Contact Lens

A Closer Look at USP’s Contact Centre Operations
August 2023

By Josef Rosenberg, Contact Centre Manager, Utility Safety Partners

August is, if nothing else, steady. 

Steady drumming of fingers on keyboards, steady calls flowing effortlessly through our VoiP system and into the waiting ears of agents, and steady days of continuous work becoming steady weeks.

So, of course, I thought, “This would be a terrific time to start a customer survey!”

Fundamentally, we wanted to determine why, in the year 2023, a segment of our homeowner users preferred to call in by phone (which of course, means potentially waiting on hold, risking a less accurate locate request, and taking longer than two minutes to process) rather than placing their request on our website. To sweeten the pot, we also had a draw for a fabulous LED TV at the end of the survey window.

All in all, the duty of helping USP (and the lure of a new TV) convinced many to contribute – 1,624 homeowners placed non-emergency tickets during the survey interval, with about 52.3 per cent (849) of those agreeing to participate. This is an excellent sample size.

We asked a myriad of questions, primarily on whether people were aware they could place a ticket online (40 per cent of respondents did not know they could), which parts of the website they found most frustrating (over half of respondents said they had issues with the account creation process), and whether they had any issues with the mapping tools (only about 20 per cent or so did, which is lower than expected).

Very few of the callers (less than two per cent) choose to call in their work by phone because of their project’s complexity; rather they were not looking for the assistance of an agent, but to avoid parts of the website they did not want to encounter. Finally, 40 per cent of all respondents stated that just simplifying the account creation process would make them more likely to use the site in the future.

With the information we gathered from users, USP feels that we’re ready to make some notable changes to the website going forward that will hopefully spur even more homeowners to use it as their preferred course in 2024. It's going to be a busy winter!