In recent years, utility customers' needs have changed significantly. Customers want greener energy products and simple business processes to interact with and are continuously looking for more services to help reduce their energy consumption.
This presents a golden opportunity for utility companies to use technology to reshape customer experience, transform their old business models and make a positive impact on the planet. E.ON, one of the largest European utility providers, embarked on a strategic digital transformation initiative to redefine customer experience for its 50+ million users. The German-based company turned to HCLTech as its trusted partner to develop a digital sales platform with state-of-the-art digital infrastructure and customer experience.
The Challenge
Inefficiencies in customer-facing processes
A transformation of the traditional E.ON sales business was needed to stave off challenges from the competition and succeed in the digitalization race.
- Legacy systems and traditional business processes were causing misalignments in E.ON's sales business, causing continuous headaches for employees and customers
- Outdated infrastructure inhibited the company's ability to leverage the full potential of an integrated digital business model and hindered E.ON's ability to meet changing customer needs
- It also caused higher operating costs and falling customer satisfaction and retention
The Objective
Transforming the customer journey
E.ON was looking to streamline its processes to significantly enhance customer experience. The objective was to reimagine customer processes by developing a state-of-the-art digital infrastructure and accelerate agile transformation, which required a mindset shift towards new ways of working. The aim of the new processes was to form a simple and personalized customer experience that would result in higher customer satisfaction. HCLTech was brought in as an experienced partner to enable and execute the program.
The Solution
Digitalization to overhaul processes and efficiency
The HCLTech solution comprised a comprehensive end-to-end digital transformation journey that started with onboarding the customers to E.ON before moving on to clearly showcasing the portfolio of products available and ending with exceptional customer service at every stage of interaction. With Salesforce and MuleSoft forming the main integration platform, the solution cut across different tech stacks and automated the onboarding of new customers, as well as automatically generating billing information. The modern digital infrastructure enabled automated e-mails for customer onboarding, contract creation and payment notification. Offering a 360-degree view of customers, it also added the capability of customer query case creation via email, chat and phone.
From the customer perspective, the new solution made account information, such as billing and usage, readily available to customers online. With skill-based routing, it enhanced customer interaction by assigning cases to available agents and it added a Salesforce Einstein chatbot to facilitate an automated response to customer queries. This new way of working even helped track and reward customer loyalty. To successfully deliver this transformation, HCLTech implemented Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) for smooth development and deployment. To make sure security wasn't compromised, HCLTech also ensured GDPR-compliant encryption of customer-sensitive information.
The Impact
Accelerating speed, efficiency and customer delight
Customer processes and customer experience are now completely transformed. The processes which used to take multiple days, are now done within minutes. The program has also made significant improvements to key business metrics, such as Net Promoter Score and Cost to Serve. The partnership enabled E.ON to quickly onboard the required teams to deliver the transformation at an extremely large scale. HCLTech brought in some of its key frameworks, such as FENIX 2.0, to advise the customer on the right operating model. The team was also able to set up a standard, scalable and distributed Agile and DevOps-based way of working, which suited E.ON.
Throughout this transformation of customer experience, HCLTech brought in its experience in a variety of areas, such as automation and CI/CD, which has driven maturity in the execution of the program. The results were numerous, but some highlights of the key benefits achieved included:
- Achieved 99.5%+ platform availability.
- Delivery velocity improved multi-fold. E.ON delivered 2x more user stories than it could before the transformation program.
- The release cycle moved from six months to two weeks. This was achieved due to the extreme automation workstream – driven with HCLTech — 80% of testing and 100% of the deployment steps were automated.
Client's Perspective
“Having a partner in a fast-changing environment who keeps their promises even though there’s a major disruption is super valuable. HCLTech always stood up to their promises and played a major role for us.”
Dr. Victoria Ossadnik
Chief Operating Officer, Digital, Innovation and Inhouse Consulting and Member of the Board of Management of E.ON
