ASSESSMENT OF FACTORS AFFECTING INCOMING CALLS AT ETHIOPIAN ELECTRIC UTILITY CALL CENTER

Abstract

The aim of this study was to analyze the factors for incoming calls at Ethiopian Electric Utility (EEU) call center. Ethiopian Electric Utility call center receives high number of calls and is unreachable as a result. Several customers are heard complaining on different media about Ethiopian Electric Utility service provisioning. The study was focused mainly on employee perspective. The study was made at EEU call center located at Jemmo area. The call center has 159 employees (agents) and all the 159 agents of the call center were considered for the study. Questionnaire survey was used to collect response from agents. Additionally, three management members of EEU who supervise the call center operation were interviewed. To gain an insight on customer perspective, three customers who represent big enterprises, government organizations and residential customers, respectively, were interviewed. Data was also collected through researcher’s observation and from statistical report of the call center. Both primary and secondary data were used. Mainly SPSS version 20 was used for data analysis and excel 2016 is used as well to analyze the call center statistical report. The result showed that the highest two reasons for call to the call center are power interruption and fallen electricity pole. The top two factors for high incoming calls are unavailability of adequate information in the call center and inability to address the root causes of customers’ problems. EEU call center is accessible through telephone channel only. The suitable channel options to implement at EEU call center are self-service, SMS, web chat and email. First call resolution is found to be very low and it is not measured by the call center. It is concluded that even if EEU receives high incoming calls to its call center, the company is poor on making efforts to minimize the calls. To reduce incoming calls, it is recommended that EEU should focus on providing permanent solution to repeated problems such as rehabilitation of old power cables and preventive maintenance of old transformers. Another recommended intervention is to equip agents with relevant information about EEU services and products such as procedure to subscribe for new services. Implementing multi-channel service is among main recommendations of the researcher. The recommended access channels are self-service, social media and email.