How Momentum Energy got to a single customer view

Momentum Energy was facing a crossroad: it had a vision of a frictionless, digital experience for customers enabled through self service, but years of customisations to its core billing system made this dream unattainable.

Becoming a customer-centric organisation would require a complete reinvention of the ways of working and IT systems the energy retailer was so accustomed to.

Its custom-built legacy billing system would have to be completely replaced; it had become Momentum's primary customer management tool over time by gradual extensions of its functionality.

But the lack of a proper, dedicated CRM had meant "cluttered practices and a reliance on inaccurate manual processes" that were having a negative impact on customers.

It also meant Momentum found it difficult to tell how long a customer had been with the retailer, whether they had more than one account with the company, or how many times they moved while they had been a customer.

The only way for Momemtum to provide the digital self-service experience both its customers and the business wanted was to rip out and replace the legacy platform.

Salesforce's cloud-based CRM was identified as an enabler for low-cost growth and a way to boost operational efficiencies, through a scalable, flexible platform that would improve customers’ overall experience.

Momentum Energy’s new customer platform - dubbed Alchemy -is based around a digital customer portal that integrates with Salesforce Community Cloud.

It lets customers for the first time sign up for and manage products and services, view invoices and records of energy consumption, and change payment methods through a single online interface. The energy retailer is also soon to ad a live chat service to the platform.

Legacy customer data was cleansed and consolidated into a central database to provide a single customer view that informs every part of the new system. Staff can also access the system from mobile devices while at customer premises.

The Salesforce suit does everything from manage customer care and support, lead generation, to product and price management.

Other ecosystem components - in parts integrated via Mulesoft - include the CredAgility credit management application and Orion billing and invoicing tool, Sitefinity for digital content management, Informatica for a single view of the customer, and Veda for credit management. 

Migration required a significant effort with an 80-strong project team that co-ordinated Momentum Energy IT staff with experts from Accenture, Salesforce, Cloudsense, Mulesoft, and CredAgility.

More than 40 percent of all Momentum Energy staff were directly involved in the change program – spanning design/build/test activities as well as analytics use-case development, data cleansing, and agile delivery.

The achievement of a record month of sales in Alchemy’s first month of operation demonstrated the effectiveness of the new IT environment.

This project has been named a finalist in the industrial category of the iTnews Benchmark Awards 2017/18. The full list of finalists can be found here.