A Day In The Life: Shane Simpson, Head of Customer Experience at So Energy

As Head of Customer Experience at So Energy, it’s Shane Simpson’s job to oversee our award-winning customer service team, ensuring that any interaction you have with us is easy and stress-free. So what goes on behind the scenes to make that happen? We asked Shane to share with us what a typical day at work looks like for him.

Monday morning, 9am: My week begins with a review of our customer service figures from the previous week. This is an important job, which is why I get it done first thing; I review the figures to see how many enquiries we received last week from our customers, and use that data to do my planning for the week ahead. I work from a weekly forecast which sets out the volume of interactions we’re expecting to handle and where we’re at in terms of capacity planning. My goal is to ensure that we have the teams we need in place to deliver the excellent experience that we promise our customers.

10am: Forecast done and dusted, it’s straight into a weekly meeting with three of my customer service managers. On a Monday morning we’ve all got a lot of work to do, so we keep these meetings quite focused. We raise any concerns or challenges from the week before that still need resolving, then look at the week ahead: what projects do we have coming up, and what deadlines do we need to meet? My leadership approach is always to give my teams the trust and autonomy to get on with their projects without being micromanaged, so we talk through whether anyone needs any help from me to keep things moving forward, and then it’s on with our day.

11.30am: After a quick coffee while I catch up on emails, I meet with our team leaders to review key training and development milestones. We’re hiring quickly at So Energy, and there are a number of people on my team who have recently started. It’s important in their initial weeks on the job that we’re keeping a close eye on these individuals’ development, to ensure they’re settling in and receiving the training and support they need to flourish.

Training has always been enormously important to me. When hiring I’m always more interested in a person’s enthusiasm than I am their experience; skills can be learnt as you go, it’s finding people with the right mindset that’s really invaluable.

One of the things I love most about working with So Energy is how diverse we are as a company. Within our customer service team we have people of all ages and from all backgrounds. We really celebrate this diversity and when we reopened our office in Chiswick after lockdown we decorated the space with flags representing all the different countries that our employees are from. Having worked entirely from home throughout the height of the pandemic, it’s been fantastic to have that face-to-face interaction with the team again after so long.

1.30pm: After lunch I have a meeting with my own line manager. We’ve been working together to prepare figures for a board meeting later in the week. Today, we’re reviewing contact centre metrics - in other words, checking that our customers are receiving the appropriate level of customer service when they get in touch with us. We look at enquiries and assess the information the customer was given, the process that was followed and the efficiency with which we were able to resolve their question.

3pm: Back at my desk, I spend some time on a project I’m working on with our product team. Looking at how we can make our customers’ lives easier means asking the question: are there things we could be doing differently that would mean a customer didn’t have to contact us in the first place?

For me, customer service doesn’t start at the point when a customer needs to contact us, it begins much earlier. For the vast majority of our customers, we know that energy is something they don’t want to have to think about. So rather than needing to phone us if they have a question, how can we improve the experience a customer gets when they login to their account? Or how could we be making switching to us an even easier process? As a company, one of our core values is treating customers fairly and with integrity - and there’s always more we can be doing to ensure we stay true to our word, making energy simple, accessible, and stress-free.

5pm: My last meeting of the day, and I’ve been looking forward to this one all day. I’m meeting with one of my frontline staff who’s just passed probation. They’ve already been in touch with some brilliant ideas about things we could be doing better, so we’re going to sit down and chat through some of their suggestions.

This is undoubtedly the best part of my job. I really believe in the power of leadership and mentoring in helping people achieve their potential, and it’s great to work with a company that fully supports that approach.