E (Gas & Electricity) Ltd, a fast growing Birmingham, UK based energy supplier selected Eliq for the roll-out of its next generation mobile app and self-service portal to the company’s more than 200 000 customers.
E’s Challenge Serving over 200 000 UK homes with its prepayment offering, historically, E has offered a mobile app and a self-service web portal as an alternative to making top-up payments in stores. These digital channels have become a very popular method to make payments, however, customers could not see their balance on the app, and in case of a sudden increase in energy usage customers would suddenly find themselves out credit. A black-out or gas supply cut-off in the middle of preparing a big dinner or during a particularly cold morning is a much-dreaded event for prepayment customers, equally for E, who would see spikes of costly customer service calls when chilly weather arrives.
We chose Eliq as we wanted our customers to have the most useful and engaging digital experience in the market. Not only will our new app enable our customers to better manage their top-ups, it will aid them in reducing their energy consumption as well.
Eliq’s supplies E’s customers with a complete customer engagement platform, delivering engaging energy insights and smooth self-service functionality across mobile, web, e-mail reporting and SMS (alerts). The platform has been integrated with E’s CIS provider and it’s smart meter database to collect and analyse half-hourly consumption data, giving customers access to their consumption history, energy reports, alerts on consumption spikes as well as the ability to manage account balance, payments and set budgets.
In addition to enabling customers to view their pre-payment meter balance, a core element of the new app is ‘intelligent forecasting’. A proprietary algorithm takes each customer’s historical consumption along with current weather forecasts to determine how much gas and electricity their home will need. This is used to generate AI recommendations and alerts on when to top-up the smart meter.
First and foremost, the solution is expected to increase customer satisfaction, measurable by an uplift in NPS score and ultimately increased customer loyalty. Call volume and complaints due to sudden weather or consumption changes are expected to drop, and an increase in use of digital payment channels is expected, rendering additional savings for E.