CX and VoC Insights with Chris Hilborn of Liberty Utilities

As we approach CS Week, I wanted to share a recent conversation with a leading CX expert, Chris Hilborn, Vice President Customer Insights and Solutions at Liberty Utilities.  I first met Chris not long after he joined Liberty, having been introduced to him through a colleague at my company who was talking to Chris about customer service and support.  Chris and I quickly drifted into topics about customer experience, voice of the customer, and the challenges of delivering a cohesive customer experience across so many operating companies, geographies and customer needs.  I appreciated the nimble approach required to navigate that diverse customer ecosystem and Chris’ thoughtful and strategic insights.

I sat down electronically this week to catch up with Chris and learn more about how his thinking has evolved in the three years since that first conversation, and capture some of his tips and insights that we could share with our own Customer Experience Management teams, as well as with the Energy Central community.  Here’s a snippet of that conversation organized for your reading experience.

Wilkinson: Chris, good to speak with you again.  Remind me how you became interested in Customer Experience and Voice of the Customer (VoC) in particular, and how your early career prepared you for tackling the unique challenges of the diversified service delivery and customer ecosystem at Liberty Utilities. 

Hilborn: I have been interested in Customer Experience (CX) and better understanding customers since my early days as a Chemical Engineer working with utilities and industries as my customers.  But it was really while at a large Canadian telecom provider as the Director of Retention responsible for a base of 7 million retail customers that I gained a deep understanding for the customer.  To be successful I needed to understand customer buying and usage behavior to anticipate customer churn before it happened.  At that time, we didn’t have the same sophisticated Customer listening tools we have today, so would spend time in the call centers, in the retail stores and run focus groups to understand what our customers needed and wanted from their telco provider.  Early indicators as to when a customer was thinking of canceling services allowed us to create models and proactively communicate offers to reduce churn.   

The utility space is similar to other industries, and while customers in many areas don’t yet have the same choices of energy and water services as they do with cell phones or internet services, they do have choices.  And they have more and more choices every day.  A gas customer could switch to electric and vice versa.  Customers have solar and battery options.  At Liberty, our goal is to ensure that “When customers have a choice, they will choose Liberty”.  We need our customers to be loyal to Liberty.  To do this, we are working to deliver what our customers want:  Ease, value, quality and sustainability.  One of our challenges is that we have customers in 14 US States and 1 Canadian; these customers have different wants and needs.  We have Voice of Customer (VoC) listening tools in each of our utilities to understand what our customers prioritize so that we can better meet their wants and needs. 

Wilkinson:  You make a great point about customer choice and the lessons from other industries.  In US deregulated markets, the choice is only a matter of provider for a limited commodity set, and then only a few markets with what customers probably recognize as true free market choice, like in most of Texas for electric or say Georgia for gas.  The future promises more options to choose to participate or not, like you describe with solar and battery, community solar, microgrids, and other solutions.  Not tomorrow, but no longer science fiction, either.  The industry should adapt to the customer aspect of that impending shift.   

Part of the challenge is that the utility industry doesn’t always get recognized as being very customer centric, as putting the customer experience at the core of the decision-making process.  It’s still very much industrially focused at the core.  Liberty has a reputation for being very customer centric, and members at all levels at Liberty Utilities have appeared on panels and at events to talk about programs related to CX insights and successes.  For practitioners in the industry, tell me a bit more about how you develop that kind of mission cohesion across the enterprise, because it sounds like a “must have” feature for CX success in the future.

Hilborn:  Yes, this cohesion is a must have.  The utility industry is going through a transition to be much more customer centric.  Liberty is leading the way as we pivot to a customer centric regulated services company that has assets, from an asset centric utility company that has customers.  This pivot is essential as meeting the constantly evolving needs of our customers is key to delivering sustainable growth.

Building a customer centric culture takes time and while we have made tremendous progress we are still on a journey to be even more customer centric.  A customer centric culture requires both a top-down mandate as well as a bottom-up build from practitioners that are passionate about serving the customer.  At Liberty, we are going through a digital transformation that includes changing our ERP, CIS, EAM, HRIS and other related systems to make it easier for our employees to serve our customers and deliver to customer expectations.  This is a great starting point to be more customer focused, however to create a journey and drive ongoing improvements we needed a Customer Experience vision that our team members could align behind.  To create the vision, I brought the 5-year strategic planning process to Liberty.  More than just a budget, the 5-year strategic plan outlines how we are going to improve our CX, how much it will cost, how it will be measured, and the expected outcomes at the end of the five years.  I created a 5-year customer strategy from the bottom up, using VoC data, market data, and equally as important the insights and experiences of each of the utility Presidents.  Bringing the utility Presidents together, who operate thousands of miles apart in different environments, provided not only their insights but also created alignment and cohesion around the strategy for successful implementation and execution.  

Developing alignment also comes sharing real data and the actions that drive improvements.  As part of the 5-year strategy my team implemented a holistic VoC program that brought the customer voice to the forefront of discussions.  Utility leaders are data driven, and we captured their attention when we were able to share real-time data from multiple listening channels including transaction surveys, relationship surveys and customer panel responses.  Then the magic happens as we are able to turn data into recommendations and then into actions and results.  We call this “Closing the Loop’ as we close the loop directly with our customers that have had a bad experience, directly with our employees that need training, and sharing aggregated data and insights with our leaders to drive future improvements.  Not only has this reduced commission complaints, we have also updated processes such as our outage notification process and our complaints process.   This data is a key driver to the customer centric culture at Liberty.

Wilkinson:  We’ve talked about this theme a few times.  That closed loop process is so critical to really connecting with customers.  I talk about it with our teams in terms of the state of mind of the customer.  Imagine a customer who has just finished a sub-optimal experience.  It could have been disappointing or frustrating or confusing, but it didn’t solve the customer’s issue to their satisfaction.  They receive a link to a survey and send their very frank feedback likely to be at the low end of the scoring range.  In a normal situation, even if the utility processed the situation, identified an issue and made a correction so that customers no longer experience the problem, the customer who raised the issue may never know the outcome.  By closing the loop, by escalating that issue and making contact with the customer while the experience is fresh in their minds, you let them know that their voice has been heard and that the utility takes their feedback seriously.  In many cases, customers give the utility credit for trying even if the issue can’t be immediately resolve, and those customers are more willing to give the utility the benefit of the doubt the next time something happens because you’ve demonstrated a willingness to engage.  It’s such an important milestone in the customer journey.  Sounds like you’ve mastered it at Liberty.

So, every good CX and VoC program always produces more insights and opportunities for improvement than a company can possibly implement, which is exactly what we want, right?   Tell me how you’ve learned to prioritize those inputs and initiatives, and what best practices have you applied to the decision-making process to ensure that you are using the company’s resources responsibility to achieve the right CX outcomes?

Hilborn: You are absolutely right.  Our VoC program is providing more improvement opportunities than we can possibly implement in a year and thus we need to prioritize our initiatives. 

When I started with Liberty back in 2020, we had an instinctive feel of where we should focus, however we didn’t have the data we have today to help us prioritize.  In the absence of VoC data, we built a model with ESource to help us predict which opportunities would provide the biggest lift to our CSAT scores.  From our limited data, we looked at how many customers were experiencing an issue, how many customers we could affect across our utilities, and how ready we were as a company to implement a solution.  This allowed us to prioritize our ideas and create our first annual CX plan.  We now use this type of modeling with our 5-year strategy process.

Our comprehensive VoC listening program has really allowed us to understand what our customers want and need and this data forms the foundation of our strategic planning.   With the VoC data, market data and insights from the utility Presidents, we align on the projects that will drive the largest impact aligned with our resources and maturity level. The projects are prioritized and sized so we can then see which projects will fit into the capital allocated to the CX program.  While this may sound straight forward, it takes sophisticated analytics and a leadership team aligned to the process and the customer vision.

Wilkinson:  So true, and you’re correct to say that while that process sounds very straight forward, the challenges always find a way to creep into the process.  Each step in the process from collecting and synthesizing the data to making sense of the feedback to translating those insights into action plans and building consensus with stakeholders to remain aligned with customer and business goals all come with their own complications and challenges.  It’s the never ending journey.

I know that you are speaking at CS Week in a few weeks.  Tell us about your session and how to find it. 

Hilborn:  I am honored to be speaking at CS Week this year.  I will be speaking with Chad Garrett from ESource on “Using Analytics to Enhance the CX and Predict Satisfaction”.  We will be talking about prioritizing projects based on expected outcomes and sharing some other stories from the trenches as we implemented the VoC program.  It is part of the Strategies & Analytics stream on May 1 from 3:15 – 4:15.

Wilkinson:  I want to thank Chris Hilborn for taking time to share his experience and insights with us.  Chris and the entire team at Liberty Utilities have done terrific work bringing the customer mindset into the decision-making process at Liberty.  You can find Chris on LinkedIn or stop by and see him at the upcoming CS Week event in Fort Worth, Apr 29 – May2.  His workshop with Chad Garrett will be in room 202C in the Convention Center from 3:15p-4:15p, and I recommend checking it out.  Chris is a gifted speaker and along with Chad, always delivers a great presentation.