“We deliver electricity to many households in Norway. When sudden price increases impacted the energy sector, we received around ten times more tickets every day. We used Zendesk to keep customers informed via email and set up the system to prioritise urgent tickets. Zendesk helps us be proactive, but it also enables us to be reactive when we need to be.”
Mattias Paul
Zendesk Specialist, Support Systems at Lyse
“It all comes down to trust. Agents need to be able to trust the system. They need to trust it to support them and trust in its ability to automate tasks that were previously done manually. Now we are using Zendesk, agents can rely on the system and the work processes we have in place.”
Øystein Valen
Team Lead of Customer Services at Lyse
Customer since
2014
Number of employees
2,000
support teams
34
96%
CSAT score on written channels
24/7
customer service
Lyse
The importance of personalised customer service
Norwegian company Lyse delivers energy and digital services to homes and businesses across Norway. As well as being Norway’s fourth largest producer of renewable hydropower and a key gas supplier, Lyse is also a leading provider of broadband, TV and mobile services through its brands Altibox and Ice.
The organisation is owned by 14 municipalities within Norway and employs around 2,000 people across the country. With such a diverse customer base, Lyse knows that personalised customer service is vital for the individuals, families and businesses it serves.
Lyse supports all the brands in its group via its dedicated customer service company, Lyse Dialog. Today, Lyse Dialog provides customer service 24/7 and employs 300 agents working across 34 support teams in key locations within Norway.
The need for a single system
Before Lyse moved its energy operations to Zendesk, the company used a range of tools and services to provide customer support. Often agents would have to log into multiple systems to get the information they needed, which could be frustrating and time consuming. The customer service team needed better visibility over its support operation.
Decisionmakers at Lyse were also very interested in streamlining working processes, removing repetitive manual tasks, and leveraging automation.
Lyse rolls out Zendesk across its energy company
The customer services leaders at Lyse were already familiar with Zendesk Sunshine Conversations, so moving all their customer service operations to the Zendesk system was the natural choice.
“It was easy to move messages from all our social media channels over to Zendesk,” explains Geir Kallmyr, Product Owner, Lyse. “Once we moved to Zendesk, we began rolling out different features and tools, such as support emails, back-office emails and web forms from our corporate portals.”
Lyse uses Zendesk Suite Enterprise Plus to deliver personalised customer experiences at scale. The company also uses Zendesk Guide to provide its energy customers with a self-service knowledge base for product information, quick answers and frequently asked questions.
The company’s customer service leaders were keen to use Zendesk Explore to leverage analytics and gain insights into their customer support operations. Using Explore enables them to access data-driven information, so they can continually monitor their operations and improve customer experience.
Decluttering and streamlining agents’ workloads
Customer service leaders at Lyse were keen to streamline the customer service teams’ workload. Working on the premise that “out of sight is out of mind”, they decided to tackle the challenge of visual overwhelm first. Within Zendesk, they created two overviews of work-in-progress. One view provided a complete overview of all open customer tickets and the second view showed just the open agent-assigned tickets that needed to be addressed by that particular agent. Now, when agents log on, they only see the tickets they need to work on immediately.
“Providing agents with a personal work view makes it easier for them to see what they need to do,” says Øystein Valen, Team Lead of Customer Services at Lyse Dialog. “Essentially, it declutters and streamlines their workload.”
The company is also using automated email reminders to streamline agents’ workload. “We integrated Zendesk’s Bump Bump Solve tool to automate email reminders. This ensures that pending enquiries from customers are followed up automatically,” says Mattias Paul, Zendesk Specialist, Support Systems at Lyse Dialog. “For example, let’s say a customer requests a field technician and an agent has emailed them to ask for further information. If the customer does not reply within a certain timeframe, we send a sequence of automated emails to follow up on the enquiry. If the customer does not get back in touch, they receive a final automated email explaining that we will close the ticket if we haven't heard from them within seven days.”
Having automated emails in place for various use cases means agents do not have to chase customers manually. Plus, tickets that are taken care of by automated emails are not shown in the agent’s personal work view.
Handling a dramatic increase in daily enquiries
The energy sector has been impacted by sudden changes and price increases. How did Zendesk help Lyse manage CX in these rapidly evolving circumstances?
“We supply energy all over Norway, and when prices increased, our customer service centre had approximately ten times more enquiries,” explains Øystein. “We had multiple times the number of chats and written enquiries through our web page and email. We thought we had a sufficient number of trained agents within those fields, but it was nowhere near enough to handle the tsunami that hit us.”
Working through each enquiry individually was not possible, so the customer service team emailed customers to provide further details and explain the situation. Any customers who needed additional information were asked to get back in touch, and the team set up a system in Zendesk, so they could prioritise these people first.
“We were able to halve the backlog of tickets so that we could focus on the most recent enquiries and priority tickets. Within a few weeks we were back in control. We would never have been able to do that without Zendesk,” adds Øystein.
So, what’s next for Lyse?
After successfully rolling out Zendesk across the organisation’s energy company, the customer service team plans to onboard further companies in the group.
“Our aim is to get omnichannel routing across all customer enquiries, so we are all working within the same user interface,” Mattias concludes. “Now, it's all about bringing all the customer's interests and interactions together, so all the agents within our customer service centre can access the information they need. We started out with the energy side of the business. Now we want to onboard the rest of Lyse Dialog and other parts of the company using the same workflow. So, this is just the start!”
