Customer satisfaction as a priority in public services
Fluvius was established in 2018 through the merger of Eandis and Infrax. This brought together the distribution of electricity, natural gas, sewerage, cable television, and heating into one integrated organization serving all of Flanders. This scaling-up came with a clear ambition: to structurally embed customer satisfaction within the organization.
This focus is far from optional. All Flemish municipalities are shareholders of Fluvius, and customer satisfaction forms part of the organization’s strategic objectives. In addition, the Flemish Utility Regulator imposes concrete performance standards. “It is both an internal ambition and an external obligation. That makes it even more important to continuously monitor customer satisfaction,” says van Heddegem.
Stable results in a changing environment
Despite operating in a rapidly changing environment — including the fast growth of solar panels, new connections, and increasing process complexity — Fluvius has managed to maintain consistently high customer satisfaction levels in recent years. Approximately 80% of customers report being satisfied, which is a remarkable achievement considering the growing volumes and changing customer expectations.
From data to insight: the power of context
Fluvius has built a strong foundation for measuring and improving customer experience in a targeted way. This is achieved through interactive dashboards and the combination of quantitative data with qualitative insights, such as customer comments.
One major improvement introduced over the past year has been the addition of “context” to the analyses. Each evaluation is linked to relevant process variables, such as the type of subsidy, the nature of an outage, or the specific customer journey involved.
“You not only know what customers think, but also in which situation they experience it. That makes our analyses far more concrete and directly actionable,” says van Heddegem. “As a result, the focus has shifted from general insights to targeted improvement actions for specific processes and situations.”
AI makes customer feedback scalable and actionable
With large volumes of feedback — ranging from extensive surveys to short one-click surveys — the challenge became making insights broadly accessible across the organization. Artificial intelligence plays a key role in this process. AI models are used to automatically categorize open customer comments and perform sentiment analysis.
Each comment is linked to a specific theme and analyzed for tone (positive or negative). This creates a structured and scalable overview of what customers are experiencing. It enables Fluvius to identify trends per process and quantitatively highlight the most important bottlenecks.
“In the past, we had to manually go through responses,” explains van Heddegem. “Now we can immediately see what customers are really talking about and what impact it has on satisfaction.”
In addition to AI analysis, statistics continue to play an important role. Thanks to the large amount of feedback collected, regression and driver analyses are used to determine which factors have the greatest impact on customer satisfaction. These insights help Fluvius prioritize improvement initiatives based on data and focus effectively on the elements that demonstrably have the greatest impact on the customer experience.
The future: end-to-end customer insights
The combination of results, context, and AI ensures that Fluvius moves beyond general conclusions. Customer feedback is always interpreted within the appropriate context, making it clear where, when, and why issues arise. This allows improvement actions to be deployed in a highly targeted way — for example, by request type, process step, or customer group — enabling faster impact.
Fluvius also aims to look beyond its own organization. A next step is to expand customer research across the entire service chain, including contractors and partner organizations. This will create an integrated view of the customer experience across all touchpoints and provide even more opportunities to structurally improve service delivery.
Collaboration with Know Why
Know Why has established a solid framework for Fluvius that enables customer experience to be monitored in a structured and future-proof way. The existing measurement program has been improved in multiple areas, both in terms of content and processes.
“Know Why professionally guided the entire journey and proactively contributes ideas, both when requested and unrequested. We experienced that level of involvement and expertise as extremely valuable,” says van Heddegem.
Fluvius is responsible for managing and maintaining the electricity and gas networks in Flanders, realizing new connections, resolving outages, collecting and managing meter data, and maintaining public lighting. Fluvius employs 6,000 people and manages millions of connections.
