Customer convenience
The key determining factor of customer satisfaction is the convenience they perceive in their contact with us. Immediately after completion of a job, we ask customers for feedback on our services. To express the amount of convenience experienced by customers, we calculate a score – the Net Effort Score, or NES. We calculate the NES by deducting the percentage of customers experiencing some or a lot of difficulty with the service from the percentage of customers finding it easy or very easy. This information gives us insight into the results we achieve and the areas where improvements still need to be made. In 2023, we improved the measurement method for NES consumers. Apart from providing a more relevant insight, this explains the break in the trend for this score. In 2024 we will start reporting the ‘% difficulty’ Key Performance Indicator. This KPI enables us to improve our insight into what inconveniences customers and the way in which we improve these things.
Customer convenience in consumer and business markets
Customer convenience rated by business customers
The NES for business customers rose from 34 to 36% in 2023, which is lower than the target of 42%. Perceived customer convenience during the establishment of a connection has remained stable, but this figure remains under pressure. The challenges here are still difficulties with the connection period and the associated communication. We have been working on this by training project managers in how to approach conversations with customers.
We have also improved the self-service environment for business customers so that they can personally take care of even more things online, like providing an account number for direct debits. Customers who have requested a higher contracted transmission capacity can also use ‘Mijn Liander’ to view the requested capacity for which they are on the waiting list. This information used to be available only by contacting customer services by telephone or by email. Since July 2023, we have also been offering a central data help desk together with the other network operators, where our partners in the energy transition can submit data requests.
Customer convenience rated by consumers
Our score for the consumer market stood at 43% in 2023. This is lower than in 2022 (49%) and below the target of 48%. The key cause of the continued drop remains the prolonged lead times between the moment someone requests a new connection and the performance of the work. Communication during the intervening period is also a point for attention, so we have improved communication for customers who submit a single request, for example. Their confirmation email will now also state the expected performance date. Furthermore, we have a simple online tool to offer consumers help when requesting a new connection. This gives customers all the information they need to achieve their sustainability improvement plans and stops them from requesting an excessively high capacity connection. We also launched the ‘Met de stroom vooruit’ (Powering ahead) multimedia campaign for consumers last year. In this campaign, we are raising customer awareness about the role of Liander and the challenges regarding the energy network, and offering consumers tips on what they can do.
Number of customer queries remains stable
We received over 376,000 customer queries by telephone in 2023, so those remained stable compared to 2022. Despite increasing dissatisfaction with connection lead times, the number of customer telephone queries remained more or less the same. This is because material shortages were resolved this year, so we were able to connect more customers, and we are now also informing customers more proactively about their request status.
The number of consumer complaints was about 1,900 in 2023. The number of claims was about 3,500 in 2023 and is comparable to 2022, only a large part of the claims in 2022 were the result of a major outage in Flevoland. Claims mainly relate to faults and damage caused by work. We have noticed that customers are willing to take us to court more often, supported by the publication of connection lead times in the ACM Netcode amendment decision in June 2023.