As part of National Customer Service Week, Caecillian has been celebrating customer service in our organisation. We’ve explored the importance of employee satisfaction and training as well as celebrating those who have been key in providing top service to our customers.
Effective Strategy and Focused Leadership
Our customers are at the heart of everything we do, so customer service is a top priority for the entire organisation. We decided to catch up with Operation’s Director, James Lawton to see how the team tackle this.
“Over the past few years Customer Experience within the utilities sector has become more and more relevant, customer and consumer expectations are rising as sectors are getting much more advanced in the way they interact with customers face to face or online. Utility companies needed to catch up with this and over the past few years have firmly put the service they offer to their customers at the top of their priority lists, in line with safety and cost-efficiency.
I truly believe that when we complete our work to a high standard and deliver to or exceed the customers’ expectations, this not only provides the service they and our clients expect but it also means we do the job safely and within budget, with a right first time approach. Here at Caecillian we pride ourselves in our delivery, working with all our operational teams so that they are trained and equipped to provide a 10 out 10 service at all times.
Often the work we do can be very intrusive to customers and a disruption to their lives, often they don’t want us there! Customers don’t plan to have a water leak, a problem with their sewer or to have their gas pipes replaced outside their house but being there is a necessity. Our approach to overcome this is simple; communicate well and do the job quickly, without ever having to return once we have left the site. We speak upfront to customers to explain what and how we will be completing the work, we then communicate during the work and inform our customers how we are progressing but more importantly, we inform them of any operational challenges we are facing that may cause a delay which inevitably we do come across when working underground. Once works are completed we speak to the customers before leaving site to ensure that they are satisfied and if there are any concerns we get these rectified quickly.
Regardless of this approach, sometimes things don’t go to plan and we may get a complaint or an unsatisfied customer. Feedback of this nature is taken very seriously. As a management team, we look at what hasn’t gone well, in order to learn from our mistakes so that we are constantly evolving our service and developing our people. We actively encourage our teams to gain customer feedback in order to measure performance and we reward our teams on success with the number of accolades and positive feedback they receive”.
