Improving the complaints experience for British Gas customers
British Gas receive around 200k complaints a year via their online channels (chat, social, e-form, email).
Original British Gas complaints page
The problem
British Gas receives many complaints via email and letter, the slowest and least satisfying channels. Web chat, though accounting for only 2-3% of demand, offers faster resolutions and a better experience. However, it handles many general inquiries (50%) and complaints directed to the wrong department, wasting agent time and increasing costs.
Insights
Through meetings with stakeholders, we gained a clear understanding of the customer and business processes for online complaints.
We identified pain points, costs, and average resolution times for each channel. By sampling 60 web chat transcripts from one day in June, we found that 46% of chats were general inquiries, with 21% about engineer visits, 14% about HomeCare, and 10% about Direct Debits or tariffs.
Prototype and test
Using the insights gained from our stakeholders and chat transcripts we designed a new flow with three major changes.
Firstly, we designed a multi page flow which took users through a triage to help them understand what type of complaint they had.
Proposed multi page complaints flow
Secondly, we surfaced the most common types of enquiries on the startpage. We hoped this would help to divert some of the non-complaints customers away from the complaints journey.
Start page
Finally, we added a large web chat lockup on the final page which we hoped would attract more clicks and increase the web chat demand.
Web chat lockup
We tested the prototype with 5 users (1 British Gas customer, 4 non British Gas customers).
Key findings
Users who had incorrectly selected their department on the existing page were able to choose correctly on the prototype. When asked to resolve a general inquiry, they successfully exited the complaints journey.
All users noticed and recognised the web chat option at the end of their journeys.
Launch
View the new complaints journey – released September 2020.
As of November 2020, web chat demand increased from 2-3% to around 10%. Agents are now handling fewer complaints from customers in the wrong department.
However, general inquiries are still reaching complaints agents, due to factors outside this project's scope.