Harnessing robots for operational efficiency and smooth onboarding of new clients

Like many industries, companies in the energy sector are under huge pressure to remain competitive in a very tough market. Power prices are increasing, and customers are shopping around for the best deals.??

Just like it is for most other businesses, increasing operational efficiency and improving the customer experience are key focuses.? ?

That’s the case for Frank*Energy, Genesis Energy’s younger, digital-focused brand. Frank*Energy has made a name for itself by making power easy and affordable.?

But even for a young(er) company (Frank*Energy has actually been around more than 20 years now, initially as Energy Online) there can be time-consuming manual processes – processes that are ripe for automation.?

At Frank*Energy, one of those processes was the simple act of signing up new customers. It sounds easy, right? But how many of us actually have systems that enable a 100% human-touch-free signup??

At a time when customers are less loyal than ever and expect simple, easy – and super-fast – joining processes, the last thing you want is delays in approving new customers and getting them set up.?

Frank*Energy is avoiding that problem now with the use of “Betty the robot”. The robot picks up all those details entered into the web form by people signing up and transfers it into the billing and customer relationship management system – a task which the customer care team previously managed manually. Betty’s also responsible for doing ICP and credit checks.?

It’s a simple process but it’s a big time saver for Frank*Energy’s customer care team – they’ve halved the amount of time a customer care agent works on a signup, and in doing so they’ve also significantly reduced the length of time it takes for a customer to be onboarded.??

It’s still early days for Betty at Frank*Energy, but Chris Malcolm, Frank*Energy’s Senior Product Owner, tells us the robot managed the work of 2.5 FTEs in August. That was a month which saw a record number of signups for Frank*Energy – yet they saw improvements in their signup SLA and didn’t need to increase their staff numbers to cope with the increasing client signups.??

Optimise. Then automate.?

But let’s be frank here ourselves: It wasn’t all perfect.??

Chris tells us he had some pretty ambitious target numbers for Betty. In fact, he wanted 70-80% of all signups to be fully automated, asap. I’ll admit, that’s not a figure we’ve achieved yet. And here’s something really important for all businesses to consider before introducing RPA (Robotic Process Automation): automation only goes so far. You have to look at optimising your processes and ensuring it's running smoothly, then automating it.??

In Frank*Energy’s case, part of the issue lay with web forms designed to maximise the ease with which customers could signup – something we all want to do, but which, in this case, meant a lot of forms were going through without crucial information. Betty couldn’t cope with that. A human customer care agent was needed.?

Tweaking Frank*Energy’s customer signup journey, including cleaning up those web forms, for example, encouraging customers to include ICP numbers if their address can’t be found in the system, has improved the quality of data hitting the robot and increased the number of signups that can be handled by Betty.??

It’s a work in progress. Quanton has been working with Frank*Energy to optimise their processes and their overall digitisation. But Betty’s already bringing powerful returns for Frank*Energy, its employees, and its customers.??

If you’d like to hear more about Frank*Energy’s journey – and the lessons they learned along the way, read our case study here.?