Effective Customer Engagement During a Crisis
A Guide for Utilities
Data-driven insights for reaching out to customers effectively when times are tough.
Preparing for a crisis is an enormous challenge, even when you put decisive action plans into place early on. But in a prolonged crisis, such as the coronavirus outbreak, events unfold and change quickly over the course of days, weeks and months, and businesses face threats on many fronts. Revenues plummet. Employees suffer. Customers struggle. Services are limited. More and more customer balances go unpaid.
You need to act – fast. You need results – fast. But figuring out where to begin can be overwhelming.
We’ve got you.
What can companies do to prepare for and manage ongoing crises – right now?
We’ve put together this resource guide covering all the work we’ve done through the COVID-19 crisis showing how companies can–and should–engage customers in a way that will help them survive a volatile situation.
From understanding economic risk factors to determining which customers are newly vulnerable, we invite you to explore the materials below. We think you’ll find them useful–not just during the current crisis, but as you prepare for potential future crises, as well.
Looking for results? We’ve got them! Download our case studies on boosting CAP enrollment and finding delinquent customers most likely to pay in full.
Risk factors for contracting COVID-19, or losing income because of it, indicate an overlap with risk factors that make a person more likely than others to default on a utility bill, which means those who are already struggling are destined for a deeper struggle ahead. Join us for this deep dive into the data as we compare levels of risk among the citizens of Baltimore, Cincinnati and Greensboro, NC.
This step can be more complex than it seems on the surface. For example, our extensive billpay research has shown that generally speaking, younger people are more likely to default on payments than older people. This indicates that snail mail and 1-800 numbers may not cut it for outreach to a younger, more digitally engaged crowd. During the current crisis, effective outreach may mean charting new courses for customer engagement, as the stakes are higher than ever.
From psychological barriers to website blunders, we offer four major reasons your customers still haven’t enrolled in what should be extremely helpful assistance programs. Learn from this two-part series on why enrollment could be suffering, and get ideas on how to boost your awesome program’s numbers.
