Customer convenience
The key determining factor of customer satisfaction is the convenience they experience. Immediately after completion of 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.
Customer convenience in consumer and business markets
Customer convenience rated by business customers
In 2021, customer convenience based on the Net Effort Score (NES), as rated by business customers, rose to 38%, compared with 35% in 2020. This increase is partly due to a high rating for the quotation process. The perceived convenience for business customers is however under pressure where connection implementation is concerned. Our total work package is larger than we can handle. Liander will deploy more technicians and resources in the coming years to increase the capacity of the power grid. One consequence, unfortunately, is that Liander can then deploy fewer technicians to connect large companies to the grid. This is a logical choice though, since a new connection is of little use if there is too little capacity on the grid.
Customer convenience rated by consumers
Our score for the consumer market stood at 51% in 2021 (2020: 54%). Customers are finding it more difficult to make arrangements for normal connections, remediation work and combined work. As in 2020, the most important points for attention were the long waiting time between submission of the request and final execution of the work, and the quality of communications during that period. Lead times are increasing due to the lack of capacity in the power grid. This makes effective management of customer expectations even more important. We focus on proactive communication about lead times to achieve this. As a result, consumers give us a high rating for customer interaction.
Drop in the number of customer queries
The Customer Contact Centre answered over 290,000 customer queries in 2021. Due to the introduction of a new method, the number of queries is not directly comparable to previous years. The queries were mostly about the customer's connection, the energy contract and feed-in. Customers consult the website primarily for information on outages and connections, or they visit the contact page.