Dirk Michiels: Customer care and billing with focus on customer experience and energy transition

It’s the start of November. I am picking olives in Tuscany. It should be cold but it’s not. It is actually 30 degrees Celsius. This is not just a local weather issue, it is a global climate problem.??On top of this, we now are also in a global energy / political crisis and we have hardly recovered from COVID.?

Our lives and economy have become extremely carbon hungry. There is actually a near linear relationship between the gross world product (GWP), the energy consumption and the carbon emissions.?To make things worse, 50% of the global energy consumption goes to heating and cooling. The good news is that we are on a mission to “Net Zero” in most countries. This is what the energy transition is all about!??

Who we are and what we do??

Zero Friction was founded by customer care and billing veterans that had a dream to deliver a game changing platform without the nightmare of the implementation.?Zero Friction wants to impact the energy transition of the collective heating and cooling market.??Now more than 60 customers are on-board, including giants like EDF, Veolia, Engie and Equans.??

The Zero Friction is a Software As A Service (SAAS) – cloud solution that covers the meter to cash cycle and has an integrated customer portal for advanced customer interaction liked by a growing customer base.?The platform is easy to implement. Which gives you an amazing short time to market and value. Zero Friction is like Spotify for customer care and billing. It brings the cloud, data and AI as a real digital transformation solution to your organisation.?We don’t talk about months or years, we talk about days or weeks for implementation.??

The platform is also easy to run. You can run it yourself, or you can make use of our Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) services that are provided by Zero Friction or its partners to run the customer care and billing solution.?The Zero Friction platform is an enabler to make the energy transition possible. As we are a pure SAAS solution, you benefit from new functionalities that are continuously added to the platform.?

Increasing customer awareness?

We want to go beyond being just an enabler. As a SAAS Cloud platform we are continuously innovating and adding functionalities to the platform that become available for all.?Currently customer care and billing is often an afterthought.?As an end customer, you get your invoice after the consumption has happened. The end customer can no longer impact the consumption.?Our innovation team is working on creating a “goal setting” functionality that allows end customers to set goals for energy consumption in a certain period. This way we want end customers to be more aware of their energy consumption and be in charge of their own behavior and the consequences this has. We believe that engaging more customer awareness is a great way to impact the energy transition.?

Our ask

You want to give your input on this innovative approach? Want to join our user voice on this topic? Or want to have more info on Zero Friction? Do not hesitate to contact us at?[email protected]???

About the author

Dirk Michiels ?

Zero Friction, CCO,?[email protected]?

Dirk has a 35+ year track record comprising new business development, sales channel strategy and management, and execution, and value creation for Customer care and Billing solution in the Energy and Utility industry globally.?