Puro Power is one of the few survivors of the carnage experienced in the UK energy supply sector over the course of 2021-22 when a large proportion of the myriad providers in what used to be a lively and competitive energy market were forced to close. Despite their resilience, Puro Power are becoming increasingly aware that the gradual lifting of the government price caps and resulting vertiginous rises in consumer energy costs are causing not only a drop in demand but also a rise in late payments of bills.
The company decides to analyse the profiles of those customers who have fallen behind with their energy bills. To their surprise, they find that what appears to differentiate these customers from the ones who manage to keep up with their payments is that on average their energy consumption has not reduced and in about half of the cases it has actually increased slightly, resulting in a considerable hike in their bills as prices rose sharply. They refer to this group of customers as “the ostriches” due to their tendency to bury their heads in the sand in the wake of the crisis in the energy market.
Although not all “ostriches” had fallen behind with their bills, the statisticians found that the propensity to fall into debt was much higher in the “ostrich” population than in the general customer base, so they decide to take action.
Analysing their data, they isolate the group of customers whose energy consumption has remained roughly constant or increased since the start of the energy crisis. Using advanced data segmentation technology (such as the one available from Noetica), they devise a targeted strategy of contacting this selection of customers with highly targeted offers.
Wisely, Puro Power’s marketing experts decide to contact this population by phone, as “ostriches” are known to ignore any letters or other written communications.
For instance, such customers who were not yet on smart meters are offered incentives to install those. Those who were already in arrears were offered a reduction in their debt as an incentive to install those meters, on the understanding that they would monitor their consumption going forward. For those customers in the “ostrich” population who were not in any noticeable financial difficulties, the chosen approach is to have a conversation and attempt to gain some understanding of their financial circumstances. Depending on these, using a process built into the call centre agents’ application (using technologies such as Noetica’s no-code scripted apps), advice is provided on ways of reducing their energy consumption, proactively enrolling them on a series of schemes that would reward them for such drops in their monthly consumption.
As an immediate result of using these technologies in combination with an efficient yet compliant dialler (such as Noetica’s), Puro Power is seeing a dramatic reduction in the number of their late payers, while the rest of the market is struggling to cope with mounting volumes of debt and defaults. All this is made possible by the intelligent use of a range of technologies and a responsible, targeted and discriminate deployment of outbound voice dialler (such as the one offered by Noetica).
