Operations & Service Recovery
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I’ve found the team at BFY to be a dedicated and personable bunch of people, who have their clients success at the heart of what they do. Definitely the most effective consultants I’ve worked with in a long career within the utilities sector.
Operations & Service Recovery
Drive lasting change through continuous improvement
Service provision is complicated in Utilities. Multiple, disparate processes must work in unison to deliver the right outcome for customers and suppliers. When problems arise, overcoming them quickly is crucial to protect performance and satisfaction. Often, this is more difficult than it sounds. Every operational team has its own unique challenges, which are heightened by the evolving presence of regulatory and industry-specific constraints. This is where real experience and in-depth knowledge are invaluable.
At BFY, we can help you to enhance service quality and realise positive operational change, through the core principles of Operational Excellence. Our experts hold a proven track record in Operations and Service Recovery, empowering suppliers in Energy and Utilities to overcome their biggest, and most disruptive challenges.
We can help with:
- Reducing financial loss through revenue leakage
- Improving same day closure performance in complaints
- Reducing bill shock and overdue unbilled customers
- Enhancing accuracy in customer switching and COT
- Increasing SMART deployment success
- Maximising PAYGO cash recovery
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From day one the BFY team have been approachable, willing to help and roll their sleeves up to get fully immersed into the problem and the team. I'd highly recommend BFY.
Less disruption, faster improvements
When driving change, customer experience doesn’t need to suffer. Move faster, and resolve issues sooner, with unique insight from our best practice approaches. Offering expertise from real-world experience, we can provide a blueprint for overcoming your most disruptive challenges, allowing you to achieve and maintain exceptional levels of performance.
Our specialists are fully immersed in the problems that you face. As a team who’ve experienced the industry for ourselves, we’ve felt the frustrations that an underperforming process can bring. Leveraging this insight to empower other suppliers is what’s built our esteemed reputation. We combine this with the core principles of Operational Excellence, creating an approach that breeds pace, agility, and improvement.
Transferring knowledge, and internal upskilling, are fundamental in the exceptional results that we deliver. We partner with your key business leaders to share and embed our industry expertise, ensuring that your operational teams are set up for enduring success.
Operations & Service Recovery
Meet the Team
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Rachel Littlewood
Director
Rachel leads our operational and financial turnaround engagements, helping to solve complex operational challenges while maximising commercial performance and customer outcomes.
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Jon Vincent
Client Director
Jon helps clients resolve problems with billing, settlements, and customer service.
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Kev Brown
Senior Manager
Kev leads continuous improvement and lean transformation projects with our clients, supporting customer operations to deliver our Leadership and People Excellence programme.
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Lauren McCullough
Senior Manager
Lauren leads our clients through Operational Excellence, Lean Transformations and Continuous Improvement activity.
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Jonathan Paton
Senior Manager
Jon specialises in Customer Operations leadership, customer contact, and operational service delivery transformation/improvement.
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Joseph Cooper
Manager
Joseph supports our Retail clients to improve their operational processes and business performance.
View ProfileOperations & Service Recovery
Our Impact
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Large energy supplier avoids ~£7.5m in complaints costs
We supported a large energy supplier with a transformation programme, looking at how they can manage their complaints inflow and address the growing backlog. The programme transformed their complaints capability and resulted in ~£7.5m in cost avoidance.
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Improving retention for a large energy supplier with ~£25m benefit opportunity
Large supplier was retaining ~5% of customers when moving in or out of a property. We created a plan to improve retention performance and mitigate the impact on data capture, debt collection, and complaints, while also enhancing customer experience.
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Large B2B supplier increases efficiency with operational excellence
We supported a large B2B energy supplier with operational improvements in its Pricing team, aiming to increase efficiency and reduce the time taken to produce prices for new and existing customers.
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Operations & Service Recovery
Our Insights
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Improving billing accuracy as potential Ofgem changes pose £200m+ risk
Suppliers may need to increase 'billed to actual' performance by 10%, if the back bill window is reduced to 6 months by Ofgem. See how to mitigate the commercial and operational risks in this article, and get tailored guidance from our interactive assessment.
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Service demand to rise with water bills – What next for suppliers?
Water bills are set to rise by £10 a month from April, according to this week’s forecast from Water UK - adding further pressure to household budgets. At the same time, service demand is expected to grow, making it crucial for water suppliers to prepare. As we explore below, the success of any servicing operation hinges on people and processes, but their role becomes even more vital when supporting vulnerable customers.
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MHHS could trigger ~£200m spike in physical meter read costs for suppliers
With just over half of meters operating in smart mode and many suppliers behind on installation targets, physical meter read costs are set to spike when MHHS goes live. The reform will empower customers to reduce bills, by aligning consumption with cheaper, greener energy - but significant progress is needed to ensure these benefits are widely accessible.
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