams that are responsible for continuously analyzing the insights from Hello Customer even deeper to connect the dots. This information is then shared with the various departments so that everyone can take action based on their own expertise. Our quality and monitoring team, for example, is responsible for making coaching recommendations based on customer feedback. Because we can easily see which agent a customer talked to, we can offer individual coaching to our agents.

Another way of connecting feedback to other data, is by incorporating the results from Hello Customer to a CRM. Luminus does this with their CRM, Salesforce. “When a customer reaches out, our employee can immediately see when the customer was last surveyed and how they felt about Luminus at that moment. This lets our agents personalize the customer contact. It strengthens our individual approach as the customer feels and understands that we think of them as a person, and not a number.”

1. Quick time-to-value and optimizing internal resources. Whereas before Luminus analyzed everything manually, they now get actionable insights in real-time from the customer feedback. Their teams can work on analyzing the data further and working together with different business units.
2. Fight churn in a competitive market. By understanding their customers better and knowing why people churn, they can find the right arguments to retain customers better. By conducting an exit survey after customers churn, they get an even deeper understanding.
3. Targeted coaching investments. By linking Hello Customer to operational data in their CRM, Luminus knows exactly which agents to train based on objective customer insights.
4. Improve marketing campaigns. With their onboarding survey Luminus wants to understand why customers choose Luminus and what they expect from them as an energy supplier. These insights are shared with the marketing team so they can improve their acquisition campaigns.