Energizing Culture Change

Volumes have been written about how to create culture change in organizations, and usually the discussion focuses on top-down strategies. But at electric utility Ameren Missouri, change is a collaborative, grassroots organizational effort, powered by continuous customer feedback and rewarded through corporate incentives and recognition mechanisms. Ameren’s efforts have produced a new culture of accountability and customer focus among its employees.

Ameren Missouri is an electric and gas utility with 1.2 million customers across central and eastern Missouri, including the greater St. Louis area. In 2004, it halted its customer satisfaction survey. Under that system, customers were called one to three months after a customer service event, and managers received their responses on paper in large binders up to three months after a survey was completed. By the time the information reached managers best-equipped to affect change, feedback was old and couldn’t provide actionable insights, guidance for learning or solutions to fix identified problems.

In 2005, Ameren partnered with CMI, a market research firm, to build a new customer feedback program. The program’s goals included producing more timely, accurate and actionable information to act as a driver of culture change in the organization and provide a foundation for learning and development for front-line, customer-facing employees.

The new program would provide statistically valid and quantifiably measurable feedback as well as anecdotal insights from customers. Further, to be seen as credible and useful for learning and improvement, the information had to be available within a short time following customer interaction.

The resulting program is an information-driven customer feedback system called Field Operations Customer Survey (FOCUS), a telephone survey that asks customers to rate performance on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the most positive rating. Interviewers also capture verbatim feedback regarding specific experiences.

Ameren delivers customer feedback quickly to managers through a Web-based program called Web Insights Navigator (WIN) that allows managers across the organization to access monthly FOCUS results relevant to their area of responsibility.