Close to the customer
At Fluvius, we start from the expectations of our customers for everything we do. Goal: to make the customer Experience (CX) as consistent and positive as possible in every customer contact, regardless of the process, channel, or employee.
What does the customer want?
Customer expectations in terms of new applications and processes are rapidly evolving under the influence of commercial actors in the energy market. To respond to this, we previously set up the CX team within customer service. This team of five experts gathers customer insights, enters into dialogue with customers, detects opportunities and, together with colleagues from across the company, continues to polish the daily operations to realise the ideal customer experience.
To meet our customers' needs even better, we are committed to four service promises for our customers. We want every employee to know these promises and apply them each day.
Polling customers: high marks for 'connections' and 'meter reading'
Through our customer satisfaction survey, we learned that in 2022 our customers were most satisfied with the 'meter reading' (94%) and 'connections' (89%) processes. Especially the smoothness of the process and the friendliness and helpfulness of our staff are greatly appreciated. We also see a high satisfaction score for 'premiums' (86%). An action point for this is that we need to keep working on the turnaround time for premium processing.
Our customers are slightly less satisfied with the notification of their 'local generation'. In 2022, a lot of local generation plants were notified. Moreover, we commissioned a new notification tool, which led to quite long lead times.
Another process about which our customers are less satisfied this year is 'breakdowns'. This is partly due to the fact that more customers with voltage problems (solar panel inverters failing) responded to the survey this year: about 20% of respondents experienced this type of failure. Resolving this type of problem often requires adjustments to the grid. This leads to longer lead times. In addition, the failure of local solar production also has a negative financial impact for the customer, which triggers greater dissatisfaction.
As in previous years, we also see a lower satisfaction score for the 'prepayment' process (66%). What is new in 2022 is that we now also measure the satisfaction of customers who have been actively using Prepaid for four months. From this, we learn that customers identify a positive impact on their financial situation as they get to know the system. After four months, satisfaction therefore rises to 89%.
For the 'studies and construction' process, we had to change the survey methodology this year because of the privacy legislation GDPR. This modified methodology did not yet yield reportable figures for 2022. It was therefore decided to exceptionally keep the 2021 result for this topic for calculation of the general satisfaction score.
General customer satisfaction: annual result
| Type of service | 2021 |
2022 |
|---|---|---|
| Meter reading | 86% |
94% |
| Study & aptitude | 92% |
92% |
| Connections | 78% |
89% |
| Premium applications | 86% |
86% |
| Fault management | 84% |
76% |
| Local production | 64% |
67% |
| Prepayment | 67% |
66% |
| Total | 80% |
81% |
Dealing with complaints
Customers address us through various channels to report a complaint. We call these 'first-line complaints'. When customers express dissatisfaction with the handling of their original complaint, we call this a 'second-line complaint'.
In 2022, we received a total of 26,896 effective first-line complaints and 2,552 second-line complaints. This is an increase of 6% (1,635 complaints) and 33% (634) respectively compared to 2021. The number of first-line complaints received is the highest in the past five years. This increase is caused by an increase in complaints within the 'Market Operations', 'Supplier Role Fluvius' and 'Local Production' activities.
Due to high energy prices, customers have become more conscious of their consumption pattern and behaviour. In addition, lead times (premiums & green electricity) and proactive communication remain points of attention. Within the activities 'Connections', 'Faults/Defaults', 'Tariffs' and 'Quality', we recorded a decrease in complaints.
| Number/Year | 2021 |
2021 |
|---|---|---|
| Complaints | 25 261 |
26 896 |
| Second-line complaints | 1 981 |
2 552 |
| Total | 27 242 |
29 448 |
Customer-focused communication
In 2022, we took further steps towards even more customer-oriented communication. In doing so, we worked on proactivity, relevance and accessibility.
Self-service and digital
With an 'omnichannel policy', we communicate our information and services to a broad target group of customers. Self-service and digitisation are central to this: this allows a large proportion of our customers to call on us 24/7.
We also continue to provide the best possible support to non-digital customers. We are committed to the 'Avoid-Click-Call-Face' customer channel strategy. Here, live customer contact is preferably not necessary, for instance because it is clear to the customer, the customer is helped online or contacts our call centre. In this way, we want to use the available resources as efficiently as possible.
Customer channels
- Customers contacted us by phone over 2,556 000 times in the past year. This is an increase of about 30,000 calls compared to 2022.
- We handled 236,000 website contact forms.
- Through our 'direct messaging' channels (WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Web chat, Twitter), we recorded a total of 32,000 customer conversations.
- Fluvius practices 'social listening': when customers publicly ask questions about Fluvius on social media, a team of customer advisers formulates a response.
- More and more customers are finding their way to My Fluvius. Through this online application, customers can monitor their consumption themselves, open and close the data ports of their digital meter, and apply for premiums. The total number of customers who registered a new account rose to 1,967,750 in 2022 (compared to 279,898 in 2021). Moreover, these customers regularly consult My Fluvius: in total, we counted 5,834,296 sessions (compared to 2,048,508 in 2021). In doing so, they click the 'Consumption' tile most often (3.5 million times).
- We counted 47,600 customer visits in our 14 customer offices. Our customer offices have extensive opening hours and customers can visit them without an appointment.
