Elenia powers the lives of over 432,000 people in 100 municipalities by building and maintaining Finland’s second largest electricity grid. One of Elenia’s largest projects is improving the reliability of power distribution by renewing older sections of the existing grid by placing the lines underground, where they are safe from the strain of the weather.
Customer experience is of great importance for Elenia, who aims to have the most satisfied customers in the industry. However, Elenia had recognised that grid renewal projects, dubbed Säävarma, were a source of immediate customer frustration due to lacking communication.
These projects were especially prone to inadequate customer experience, as they include working with excavators on private property, inconveniencing residents and raising concerns of safety. Customers would at times be left in the dark of how projects are moving. Construction projects could easily be postponed due to unforeseen changes in weather conditions or archeological findings within the construction area, resulting in prolonged project length, higher costs and customer dissatisfaction.
Respectively, directing the customer experience posed a challenge as well. Elenia’s contractors carrying out the construction work could have an array of their own sub-contractors, blurring the lines of responsibility over customer communication. At times there could be multiple people in direct contact with customers, driven by different motivations and with varying levels of customer service skills, resulting in a patchy customer experience.
Elenia recognised the need to deepen their interaction with customers throughout the customer journey, develop their communication and take responsibility for customer satisfaction through the layers of contractors.
Together with Elenia’s partners and key stakeholders we pinpointed the pains of customer communication within the customer journey that most often result in customer dissatisfaction in Säävarma projects. We started by building the customer journey and identifying when and why does communication fail and assigning respective actions to support proper transfer of information to customers whenever necessary.
We compiled these communication activities into a communication playbook for staff of Elenia, their contractors and subcontractors to refer to in the field when faced with situations requiring customer communication. The exhaustive playbook gives a quick overview of communication responsibilities and guidelines for ensuring proper communication towards customers. This results in customers being more informed about the project’s progress and thus feeling less inconvenienced and uninformed.
Acting according to Iona’s core values, “Plans alone are nothing”, we created an operational model to bring the playbook to life in everyday Säävarma operations. To validate its effectiveness, the playbook and its operational model was immediately piloted in ongoing Säävarma projects to gather feedback from customers.
Although Elenia felt that Säävarma projects were business as usual, we recognised that they could not be more distant from the everyday lives of their customers. Customers could be unaware of an upcoming Säävarma project until construction was starting in their neighbourhood. This sometimes resulted in dissatisfaction against the projects. Rather than fighting the opposition, we created a concept to increase collaboration between Elenia and its customers, labelled “Meidän Kylä”. Getting properly piloted whenever the pandemic situation permits, its objective is to increase bi-lateral communication and co-operation especially in the beginning of Säävarma projects.
Ensuring all Säävarma projects would have a warm welcome from all Elenia customers in the future, we provided Elenia with recommendations for organisation-wide implementation of the new customer communication playbook as well as of the Meidän Kylä- concept.
