Why make it complicated, when it can be surprisingly simple?

This article is part of a Project Transformer series about “Bright Spots” of innovation. Each year, an Eneo program recognizes their employees’ low-cost and no-cost innovation projects that have made a positive impact on the company and the communities it serves. This week we feature two teams' initiatives that tied for Third Place in the Eneo 2018 Simply Smart Innovation competition. The external panel of judges commented on their projects, “Sounds like a cost-effective way to capture GPS data and use it sensibly. [… and …] A very good illustrative example of the potential of information to identify customer issues.”

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As British physicist and mathematician Sir Isaac Newton said, “Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.” Scientists are trained to look for the simplest explanations and solutions to challenging problems. In the following examples of Eneo employee innovation, two project teams have taken this principle to heart, finding surprisingly simple solutions to managing complex customer data problems. They also demonstrate how the arrival of a new colleague can often help a team to see a chronic business operations problem with a fresh perspective.

PROJECT: MyCustomer

In this first winning project, a new sales manager (for large businesses and residential buildings) arrived in the northern district of Yaoundé, Cameroon’s capital city. His previous role had been in Eneo Logistics and he was familiar with using digital location data. New to sales, his first question was: “How do I find all my customers?” Like most countries in the world, Cameroon doesn’t rely extensively on permanent street addresses – so planning trips to visit customers and checking on infrastructure requires an integrated view of several sources of geolocation data. The new sales manager discovered that the Eneo team had taken the first step toward digitizing customer profiles by creating an enterprise Geographical Information System (GIS) database of their locations. However, only the first phase of this digital transformation had been completed; sales and operations field trip planning was still done manually, referring to the GIS data, but plotting efficient land travel routes to customer and infrastructure locations on paper-based plans and maps. The next step of this digital transformation journey was to transform the employees’ mobile phones into field control centres for customer location and field trip management. The solution needed to be low-cost and easy to use – able to integrate Eneo’s customer GIS data, as well as public GPS data to geolocate roads, built infrastructure, electrical poles and other electricity network elements. The surprisingly simply solution was the purchase of an Android-based mobile app from the Google Playstore for a few dollars that the team configured to collect and integrate their “MyCustomer” view of all these digital data layers. The impact has meant reduced field trip planning time, more customer visits, better customer relations, and improved customer payment rates (reducing arrears in Yaoundé North by 10%).

PROJECT: Customer Over View

In the second winning project, this time in Douala, Cameroon’s economic capital, a news sales leader in the northern district realized how difficult it was for their team to get real-time information about a customer’s account status while in the field at the customer site. This need often became urgent, particularly when a sales representative or field agent was interacting in-person with a customer whose electricity was about to be cut off for apparent non-payment of their bills. The only way the customer’s verbal explanations of recent payments or claims against cut-off could be confirmed was to call an Eneo colleague in an agency to check for recent transactions or correspondence in customer databases. If the agency was closed or internet service was unavailable, this was impossible and frustrating for everyone. Further, Eneo sales representatives and agents did not have basic customer profile information on hand such as subscribed power or GIS location data. The team needed to find or create a rapid, low-cost solution to the problem. The group embraced the “lean startup” mindset, holding several brainstorming and prototyping sessions between the Sales team and IT colleagues. The result was a mobile app they created, called “Customer Over View,” that functions online and offline. It allows the Eneo employee or agent in the field to view a customer's basic data (contract or meter number) and get a global data snapshot of their account situation (payment history, consumption patterns, metering accuracy, anomalies, claims or complaints, etc.). Both customer relations and customer revenue have improved in Douala North as a result.

Developing the Simplification Drive

Today, the Eneo Sales and IT groups are working to continue to improve, integrate and more widely deploy both solutions. These ingenious employee-driven projects reduced operational complexity and improved business performance by simplifying access to rich customer knowledge. Whenever our current practices are confusing and do not produce the desired results, we must ask ourselves: “How can this be further simplified?”; “What can we stop doing?”; “How can reduce the number of elements?”; “What’s the least we can do to make the greatest improvement?”; “How can we make this easier today, tomorrow, next week?”; and “How can we democratize access and usability?”

The project manager of one of these winning projects explained, "When I told my family that my Eneo team had won a Simply Smart innovation award with our solution, their reaction was, “That’s so ‘you’! You like to simplify things.“ … Indeed, what drives me is the desire to always find the most efficient way to make something work and meet goals. Together, our collaborative team has streamlined our understanding of our customer and designed the solution so everyone, expert or not, can use it.”