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In November 2008, we completed the final transfer of customers onto a new SAP billing platform. While we expect the new billing platform to benefit both AGL and our customers in the long term, the process of transferring our customers to the new billing system resulted in delays in the provision of bills to some customers. In some cases, bills were delayed for up to 360 days. As a result, we received an increased number of complaints from customers as well as adverse media commentary and increased regulatory scrutiny.
In response to this unacceptable customer impact, AGL delivered two key programs of work: the first being to address the immediate issue of billing backlog; the second being to re-emphasise that the customer is central to everything that we do.
The billing backlogs have now been cleared. The number of unbilled accounts has been reduced from 270,000 in March 2009 to 28,000 at 30 June 2009, and has since fallen to 13,000 by mid-August 2009. The target is to have no unbilled accounts greater than 30 days overdue by the end of December 2009.
During 2008/09 AGL introduced a new Customer Experience business unit. The aim of this unit is to put the customer experience at the forefront of business change and all that we do at AGL. This business unit has overall control of the management of feedback from our customers including complaints and is driving a program of work to improve our complaint handling processes.
Ombudsman complaints increased significantly this year. One of the main causes for the high levels of Ombudsman complaints has been delayed billing, attributed to the lasting effects of the Project Phoenix implementation. Complaints peaked across all States in March 2009 prior to the clearing of billing backlogs.
Complaints by customers to the Ombudsman have fallen during the first four months of 2009/10. AGL’s target is to reduce Ombudsman complaints to 45 per 10,000 customers for 2009/10, a decrease of 35% from 2008/09. During 2009/10 we will develop a longer-term improvement goal for future years.
In December 2008, a comprehensive Quality Assurance program was implemented to improve customer service by our operational teams. AGL now measures the way we communicate with our customers, looking at those things that directly affect customer satisfaction. These customer service metrics are monitored to assist with employee performance management and identification of training needs. This has resulted in more consistent management of customer processes and improved interaction with our customers.
AGL has changed its methods of managing work to bring a greater focus onto the customer. Our retail operations now work on the basis of completing ‘today’s work today’, so that work on resolving a customer’s query is initiated on the same day that it is raised. This has resulted in improved turn around time of work allocated to employees, driving a faster resolution of customer issues. This method of work allocation has only been possible since customers were transferred to a single billing system, and is one of the benefits that Project Phoenix has delivered.
We have continued to meet our regulated grade of service targets for call handling at contact centres across Australia, for all States except South Australia. Our contact centre employees have worked hard to deal with the increased call volumes and issues being raised. Through the implementation of Project Phoenix, we now have an environment that enables us to ‘smooth’ call volumes across Australia. This has resulted in better management of peaks and troughs of calls across all States.
During 2008/09, the average speed of answer has been 61 seconds, with an average of 78% of calls answered within 30 seconds. This is consistent with 2007/08. The average speed of answering calls has been consistent across all call centres for the year.
