Who Ever Says Thank You for Electricity? An Inspiring Success Story

At CX Bulletin, I try to cover major developments, new reports and research from around the world relating to customers, and to summarize and interpret them for you. And I never pull my punches when it comes to criticism.

A success story I read recently gave me a lot to think about. I felt the need to read it a second time. This time, I came away with renewed inspiration and growing admiration.

At its core, this story describes one of the first steps of a customer experience transformation and its successful results. But what really moved me was that the project was carried out patiently, carefully and boldly, and that it was born not in the flashy office towers of Istanbul but in Samsun — whose name makes all our hearts skip a beat — the city named in the opening sentence of Nutuk.

By all means, let’s keep following developments around the world. But if we don’t make time to applaud successful experience projects in our own country, and to draw plenty of inspiration from them, we’ll be doing the greatest possible disservice to the customer experience industry, which is still relatively new. That is why I wanted to share this heartwarming story with you, too:

No going through the motions: doing the painstaking work

Yeşilırmak Elektrik Dağıtım (Yedaş), a power distribution company, has brought all of its customer touchpoints together in one place. It saddens me to see that most voice-of-the-customer projects only ever make it this far, with nothing planned beyond that point. This time, I was thrilled to see so much more.

We can fall into the trap of seeing a Voice of the Customer (VoC) program as nothing more than regularly tracking and reporting customer requests. And yet isn’t one of the magic ingredients of customer experience “closing the loop” — and then, rather than stopping there, measuring the quality of that process and satisfaction with it, and entering an endless cycle of improvement? In this project, the shift to a customer-centric culture got off to such a strong start that the cycle of closing the loop, measuring and improving has also been put into practice with more than 150 users.

But I struggled to understand how they had tackled one major difficulty that few in the industry are aware of: power distribution is a hygiene factor. You won’t get positive feedback like “My chandelier is shining even more beautifully today” or “the electricity is so good that my TV picture looks sharper.” Global energy markets fluctuate; bills go up; a storm blows in (did I mention that Yedaş operates in the Black Sea region? 😊); power lines get damaged, and that is when customers remember their power distribution company.

Having chaired the jury at countless customer experience competitions, and having scrutinized and assessed entries from power distribution companies all over the world, I’m familiar with challenges like these. I even remember a Dutch power distribution company whose customer experience project I once evaluated at ICXA: it had to put the project on hold for two years because of the impact of the Ukraine-Russia war on the energy market. In short, a potential complaint and its resolution are anything but simple. Closing that loop, in particular, is a serious challenge. Well, let’s say it gets closed: going to your customer and asking how satisfied they were with the resolution process takes courage in its own right. 😊

My curiosity grew when I read in the success story that AI layers had also been implemented in this project, which Yedaş ran together with Wiseback. I reached out to Yedaş Customer Experience Manager Erdem Ertürk and Wiseback founder Hasan Genç. They were kind enough to answer my barrage of questions quickly and warmly. But when we saw that every email just led to another, they graciously agreed to my request for an online meeting so I could hear this story from its heroes.

In a very enjoyable conversation, I learned far more than what was in the case study they had shared. I listened in amazement as they described how, in roughly 1.5 years, they had started the project from scratch and moved it forward with a bold yet solid plan, and how they had improved customer experience in a challenging region. Hundreds of stakeholders used Wiseback to improve customer experience and resolve complaints quickly, working toward demanding KPI targets with great energy. The result was a well-deserved victory: resolution ratings have doubled.

Toward the end of our conversation, as they described how they celebrate CX Day with their customers every year and how they use surprise gifts, the success story took on even more meaning.

How about a quick recap?

• A very tough industry
• A storm-prone region that is hard to get around
• Transforming the organization’s culture into a customer-centric one across an operation spanning five provinces
• “End-to-end voice-of-the-customer strategy and management” in substance, not just in name
• On top of all that, deeply integrating AI into the project, not because it is trendy but to improve customer experience
• Doubling customers’ ratings of resolution quality

And let’s admit it: patience is not our strongest trait as a nation. I think even pressing on down this road with determination for 1.5 years deserves applause in itself. I wanted to share this success story, which inspired and surprised me so much, with you as well. My thanks to Erdem Ertürk and Hasan Genç for a very enjoyable conversation, and my congratulations to them for inspiring us all with their exemplary project.

What, and who, has been inspiring you lately in the world of customer experience? Please share stories like this with me too; let’s celebrate them together. While everyone is focused on competition, I think we as the customer experience industry could make more room for solidarity, and for growing and developing together.