We’ve been talking to you about a new opportunity we’ve identified to significantly reduce reschedules on the day. The idea is to seek active confirmation of appointments by consumers, with unacknowledged appointments being rescheduled.  

We told you that, as part of considering this change, we would report on our test of the alternative approach (i.e. no truck roll unless active confirmation of appointment by consumer).  The test reporting period started on Monday 23 September and ran for two weeks.  The results are now in and we want to share them with you. 

In addition, given there has been a delay in getting these results to you we are making come changes to our proposed timetable to give you more time to consider them and give us your feedback.

What’s happening

The overall results from the test show a higher rate of appointment confirmation than BAU. We also saw a reduction in reschedules on the day, particularly where a customer was unavailable at the original appointment time.

We’ve analysed the test results against our view of what ‘good’ test results look like – which we published here.  Here are the key outtakes from the results:

1. Appointment confirmation rate - during the test period 82% of scheduled appointments were either confirmed (71%) or changed by customers during the Service Company call (10%). This exceeded our target of 80%.
2. Reschedules on the day – during the test appointments which were not confirmed were cancelled. The reschedule on the day rate for confirmed appointments was 28%, which was an improvement of 6% against the data capture period (26/8 – 6/9). Encouragingly, there was only 1 ‘Customer Unavailable’ reschedule for confirmed orders (in the month of August there were 484).
3. Repurposed appointments – 499 appointments were changed or cancelled by the customer during the active confirmation process. In addition to this 859 appointments were not confirmed and the appointment was cancelled. Combined this released 1,358 appointments which could be repurposed for a confirmed appointment.
4. Customer experience – there have been 125 surveys returned for completed test customers and the ‘Overall Satisfaction’ score is 8.1, which is above our BAU score.

A detailed breakdown of the test results will be available on our  dedicated webpage  from Tuesday 22 October.

What’s the details

We told you we would publish these results by Monday 7 October, giving you two weeks to consider them before the consultation period was due to end on Friday 18 October.

Given the delay in getting these result to you, we’ve decided to change the timetable.  This change recognises your earlier feedback about the important of adequate (i) time to consider the results (i.e. 2 weeks), and (ii) notice of implementation (i.e. one month).

The new proposed timetable is set out below (emphasis added):

We’ve created a dedicated space on the Chorus Service Provider website in which you’ll find all the information related to this project.

Next steps

Please contact your Account Lead or Service Delivery Manager with any feedback on the test results by Friday 1 November.

We’ll let you know on Monday 11 November whether we have decided to go ahead and implement this initiative as BAU.  If we do so, we’ll give you one months’ notice (i.e. implementation from Monday 9 December).

Contact

For any queries please contact your Account Lead or Service Delivery Manager.