Customer journey and consumer regulations

Overview

Delivery of smart local energy systems (SLES) requires the deployment of a high volume of assets: heating systems, batteries, solar, electric vehicles, wind.

This will usually be done through the sale of products and services to individuals therefore a key aspect to deliver SLES successfully is a customer service model that needs to offer appealing products and good service. What products and services you offer may differ between different SLES and locations, but the experience of bundling products and services is transferrable.

As most energy related products and services, such as electricity, heating, and transport, are paid for privately by consumers by their nature SLES involve multiple organisations and are thus impacted by consumer regulation and protections.

This creates complex customer journeys and thus a challenge to SLES to deliver efficient customer service and recruit the high volume of customers needed for the SLES to function.

The ReFLEX experience: from one-stop-shop aspiration to local energy services hub

ReFLEX Orkney aimed to establish a one-stop-shop for energy services. We set up the ReFLEX Experience Centre in Kirkwall co-locating the customer team’s office and a workshop for prepping vehicles. This enabled customers to come in to speak to staff, take test drives, and collect their new vehicles.

The aim was for the customer team to provide a central contact point for services that are delivered through multiple businesses. Each of the services offered aimed to join up commercial products with grant funding or affordable finance, which meant that ReFLEX Orkney worked with external suppliers for each of our service offerings. For example:

• For electric cars the leasing is brokered with DriveElectric and the finance with either Arval or Lex Auto, and we helped customers access grant funding from the UKRI funding to ReFLEX, Energy Savings Trust (EST) and the Office for Zero Emissions Vehicles (OZEV).
• For the car club we work with Co Wheels.
• For the chargers we work with RS Merriman as the installer and MyEnergi as the supplier of the Zappi smart charger.

However, if there's a problem with a vehicle, it has to be reported by the customer to the leasing finance company as they own the vehicle and hold the warranty. Likewise, if there is an issue with a car charger, customers need to report directly to MyEnergi due to how the warranty works.

The ReFLEX customer team’s role in this is to handle all initial enquiries, track where in the journey a customer is, help customers to understand the process they need to follow and be a point of contact for help through-out that journey. We also act as administrative support for the suppliers and gathered data for the research aspect of the project.

This multi-partner approach allows the project to partner with well-established businesses and give customers the best products and financial help.

However it creates a challenge to having a one-stop-shop from a customer service point of view. Data protection law, warranty T&Cs, and FCA regulations mean that customers still have to interact directly with multiple organisations – ReFLEX staff can’t provide the single point of contact we initially hoped to. If someone leases a car and gets a charger that’s six or seven organisations they may have to engage with. So we are more of a hub, coordinating service for people to get multiple products (electric vehicles and chargers) in one place and guiding them through sometimes complex customer journeys.

The ReFLEX team can help people navigate a process they would otherwise have to do all themselves, but it creates false expectations with customers to call it a one stop shop so we've had to change our approach along the way.

Learnings and outcomes

As a demonstration project trying to develop a model that shows how to bring together multiple products, services and funding to make it easier for people to decarbonise affordably, these complex relationships are a challenge and an area of ongoing learning for team.

We get a lot of feedback from customers thanking the customer team for our help in navigating a process that they would have had to figure out on their own – like getting a charger and applying for the grants at the right time. But we also get feedback from customers where there have been challenges due to the number of organisations involved, breakdowns in communication, etc. Throughout the project we are constantly looking at how we can refine and improve working between the organisations involved, to make it easier for customers.

We have managed to instigate some changes in the system to improve the customer journey. For example, following feedback from customers about the EV charger process, we worked with MyEnergi to improve the process enabling RS Merriman to liaise with MyEnergi on the customer’s behalf once the initial case number is received (customers still need to make the initial report themselves due to the warranty).

Next steps

The UKRI grant funding provided to set up the ReFLEX Orkney project and demonstrate a smart local energy system came to an end in March 2023, however ReFLEX Orkney Ltd, Orkney's local energy services business set up during the project, is here to stay. ReFLEX Orkney continues to offer electric cars to lease or buy, can support you in getting an EV charger installed and we are working on some exciting new offers, coming soon.

We may also seek FCA authorisation in the future if this supports a smoother customer journey and allows us to offer more products and services.