Stacey Witchell is just over five months in to her eight-month data science placement at Centrica.
Stacey has been developing statistical models that provide an understanding into key events and how they affect the company’s customers.
The aim of her research is to fully understand the key factors that lead to a poor customer experience, particularly, how the customer experience is affected by employee engagement.
The findings that Stacey delivers will be used to drive changes in the business process to improve customer experience. To deliver results for this project, Stacey has so far had to acquire data by performing both internal data collection and external data sourcing.
Once pre-processing and data cleaning had been performed, models that uncover relationships between factors and events have been applied.
Going forward, Natural Language Processing techniques will be used to interpret customer survey responses.
“Being part of the Data Science team at Centrica has been an incredibly rewarding experience. Collaboration with members of the team and colleagues across different business functions has been vital to gain shared understanding of problems and to reach solutions. The encouragement that I have received from colleagues has inspired me to explore new ideas, try different approaches and apply a range of scientific methods to understand relationships in the data. It is really exciting to be involved in a project in which the data insights that I provide, have the potential to shape the decisions that are made and drive business performance.” – Stacey
As a customer focused company, Centrica strives to innovate to deliver the customer the best experience possible. Stacey’s project is an excellent example of this. Her findings will be used to drive changes that ultimately benefit the customer. The work that Stacey has conducted is just one of many ways we can help the customer using data.
Data Science and Analytics are used across Centrica, but all share the same goal of providing the best customer experience.
Centrica’s Data Science team aims to achieve this by developing and implementing energy forecasting, prediction and detection of appliance breakdown, product recommendations, social media analysis, understanding the drivers of events, simulation modelling, roster optimisation, and using chat bots to assist employees.
The team applies a wide variety of data science techniques including optimisation, simulation, computer vision, prediction, forecasting, Natural Language Processing, Cloud Based Solutions.