Enbridge Chooses i-Sight Complaint Tracking System to Ensure Resolution of Every Complaint

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Enbridge Gas Distribution

Enbridge Gas Distribution has implemented the i-Sight Service and Complaint Tracking System to improve its handling of customer concerns and complaints. Enbridge Gas Distribution is Canada's largest natural gas distribution company, serving more than 1.7 million customers in Ontario, Quebec and New York State.

"At Enbridge, we are committed to ensuring that our customers’ questions and concerns are handled quickly, efficiently and fairly," says Mike Mees, Customer Ombudsman, Enbridge Gas Distribution. "We selected i-Sight because it helps us to meet that commitment. With i-Sight, we now have a consistent process for managing complaints and ensuring timely follow-up and resolution."

Challenge

Every day, thousands of Enbridge customers contact the company’s call center to speak with a Customer Service Representative (CSR). Most of the time, the CSR is able to answer the customer’s question and resolve the issue during the first point of contact. Approximately 30 to 40 calls are escalated to a manager or supervisor within the call center. If the manager or supervisor is unable to resolve the problem, the case is escalated again.

Until recently, however, there was no common set of procedures for handling complaints that could not be settled within the call center. Sometimes the complaint would be forwarded to a senior manager in the corporate head office; at other times, it might be passed along to one of Enbridge’s regional offices. Managers had no easy way of monitoring the complaint handling process, and the speed with which customer issues were reviewed and resolved varied widely. Inevitably, some customers were left feeling frustrated and ignored.

Solution

After a thorough review of the company’s complaint tracking ing processes, Enbridge appointed Mike Mees to the newly created position of Customer Ombudsman. At the same time, the company decided to replace its existing complaint-tracking system, based on Microsoft Access, with i-Sight Service and Complaints Software from Customer Expressions, the leader in customizable, web-based solutions for business processes that require case management.

Now, every complaint that cannot be resolved by a CSR is logged in the i-Sight tracking system by the call center manager or supervisor to whom it has been escalated. From that point on, i-Sight maintains a detailed record of every decision or interaction related to the case. And because the system has been customized to meet Enbridge’s specific requirements and business processes, managers have the assurance that each case will be handled promptly, consistently and efficiently.

At Enbridge, complaints that cannot be resolved by a call center manager are now escalated directly to one of three staff members in the Ombudsman’s office. i-Sight provides them with the full case history and all relevant information about the customer’s issue. If necessary, the staff member can forward the complaint either directly to Mees or to a designated support person in one of the regional offices. That individual would then follow up and record the outcome in i-Sight.

"One of the things we realized during our review was that we needed to make it as easy as possible for people to enter information in the tracking system," Mees says. "Our old system was not very user-friendly, so people tended to avoid it. On top of that, it was not easy to add new users. It required a fair bit of training and the employee needed to have access to one particular server on the network, which often required technical support."

With i-Sight, those problems have disappeared. The software is also remotely hosted and web-based, which means there is no server hardware to manage and no need to jump through technical hoops to provide access to employees in various remote offices. And instead of a long list of questions and fields to be filled in, i-Sight walks the user step-by-step through the complaint-logging process, displaying only the relevant fields and eliminating the need to re-key information that is already in the system.

"Since we implemented i-Sight, we have had fantastic feedback,” Mees says. “The training is minimal and everybody who uses the tool has had a positive response. People love it because it helps them do their job and is so easy to use."

"It was an extremely smooth implementation," he says. "In fact, our project manager called them the best vendor he has ever dealt with. The support he has received from the i-Sight team is amazing."

In addition, Mees and his staff can now easily assign cases to employees elsewhere in the organization. "Our old complaint tracking tool did not allow us to do that. If you wanted to refer a complaint to someone else, you had to follow up manually with that person." With the new system, it takes only a few clicks to assign a case directly to another staff member. "All of the administrative support people in our regional offices have access to the i-Sight tool, which makes things a lot easier and more efficient." Automatic alerts and reminders help to ensure that every case is handled promptly and professionally.

i-Sight also provides a full complement of pre-configured reporting tools. In seconds, Mees can see how many complaints have been logged during a specified period, how many remain to be resolved, the average time to resolution, the most common problems, the geographic distribution of complaint cases, and much more. "With i-Sight it is easy to spot trends so that we can determine what is causing the complaints. And because i-Sight is so simple to use, we are confident that all of the complaints we receive will be properly logged in the system. As a result, we should have much better statistics."

Mees isn’t just pleased with the i-Sight software – he also has high praise for the team at Customer Expressions who were responsible for developing and helping to implement the solution. "It was an extremely smooth implementation," he says. "In fact, our project manager called them the best vendor he has ever dealt with. The support he has received from the i-Sight team is amazing."

"In fact, our project manager called them the best vendor he has ever dealt with. The support he has received from the i-Sight team is amazing."

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