Last year, when Ameren Illinois had Colorado vendor E Source facilitate customer journey mapping related to power outages, a funny thing happened.
“During our sessions, you could actually see when employees experienced that aha! moment,” recalled Melanie Wemple, an E Source managing director who worked with the group. “Everything started to click about how their job impacts the whole process. One person would say, ‘Oh, you mean when I do this, that happens.’” Added Angel Watkins, a senior project manager in the utility’s Customer Satisfaction Group, “Then another person would chime in and say, ‘Oh, I didn’t know someone was waiting on that information from me.’ Or, ‘I get it—the cause code needs to be included here.’ ”
Journey mapping, or the process of documenting the customers’ experience from their perspective, is all about gaining insights like this, Wemple explained. No one person sees the full extent of the customer experience. But the process of journey mapping brings together employees from the call center, the field, IT, the back office and more, and they reveal crucial information and learn from one another. That process can be extremely helpful in improving customer touch points—every point of contact with the utility, from start to finish—and increasing customer engagement.
While Ameren’s work was geared toward electricity restoration, according to Wemple, gas companies can take advantage of journey mapping for anything that a customer would want, including gas emergencies/leaks, outages, starting or transferring service, bill payment, disconnections for nonpayment, nonemergency service inquiries, meter exchanges or participation in energy efficiency programs.
At Ameren Illinois, 25 to 35 staff members participated in the customer journey mapping sessions, which took place on four days over two weeks, with additional follow-up interviews. The group used E Source’s JourneyHub, a web-based tool that allows utilities to map customer touch points, along with flowchart maker and diagramming software Visio, to integrate the customer experience with the operational flow.
According to Watkins, employees examined the process—in this case, outages—from both a customer-facing and operations perspective. “We wanted to know, are we giving clear, concise messages and using language the customer can understand, or are we communicating in our more technical company terms? Were we communicating the right data and timely information that helps customers know where they are in the outage process?” she said. For example, the group wanted to help make better decisions for customers who might be sitting at home, wondering, “Should I go to a hotel for the night?”
Wemple observed that by using journey mapping, the members of the group shifted their way of thinking about when they should provide information about outages. They decided they needed to tell the customer the approximate time of the restoration, but that they could wait to tell the customer the exact time until they had more information and could better estimate it. They still wanted to communicate updates to the customer, such as “We’re still evaluating the outage,” but focus more on accuracy.
And that shift has paid off, according to Watkins. “We made some changes, and during our last outage, we saw a 30 percent reduction in calls about outages because we were able to provide better messaging,” she said. The company also implemented a few interim actions, including stopping the auto-generated messages about estimated restoration time during a major storm, and giving more and better data along the way. “ERT is important,” Watkins said, “but based on customer surveys, customers also want to know what is causing the outage and what’s happening in the neighborhood.”
Ameren is implementing a number of changes from this project, including planning other projects the company will tackle.
“One of the things we learned is that journey mapping should be continual rather than a one-time thing,” Watkins said. She added that if she’d known beforehand that they’d run into one or two areas with layers of difficulty, she’d have pushed for even more front line employees (e.g., those in the call center) to attend and vet what others thought occurs in the process. But the main benefit, she said, was that “it helped us do better root cause analysis and figure out how a problem really starts.”
Customer Focus Leads to Happier Customers
Southern Co. Gas has a history leading up to customer journey mapping. “In 2007, Connie McIntyre was asked to take on the role of vice president of customer service, but had the foresight and vision to retitle the role vice president of customer experience instead,” said Sandra Broughton, managing director of customer experience.
McIntyre understood that the utility needed to develop a customer-centric culture rather than rely on transaction-based responses as it had in the past. The utility had been doing root cause analysis of customer complaints, Broughton noted, so it was already beginning to take a more holistic view of process improvement.
In 2015, the utility engaged E Source to help revamp its Customer Experience strategy and interviewed more than 60 leaders and employees, said Doris Yon, Southern Co. Gas’ senior business analyst and lead facilitator and trainer for the journey mapping process. Journey mapping became a key component in that effort, revealing customers’ emotions—both good and bad—when doing business with the company.
“Journey mapping allowed us to focus not only on internal operations, but on the customers’ experience,” said Broughton. “We understood their happy points and what tended to damage the relationship so we could improve it.”
E Source helped Southern Co. Gas develop its four-step journey mapping process:
First, the group tackled the customer onboarding process, which includes new construction, conversions and customers wanting to increase their usage by adding appliances, said Yon. They used JourneyHub as a tool and held workshops like Ameren did.
The experience changed their way of thinking, so that they have a more mature, customer-centric culture today. “We’re invited to the table since other groups [within the larger organization] have seen the results and are asking us about journey mapping,” Yon said. Added Broughton: “We’re a matrix organization, and because many of our stakeholders are not in our organization, we had to win their trust and get buy-in.”
In fact, several groups, including a Field Operations initiative examining home entry instructions, started asking for help in using journey mapping for their projects. Broughton said, “It helped that Connie sponsored ‘a refreshing’ of our strategy and got approval at the executive level.” According to her, any organization should make “customer experience part of its strategy—get it politicized and gain the necessary buy-in.”
Yon pointed to some “quick wins” about four months after starting journey mapping exercises. One involved customers ordering service online. Customers want to self-serve, Yon explained, but there was an issue: “When they completed the transaction, we said, ‘Thank you’ but gave them no further confirmation, so they didn’t know if they submitted their information correctly, and if they had questions, they didn’t know who to contact.”
The company developed a confirmation page and new closing verbiage that sets customers’ expectations on immediate next steps and information on whom to contact if there are questions. Since the changes have been implemented, the call center has reported fewer customer questions about the process, and the metrics attest to that. The onboarding process is a multiyear process that will undergo major system enhancements in the future, and other recommendations will be implemented at that point.
This group also had what E Source Managing Director Wemple describes as the “aha!” or “light bulb” moment. Onboarding is a complex business process; there are more than 200 touch points and a dozen departments involved, Yon explained. The utility thought it had been doing a good job keeping the customer informed, but found that only 10 percent of customer touch points were actually mapped. “No wonder they were frustrated. We needed to do more proactive notification,” said Yon.
Yon is now taking on more journey mapping projects and recruiting other staff business analysts and trainers to help with future efforts. But if she could begin again, the Southern Co. Gas business analyst wouldn’t have made assumptions about processes initially and then validated them with Voice of the Customer data. During work on a second business process, the group reviewed the VOC data at the start, which was much more effective, she said.
Furthering Customer Engagement
Vectren has integrated journey mapping into its existing framework around customer engagement. “Our journey started in the fall of 2015,” said Reese Hamilton, director of customer service. “That summer we made a structural change, creating our Customer Experience Organization, and from there we started researching this tool on our own and working our way through it.”
Rather than engage a vendor to facilitate sessions, Vectren “kind of backed into journey mapping and tried to grow things organically,” said Tammie Corder, quality assurance manager.
Journey mapping became a part of Vectren’s focus on continuous improvement and value stream analysis to better understand its process flows, said Andy Higgins, manager of e-business and telecommunications systems. “We realized we needed to go deeper and view the journey related to each business process,” he said. “Journey mapping gave us a better picture of what we were doing and better solutions.”
Prior to this, the utility typically responded to issues one by one and sought a solution that would serve all channels. Then, throughout 2016, the utility gained a better understanding of journey mapping and how it could be used, said Higgins.
Vectren’s journey mapping work now occurs in meetings related to separate business processes. “For example, recently we had a Value Stream Analysis meeting with 15 people about the move-in process, and an informal meeting on the payment process with four people. Using process mapping, we look at how customer journey mapping flows into a business process. We don’t see it as a standalone, separate event,” Higgins said.
“So, whenever we have a meeting about any process, journey mapping comes into it,” added Hamilton.
Their greatest revelation came when they noted that not only do customers have different touch points, but they also have different “personas” (a journey mapping term that refers to archetypes created to represent customers), and focusing on those was the best way to track their journeys.
The utility identified six personas, such as college students, new residents and retirees on fixed incomes, and looked at touch points for each group.
“The more traditional customer picks up the phone and may not need to contact us again for 15 years,” Hamilton said. “College students who use a mobile app or website may contact us two, three or four times as they change housing through school. But we realized that the process requires a phone call from everyone at some point. Even the tech-savvy person and the college student can’t do it all themselves; they have to talk to us. This may be an issue we want to address as we continue.”
Vectren is not far enough along to have garnered metrics about how changes are working, but Hamilton believes the utility is implementing the right processes. “We just transitioned to a new technical platform, and we believe our new speech-enabled IVR [Interactive Voice Response] is delivering a much better customer experience,” he said. However, research tells him it will be years before that shows up in their JD Power scores.
“[Still], from an IT perspective, what we build or deliver to the customer is now more aligned with what we need, which in turn reduces rework and changing the system. So, we also gained an operational benefit from understanding what the customer is doing,” Higgins said.
Corder, who according to her two colleagues is driving the journey mapping initiative, is happy with anecdotal results, such as co-workers and customers presenting them with case studies. “They’ll say, ‘This happened to me and I wonder why it did. Can you put this to a journey map and investigate it?’ which is exciting,” she said.
Looking back, Corder said that she would have liked to have had formal discussions about journey mapping when they started, and the company might consider using a vendor in the future. Higgins also has a memorable takeaway from journey mapping: “We realized that during the move-in process, we ask customers where their meter is. We connected it to their house to make money, and we already know where it is, yet we still ask. Occasionally a person will ask us back, ‘Don’t you know?’” As with Ameren, it was an aha! moment within the company.
Hamilton summarizes journey mapping in a way that could apply to a number of utilities. “Historically, as a utility, we’ve been the only game in town, and we looked at what the best process was for us. The journey mapping process taught us that what is good for us is not necessarily what’s good for the customer, and that’s who we’re ultimately trying to serve.”
The American Gas Association and its co-sponsor Edison Electric Institute are joining again with CS Week to present a single comprehensive customer service event, May 22–26 in Fort Worth, Texas. CS Week’s seven workshop tracks align around the customer experience lifecycle. Ameren Illinois, Vectren and Southern Co. Gas are among many of the natural gas and other utilities discussing methods on customer journey mapping and other key customer service issues. For more details or to register, visit www.csweek.org.
