10 September 2026
A UK energy supplier running district heating networks across dozens of sites, serves thousands of residents but formally surveys only a fraction of the calls those residents make — and had no reliable way to see what was happening in the rest.
With a lean insight function supporting a fast-growing B2B and district heating business, the team needed a way to see further into its customer feedback, connect it to known seasonal patterns, and get sharper, faster reporting in front of both the contact centre and the exec team.
The challenge
The insight team manages customer feedback across several channels: a post-contact satisfaction survey run after every contact centre call, a broader annual B2B satisfaction and brand study, and feedback from engineer site visits. All of it flows through the same lean team, reported monthly.
Only a small share of contact centre interactions are ever formally surveyed. The rest of the customer voice, and the reasons behind it, stayed invisible.
“We only formally survey a small percentage of our contact centre calls. If we can get proper visibility into the rest, the picture changes completely.”
Customer Insight Lead
Three structural challenges were holding the programme back:
Most of the customer voice was going unheard.
With only a small fraction of calls surveyed, the team was reporting on a thin slice of the full picture, and had no way to bring the rest into view without buying and integrating a separate data source.
Reporting told stakeholders what they already knew.
Contact centre feedback echoed the numbers operational teams could already see themselves. Exec reporting gave a snapshot of score movement but little of the “why”, so it rarely changed a decision.
Known seasonal drivers were hard to prove consistently.
The team could already tell you that scores dip when the weather turns cold, spike around annual price changes, and improve after summer safety visits. Proving it cleanly, cut by cut, month by month, by hand, was a different problem entirely.
The solution
The supplier is deploying Relative Insight to bring its post-contact NPS survey and annual B2B satisfaction study into one comparative analysis layer, replacing manual verbatim coding with automated, repeatable reporting.
The deployment is structured across three key areas:
Unified analysis across every survey source
Post-contact NPS data and the annual B2B satisfaction study, previously analysed separately and manually, are now processed through the same deterministic engine, so operational and relationship-level scores can be compared on a like-for-like basis.
Trend tracking tied to known seasonal drivers
Custom themes covering supply issues, billing, and engineer visits are tracked over time and overlaid against known seasonal triggers: falling temperatures, annual price changes, and summer safety visits. What was previously an assumption, backed by patchy manual analysis, becomes evidence the team can show.
Automated reporting split by audience
Exec reporting gets a clean monthly snapshot of score movement and driving themes. Contact centre reporting goes deeper into root cause, so operational teams get something genuinely new rather than a repeat of numbers they can already see.
The rollout covers the supplier’s core district heating customer journey first, with the annual B2B satisfaction study and engineer visit feedback brought in as a second phase. As confidence builds, the plan is to extend automated reporting beyond the insight team to colleagues in the contact centre and customer operations who currently wait on manual reports to act.
Early Impact
The programme is still in its early phase, but the scope it’s already unlocking is significant.
50+
District heating sites brought into a single comparative view.
3
Distinct feedback journeys now unified into one single view.
12pt
NPS improvement targeted for the year ahead with evidence.
“The consistency is what matters most. Three people would code the same sentence three different ways. This doesn’t.“
Customer Insight Lead
Key takeaway
Early results point to a shift in how the insight team operates, not just what it reports:
The team is moving from reactive analysis, waiting for a score to drop before investigating, to proactive tracking of known seasonal and operational drivers.
Contact centre reporting is being redesigned to deliver genuinely new information to operational stakeholders, rather than echoing numbers they can already see.
The team is preparing to extend access beyond insight specialists, so contact centre and customer operations colleagues can query themes and evidence directly.
Why it matters for Energy & Utilities
For energy suppliers managing seasonal demand, tightening regulatory expectations, and a customer base that includes vulnerable residents, Relative Insight provides a structured, auditable way to turn open-ended feedback into decisions.
Speed to insight: analysis that previously relied on manual reading is now available at scale, across every call and every survey response, not just the fraction that gets read by hand.
Seasonal evidence: known demand drivers, cold weather, price changes, annual safety visits, can be proven with theme-level evidence rather than assumption.
Stakeholder confidence: consistent, repeatable analysis removes the risk of one analyst coding feedback differently to another, giving both contact centre and exec audiences a report they can trust.
Governance readiness: theme-level tracking makes it straightforward to surface specific concerns, including vulnerability signals, for operational follow-up.
