Building a customer-centric leadership culture to transform service

The Energy and Utilities sector is evolving significantly - many are delivering system migrations, large scale restructures, and experiencing rapid growth.

Universal in the success of navigating this, is the ability for operational leaders to translate these strategic changes, and land them successfully with those people closest to the customer.

In our experience, changes like this can uncover a gap in leadership capability and skill set, holding organisations back from realising the customer centric ambitions set by the senior team. We typically see this surface in transactional behaviour, a lack of understanding of purpose, and an inability to galvanise teams around the vision or change.

Together, this prevents customer operations from elevating service into the top quartile of all sectors. Tackling the problem upstream, by prioritising the development of customer-focused leaders (with the right skills, behaviours and attitudes) is proven to enable the operational goals and strategies for high performing customer service. Over time, this can transform service culture and enhance customer satisfaction to the levels expected by Ofgem, which recently hit new heights in their ambitious Consumer Confidence programme.

We’ve seen the impact this approach can have first-hand with our clients, who’ve successfully reignited their leaders’ passion for customer service, reflected by a major shift in customer satisfaction and employee engagement.

Below, we’ve shared techniques to help drive these improvements, reflecting on their impact with organisations across Energy and Utilities.

Do you understand the operational leaders in your business?

Building a high performing team starts with a deep understanding of your people.

Achieving this often requires a ‘pause and reflect’ on the types of leaders in your business. An assessment of current capabilities, behaviours and trait-based preferences for leadership is an important place to start, also considering how closely your people are aligned to business values. This value-based assessment is critical to ensuring you have the right people, and fundamental attitudes and behaviours, to show up every day and lead your teams to achieve desired business outcomes.

Leadership qualities are evident in how a leader turns up every day, through their behaviour, words, and actions. Finding leaders who are committed to aligning these qualities with business objectives is critical to your success.

The good news is that behavioural change is coachable. Understanding your leaders’ motivations, supported by appropriate role modelling, systems, and processes can strengthen their commitment to change, and how they lead others through it.

Through coaching and training, it’s crucial to understand your leaders’ reasons for being in their role, and help them to identify their purpose. Once established, leaders can be encouraged to focus on a high performance mindset, and developing the tools and capabilities needed to create ‘followship’ in their teams.

Translating the right behaviours and attitudes into operational performance

When performance leadership and the prioritisation of outcomes is combined, you can foster true accountability in your operational leaders, and those people closest to the customer. Customer experience will feel more effective and personal, creating a deeper connection with servicing teams, who consider the full journey and take responsibility to resolve every issue the customer has, first time round.

Practically, this is about moving away from managing the target and number, and focussing on the habits and inputs that can be repeated daily to achieve any outcomes required. In busy and constantly fluctuating operational functions, the ability to fall back on repeatable processes, frameworks, and systems, will allow leaders to embrace uncertainty, deal with ambiguity and have the adaptability to cope with the modern daily operational environment.

Previously at a large energy supplier, we’ve helped customer operations to directly improve response quality and excel at end-to-end ownership of customer accounts, by applying high performance processes, systems, and operational frameworks. This was reinforced by repeatable, habit-forming coaching and development support to execute the approach effectively, which contributed to a +34 swing in NPS.

As Ofgem ramps up the pressure to improve service standards, you can assess your current approach by asking:

• Are you clear on your leaders’ natural traits, behaviours and prevalence for leading people?
• Do your leaders take accountability and responsibility for the operational and strategic goals?
• Are your customer service teams being lead to perform at their best consistently, and do they enjoy it?
• Do customer-focused teams know exactly what’s expected of them, what success looks like, and how this will be measured?
• Are teams working towards shared outcomes (e.g., improving response quality), with feedback being constantly encouraged to drive collaboration and continuous improvement?

Establishing true accountability and ownership

The importance of accountability shouldn’t be overlooked as a driver for customer-centric leadership, particularly in the modern structure of customer operations, where leaders are given increasing autonomy for a function or department.

True ownership involves people taking responsibility, displaying commitment towards the achievement of an outcome, and owning the results. Day-to-day, this can be driven by a constant focus on repeatable, habit-forming actions to enable success, ensuring a clear message is delivered and reinforced. Collaborative team input is key, followed by water-tight action setting which is tracked and followed up.

Combining this with a focus on purpose and outcome, rather than task, will drive confidence as teams continuously demonstrate their impact on results. Where there are deviations and as issues materialise, leaders are encouraged to problem solve, and collaborate with people outside of their immediate reporting structures. Leaders aren’t expected to have all the answers, but hold the responsibility to facilitate those that do.

We’ve seen a focus on accountability and ownership translate into a significant improvement in employee engagement, driving a 170% increase within an energy supplier’s customer operation, as part of a wider Leadership Excellence programme.

Leveraging data to improve leadership capability

Without the right data foundations, any effort to create high performing teams could be made in vain. Existing and historical performance must be clearly understood over time to provide a holistic view, showing where performance is on track, where it isn’t, and why this is the case. A balanced scorecard is critical to the success of any organisation. At BFY, we support our clients in establishing measures and success criteria that are aligned to strategic goals, ensuring there’s line of sight across, customer, people, and commercial outcomes.

The old adage of what gets measured gets managed, risks your people having the wrong focus and attention on targets and measures, instead of outcomes and objectives. Your people need to understand what the goal is, and feel a connection to the things they do on a daily basis, seeing this really move the business forward. This is key not only to ensure operational decisions are made on the most impactful areas, but also for monitoring critical success measures to enable real-time course corrections, and maintaining internal engagement.

Once a performance baseline has been established, key focus areas are:

• Bringing senior leaders together to agree KPIs, aligning on purpose to provide clear direction across teams
• Tracking and monitoring key metrics across multiple areas (customer, people, resources) to maintain a complete view of success, beyond financial outcomes
• Establishing a single, reliable source of data to provide a holistic view of performance, and trending capabilities, allowing leaders to quickly identify problem areas, focus points, and successes
• Ensuring data used in performance dashboards is accurate and complete to avoid misalignment of targets, misplaced focus, and ineffective performance discussions

Improving leadership capability can play a transformational role in addressing service challenges, particularly relating to failure demand, as suppliers focus on meeting Ofgem's heightened expectations for service standards. It’s clear that suppliers will be held accountable, with potential penalties and fines implied if service falls short, alongside the broader competitive risk of eroding customer experience.

Coaching leaders into a high performing mindset, in a continuous improvement environment, can not only deliver a long-term shift in service metrics, but also develop the agility for successfully driving future change.

Although this improvement doesn’t happen overnight, our experience shows it’s a worthy investment of time and effort. Ultimately, high performing customer service costs much less to deliver – and your leaders are the key to enabling this.

For more on our impact with organisations in Energy and Utilities, and how our Leadership and People Excellence offering can help, contact Kev Brown.