Customer Champion Awards are given to employees who go above and beyond to provide outstanding service to either internal or external customers. Recipients of the award demonstrate best practices of owning the customer experience. At the January Leadership Forum, Curtis Popp, Vice President, Customer Operations, announced two individual winners for the fourth quarter of 2018 and one team winner for the 2018 Annual Customer Champion award. Read more to learn about our most recent Customer Champions.
Fourth Quarter 2018 Customer Champions
Vicki Hughes, Contact Center Supervisor, was named a Customer Champion for the special concern she showed for an elderly customer. Hughes has become a point of contact for Citizens’ field service personnel who encounter elderly customers living in unfavorable conditions and who may be in need of assistance.
On one particular occasion this past December, a customer was living without gas and water service because she could not afford the repairs necessary to fix leaks in her lines. She had no phone or internet service at her home, so the only way to communicate with the customer was by making an in-person visit. Unfortunately, there was a very strong, unpleasant odor inside the home, making it even more difficult for Citizens personnel to talk with the customer and explain that the repairs were the homeowner’s responsibility and would have to be made before Citizens could restore service.
Hughes was contacted by a District Supervisor about this situation because of her reputation for advocating for the elderly and carrying out the best practices of identifying unvoiced needs, making it personal, and acting with urgency. Hughes demonstrated collaboration by reaching out to a local assistance agency, which sent a plumber to the residence to fix the leaks.
Because Hughes went above and beyond her normal work duties to make contact with external resources for the customer, Citizens was able to restore gas and water service, which the customer had been living without for nearly a month.
Staci Lewis, Quality Systems Analyst, (who was a New Service Specialist in the Business Contact Center at the time of nomination) received a Customer Champion Award for improving a tool used by employees in the Business Contact Center, Residential Contact Center, and Billing Department. Customer Transcript is a custom tool developed by IT to provide a breakdown of charges on a customer’s bill. It was in desperate need of an update because it was producing data that was not easy for the customer to understand, and in some cases, was inaccurate.
Lewis demonstrated the best practices of collaborating, continuously improving, making it personal, and knowing the business in order to find a solution. She worked with the IT department to redesign the tool, making it easier for employees to enter data and customers to understand the information. She used lunch breaks to work on the project, because those who would normally help with testing the newly designed tool were tied up with the CIS replacement project. Besides performing testing, she also made suggestions to improve design and functionality to deliver a user-friendly experience for both employees and customers.
Annual 2018 Customer Champions
Jeff Price and Brian Sharp were named the Citizens Energy Group 2018 Annual Customer Champions. This team carried out several best practices of owning the customer experience in order to communicate with a customer who is blind and deaf. They were relentless in their efforts to close the loop. They acted with urgency, and in the spirit of continuous improvement, identified an unvoiced need, made it personal, and found ways to collaborate with others in order to communicate with the customer about work they needed to do near the residence. Jeff and Brian were the recipients of a team Customer Champion Award for the third quarter of 2018. More details can be found in the article from the January issue of Engauge.
The next deadline to nominate employees for Customer Champion Awards is March 29. We encourage you to share “wow” stories that demonstrate the best practices of closing the loop, making it personal, challenging the process, acting with urgency, identifying unvoiced needs, collaborating, knowing the business, and continuously improving.
