Loyalty360 caught up with Cassandra Newsome, Manager, Research & Customer Program Development, Piedmont Natural Gas for a compelling and comprehensive interview about customer loyalty, customer engagement, and customer experience.
Can you talk about your company’s efforts around customer experience, customer loyalty, and customer engagement and how they have changed and/or progressed in recent years?
Newsome: One of our strategic directives as a company is to deliver excellent customer service every time; we use metrics around customer satisfaction and loyalty to help us measure and track our success which is vital to continuous improvement and achieving a singular focus on the customer experience.
In terms of change over time, perhaps the biggest progression for Piedmont has been turning increasingly large amounts of data into actionable intelligence in order to make timely decisions that have a positive impact on our customers.
How important is listening to your customers and how do you leverage those insights for any of your customer experience/customer loyalty/customer engagement initiatives?
Newsome: Listening and responding to our customers is critical to our continued success in delivering outstanding customer service. We take what we learn from our customers on a daily basis and use that information to continuously improve our business processes, fine-tune our situational responses, or adjust our efforts in the community in order to have a greater impact.
What are you most proud of from a customer experience/customer engagement/customer loyalty perspective?
Newsome: The positive reinforcement we get from our customers that they value our service and the professionalism and courtesy of our employees; the growing, positive relationship we have with our customers and the trust they have in us to provide them with safe, reliable natural gas service even under the most challenging of weather conditions. And, the recognition we’ve received from independent, national organizations for the positive relationships we have with our customers.
What trends do you see or foresee related to digital customer engagement?
Newsome: Some of the more obvious applications with respect to customer engagement via digital means include: bill payment, service outages and restoration timeframes, service areas, general information about natural gas (commodity and service), interactive customer “conversations.”
There are lots of metrics, studies, and benchmarks in the market around customer experience. What are the ways you measure that have led to such great success?
Newsome: We rely on a variety of metrics to measure loyalty, satisfaction, customer perception, and engagement−key factors in the overall customer experience. And, they’re not all deployed or implemented in the same way. Some of our metrics, for example, are based on transactional experiences; others on attitudes and behaviors. Some are deployed on an annual basis, others once a quarter and still others are conducted daily. Some of the metrics we capture ourselves while we rely on outside resources for others of our metrics/studies. We do this in order to capture as complete and holistic a picture as possible of the customer experience.
Whatever success we have, is because we constantly monitor the market and how consumers are responding to how we do business with them. And, based on the information we get back, we are in a position to make changes or modify processes and procedures that will enhance the customer experience.
We hear a good deal about alignment within the organization to increase the efficacy / impact of the customer experience efforts and that successful organizations are “committed” to such efforts. In your opinion, what does this commitment mean to you?
Newsome: For us, it means putting our customers first when building processes and procedures and continuously looking for opportunities to improve and grow as an organization. It also means looking at processes and customer response holistically and recognizing that lots of people and lots of functions or departments “touch” that customer and impact the overall customer experience. That recognition leads to integrated solutions and improvements that make a real difference in the customer experience.
There is a lot of talk about new media (social) and how it can increase impact. How is social media being used differently today than a year ago, and how do you see it changing over the next year?
Newsome: Social media, initially, was used primarily to impart information to our customers; it was not used to create conversations or individual interaction with our customers. Today, consumer expectations around the purpose and use of social media have evolved to view social media as a viable platform for interaction and dialogue with our company. As a result, our use of social media has evolved as well to position (in concept and in reality) this communications channel as a two-way street; our customers now use this as another means of resolving customer issues, engaging with us in our community partnerships and activities, and gathering information about our product and our service.
What are the challenges you face with data, analytics, and creating insight today and how has that changed over the past 18 months?
Newsome: Perhaps the biggest challenge is that the pace has picked up. Not only do consumer behaviors and thinking change quickly, we also live in an instant gratification world now. As each day passes, we have to react and/or respond much quicker than the day before. Being proactive in our approach to long-term planning is essential and helps us to anticipate change and being prepared for it. Data trends, and the ability to recognize the implications for business, are keys to remaining effective and efficient.
Why are customers loyal to your brand / brand promise? How has that brand promise changed?
Newsome: Piedmont’s brand promise is providing customers with “peace of mind.” Our product, our service is largely “invisible” or unseen and, therefore, customers want to have a peace of mind that their natural gas service is safe and reliable even though they can’t see it, can’t touch it. They do see it in the benefits it provides: a warm house on a bitterly cold day, an energy that costs less today than it did ten years ago, and an energy that is environmentally responsible. That promise to our customers has not changed and remains as viable today as it did when we introduced it five years ago; it is sustained by our continued delivery on that promise and by following our E.A.S.E. principle we talked about earlier.
How is customer loyalty being prioritized in your organization?
Newsome: Customer loyalty and satisfaction are at the core of our research efforts and they play an important role in helping to define our company’s strategic directives. They are key components, too, in both our individual and collective (company-wide) performance plans each and every year.
What makes your loyalty program/customer loyalty focus unique?
Newsome: We segment our customers based on “levels of loyalty” and build programs and/or campaigns to cater to their specific needs and wants in to first retain them and then to “grow” the customer relationship. We seek to improve their satisfaction and, ultimately, to increase their loyalty. This analysis helps provide us with a deeper understanding of customers and how they differ in attitudes, behaviors and needs. As a result, we can develop targeted communications and non-regulated product offerings to maximize messaging efficiency and impact.
How do you define success?
Newsome: A loyal, satisfied customer – because those are the customers that will remain with you and will tell friends and family that Piedmont exceeded their expectations− that we delighted them!
Are there facets unique to your business, the markets/verticals it plays in, that make it easier/more difficult to create customer-brand loyalty? What are they?
Newsome: Certainly, there is a level of complexity that arises from the fact that we are a regulated energy provider and that we are “out of sight” and “out of mind” for many customers . . . until that one time when they really need us to be a reliable energy provider, a reliable energy source when it’s the coldest day of the year, when they have family home, when they have a sick child or relative . . . that’s when we absolutely have to deliver; and, we do.
How does employee loyalty and engagement fit into the customer loyalty discussion?
Newsome: Employee loyalty and engagement is absolutely critical to our success in creating satisfied and loyal customers. There is a direct correlation between employees who embrace and share our core values as a company and who have been active participants in developing and setting goals, and the continuous improvement process with customer satisfaction and loyalty. Another key factor, of course, is keeping employees informed so that they are equipped to respond to customer questions efficiently and effectively. We get customer testimonials all the time about individual employees, which become part of the process to share best practices throughout the organization.
Is your brand one that customers have a passion or emotional connection too or for? How does that help or hinder customer loyalty?
Newsome: We think there is a huge emotional connection to our brand; we promise to deliver, “Peace of Mind,” and to a customer that translates into trust and reliability. That has universal appeal, whether you’re a single mother of two, a young couple just starting out, a small business owner, or a large multi-national corporation that employs thousands of workers. These are traits that have direct emotional appeal to our customers and we appreciate that fact.