Customer convenience
The key determining factor of customer satisfaction is the convenience they experience. Immediately after we complete a job, we ask customers for feedback on our services. To express the amount of convenience experienced by customers, we calculate a score – the Net Effort Score, or NES. We calculate the NES by deducting the percentage of customers experiencing some or a lot of difficulty with the service from the percentage of customers finding it easy or very easy. This information gives us insight into the good results we achieve and the areas where improvements still need to be made. Customer convenience can come under pressure owing to difficulties completing all the work we have to do, the long waiting times customers face, and the fact that we are not always able to provide the required capacity. Despite this, the figures remained fairly stable.
Customer convenience in consumer and business markets
Customer convenience rated by business customers
In 2020, customer convenience based on the Net Effort Score (NES), as rated by business customers, rose to 35%, compared with 33% in 2019. When customers express dissatisfaction, the reasons they state mainly relate to increasing connection times and the increasing number of transmission limitations. Requests for quotes for solar power generation and the associated feed-in requests are also increasing sharply. As a result, requests cannot always be processed within the specified time periods. Customers also state that they have to put a lot of effort into getting the answer they are seeking during the implementation process.
Ensuring optimum customer convenience for business customers is a collaborative effort that involves many stakeholders, including municipalities, contractors and other business parties. The level of customisation is high. Where possible, the associated processes are optimised and digitalised.
Customer convenience rated by consumers
Our customer convenience score for the consumer market stood at 54% in 2020. This is similar to 2019 and a good performance in a COVID-19-stricken year. The most important points for attention in 2020 were the long waiting time between submission of the request and final execution of the work, and the quality of communications during the intervening period. This is where the customers experience the greatest inconvenience.
Drop in the number of customer queries
Customer queries fell by 3.2% compared with 2019, with pronounced reductions during the first lockdown and during the summer. The Customer Contact Centre mainly received questions about the application process, preventing disconnection, and information requests concerning the process for people without a contract. Customers consult the website primarily for information on outages and connections, or they visit the contact page.
Online customer service
The Liander.nl website was visited more than 3.3 million times in 2020. That represents an increase of 35% relative to the number of visits in 2019. During the period after the intelligent lockdown in March 2020, we saw an even sharper rise in the need for online communications about our services.
In 2020, we worked on expanding our self-service offering, resulting in the creation of a ‘Mijn Liander’ (My Liander) environment for consumers and small business customers among other additions. Customers can use this facility to create an account and access more detailed information about the status of their connections. They can also initiate or complete a number of actions online in this environment. In the coming years, we will expand the environment so that customers can increasingly arrange their grid-management affairs online. Examples of other changes to Liander.nl are online help when purchasing solar panels, more detailed information about the transmission capacity per region and an online knowledge database.