Helsingin Energia has the best Contact Center
Finnish customers have voted the Helsingin Energia Contact Center the best in the country in the Voice of the Customer competition. The selections are based on questionnaires sent immediately following the customer service event via SN4Mobile.
The entire material covers customer feedback from more than 165,000 Finns who have called a Contact Center. The survey only included companies that have constantly evaluated their customer experience during the past year. To ensure the reliability of the results, the best customer service must have at least 1,200 customer feedback contacts a year. Helsingin Energia receives 1,000-1,500 feedback text messages a month.
Helsingin Energia came on top in the Voice of the Customer survey. In the course of a year, the Helsingin Energia Contact Center receives about 170,000 calls and about 150,000 messages through online forms and direct email. Converted to monthly volumes, the number of calls received is about 15,000 and electronic messages about 11,000.
The quality of Helsingin Energia’s service across the whole year’s survey period consistently exceeded the average of other contact centers, achieving the best result of all time for all companies late last year. Helsingin Energia improved its customer service quality by 10% during 2013.
Aiming for excellent customer experience
Customer Service Manager Heli-Anne Kivinen believes that Helsingin Energia’s success is the result of focused and long-term work as well as the courage to make changes to conventional practices.
"We can identify three factors in our customer service that are the cornerstones of our success. They are a clear common goal, continuous coaching, and an inclusive work community. Our common goal is to provide our customers with excellent customer experiences and to create the conditions conducive to recommendations. The crucial aspects in coaching are that it is personal and regular, and providing motivation and rewards is also linked to coaching. An inclusive workplace is able to extensively utilise both its employees’ know-how and ideas and customer feedback. A characteristic of our work community is doing things together,” Heli-Anne Kivinen says.
Helsingin Energia is one of the largest energy companies in Finland. It sells electric energy to about 400,000 customers in Finland and covers in excess of 90 per cent of the capital’s heating requirement with district heating. Monitoring of the customer experience is based on real time. This way, it is possible to react quickly to unexpected situations and to improve customer service.