How Momentum Energy streamlined its systems and processes to put customers first

Introduction

Momentum Energy is a 100% Australian-owned and operated energy retailer servicing customers in Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia, and the Bass Strait Islands.

The company is owned by Hydro Tasmania, Australia's largest generator of renewable energy – generating hydro and wind power.

Momentum Energy is built on a commitment to make energy easy to use, buy and understand through offering simple products, competitive prices, and exceptional customer service.

To make good on this commitment, the company started a complete business reinvention of its systems to provide better outcomes for its customers by streamlining and simplifying every single process across the business.

To achieve this customer-centric solution, it picked CloudSense’s platform to work in tandem with Salesforce and provide a single integrated platform of customer engagement.

Obstacles to a seamless customer experience

CloudSense talked to Natalie Davies, Momentum Energy’s Head of Customer Experience, to discover more about the project. First, CloudSense covered the challenges the Melbourne-based energy retailer faced that compelled it to implement a set of new systems and new processes.

Legacy systems and a cluttered CRM

Before its business reinvention, Momentum Energy used a custom system to sell to and service its customers. As Natalie told CloudSense, unusually, it was the energy retailer’s billing system that had become the primary customer relationship management tool (CRM).

“Instead of a purpose-built CRM that acted as a single source of truth for the organisation, we had gradually extended the functionality of our billing system, and were using it as our main CRM. The lack of a single, dedicated CRM resulted in cluttered practices and a reliance on inaccurate manual processes that impacted negatively on our customer experience.”

Incomplete view of customers

The disjointed nature of Momentum Energy’s systems meant it was difficult to tell how long a customer had been with Momentum Energy, if they had more than one property with the company, or how many times they had moved while they had been a customer.

Natalie described the difficulties this caused: “Across the business, from sales to customer care and through to the billing team, there was an incomplete picture of customers and their interactions with Momentum Energy.”

With no single view of customers, it was impossible to deliver a truly seamless customer experience.

Limited digital capability

The extremely competitive energy retail landscape also meant customer expectations were rising, in Natalie’s words: “To maintain customer loyalty we needed to provide an experience to suit today’s digital-first customers – for example, the flexibility and convenience of an online portal.”

Frustratingly, disjointed manual processes and inflexible systems left the energy retailers unable to expose the functionality necessary to enable self-service. To overcome these challenges, Momentum Energy knew it needed a systems overhaul to deliver better for customers.

Momentum Energy's primary reinvention objectives

To measure success and guide its reinvention project, Natalie revealed the set of objectives and parameters the company laid out for its project.

• Out-of-the-box system: working alongside Accenture, the company's implementation partner, Momentum Energy wanted to use a modular architecture and achieve as close to an out-of-the-box energy retailer solution as possible.
• Reduce costs: the energy retailer’s cost to serve was too high due to its uneconomical legacy systems. By streamlining systems and automating costs, Momentum Energy expected to substantially reduce these costs.
• Improved sales conversion: by automating sales processes, increasing accuracy, and reducing errors, the company aimed to see an uplift in sales performance and conversions.
• Increased online sales: Momentum Energy wanted to see an increase in online sales through an improved eCommerce offering for customers.
• Reduction of churn: by improving the overall customer experience, the company aimed to provide higher customer satisfaction and reduce churn rates.

Delivering a single integrated platform

To provide a key part of the single, cloud-based, integrated platform it needed to successfully achieve its objectives, Momentum Energy selected CloudSense’s Salesforce-native sales and customer engagement platform. CloudSense extends the energy retailer’s Salesforce capabilities with Configure Price Quote (CPQ), Product Catalogue, Order Management and eCommerce.

The CloudSense Platform’s CPQ and Order Management applications ensure the energy retailer provides a smooth and accurate sales and delivery process, supplying the business rules and automation necessary to make the best use of customer data in Salesforce.

CloudSense’s Product Catalogue delivers flexibility around product, pricing, and bundling and by exposing CloudSense’s eCommerce functionality, Momentum Energy now has the ability to offer online orders and self-service to their customers.

Although the new platform was essential to the reinvention project, Natalie emphasised that delivering this solution wasn’t just a matter of changing systems, the organisation had to evolve too: "Not only do we have new systems and new processes, we also changed our way of working – from putting the team on one floor, to adopting agile processes – we did everything we could to ensure the adoption of these new platforms went smoothly.”

A truly customer-centric experience

With CloudSense, Momentum Energy now has the single integrated platform and 360-degree view of customers it needs to provide a market-leading customer experience.

The genuine reinvention of the organisation has seen most business processes change as a result of their new systems. Following the changes, the energy retailer has immediately seen tangible improvements in business results and customer satisfaction.

Automated online sales and order management

Automated online sales and order management processes have saved time, reduced errors and cut costs, while improving the customer journey – in fact, order fulfilment time has dropped by 94%.

Faster and more flexible go-to-market

The improvements for customers don’t end there. Momentum Energy’s online self-service offering delivers the convenience and flexibility today’s digital-first customers expect. The company can now go to market quicker. The product team can launch new products quickly, change pricing easily and bundle products using CloudSense’s flexible and unified product catalogue.

The marked improvement is demonstrated by the reduction in product launch time to days instead of months – with four products being launched within the first 10 weeks of the system going live.

360-degree view of customers

Vitally, all data points and interactions are mirrored and updated in Salesforce in real-time to provide the all-important 360-degree visibility and continuity that ensures the customer experience remains consistent across channels.

Summing up the reinvention project, Natalie said “CloudSense is essential to providing the single, integrated platform on Salesforce that we needed. With CloudSense we have seamlessly extended Salesforce, enabling us to improve our accuracy and provide a joined-up, customer-centric service all the way from quotes and the delivery of orders, right through to our eCommerce offering.”

For more insights on Momentum Energy’s journey to customer-centricity – and tips on streamlining your business’ tech stack – sign up to CloudSense’s webinar: ‘Measuring up to customer expectations in today’s decentralized, decarbonised and digital-first energy world’.

Read the article online at: https://www.energyglobal.com/special-reports/13052021/how-momentum-energy-streamlined-its-systems-and-processes-to-put-customers-first/