New energy market entrant, goto.energy, has grown its customer base by over 200% in just 12 months with the support of Blue Prism’s cloud-based, intelligent digital workforce. The use of this digital workforce, alongside a core contact team, has enabled goto.energy to maximize operational efficiencies while delivering fast and consistently high-quality customer service.

Having been the first UK challenger brand to adopt an intelligent automation strategy at launch, goto.energy has scaled its business at speed and is now capable of onboarding more than 500 customers a day. The success of the team’s strategy is further evidenced by the fact that goto.energy has been announced as a finalist for New Business of the Year 2020, in the Lloyds Bank National Business Awards.   
 
Customer Experience Illuminates Success
 
While the average industry time for managing new customer orders is 21 days, goto.energy is capable of completing the entire process far more quickly. Typically, the bulk of new customer applications received through popular third-party comparison sites is received overnight.  Rather than standard checks being performed by an internal team the following morning to confirm and finalize the order, digital workers verify details against multiple databases overnight.  As a result, only exceptions need to be investigated by the contact center team allowing the business to process much larger volumes without increasing costs. 
 
The pre-integrated cognitive capabilities of the Blue Prism Cloud digital workers are also being used to eliminate errors and delays within the billing cycle. Tens of thousands of meter readings a month are collected to start the billing process. A large proportion of these are sent in by email and previously had to be re-keyed into systems manually. Instead, digital workers are now reading and extracting the correct information within seconds. Additionally, errors in the numbers provide trigger communications back to the customer to help elicit the correct information without delay. 
 
“By employing a digital workforce, we are changing the day to day work of our team. Instead of being focused on transactional activities all day, they now spend an increasing part of their time investigating anomalies and taking action to respond fast to customer requests. This is a more challenging and complex role which our people find more rewarding. It’s no wonder our contact center attrition rate is just five percent when the industry average is 35 percent,” says goto.energy CFO Evan Salway.
 
Employee engagement in the automation strategy continues to be a focus for delivering successful outcomes. “We involve all our employees in the identification and development of new automations because they have a granular view of where the opportunities for improvement lie. We put in place a formal process for channeling ideas into our virtual AI center. Our people are incentivized to submit valuable ideas, and this allows us to accelerate the benefit of automation into every corner of our operations,” says Salway.  
 
“goto.energy has created a highly effective hybrid workforce model. We are excited to be a part of this ambitious team’s plans to deliver a differentiated end to end service to customers together with our partner, CodeBase8 . With the elasticity of cloud underpinning their digital workforce, we are looking forward to seeing the business scale new heights,” says Terry Walby, chief executive, Blue Prism Cloud.