Contact Energy New Zealand Discuss Business Benefits achieved with help from MaxAttention

[former_member135675]

Contact Energy is a vertically integrated generator and retailer of electricity and gas in New Zealand. They serve about, 500,000 customers every day, 24/7. Their customers’ expectations are changing quite rapidly. The world of the homogenized mass market has gone and customers are seeking individualized service. What they needed at the core of their business was technology that would enable them to industrialize and remain low cost, but also enable them to add modules and extra capabilities to meet customer expectations.

Mark Corbitt, General Manager ICT, Contact Energy New Zealand stated, “The major components we deployed were CRM, ECC modules, including the industry services for utilities, which was a major part of it, stream serve, and open text…we initially started with MaxAttention from a project perspective. We needed access to expertise. There were two, what I would term ‘top-line’ SAP experts that spent really a few days with us. So after just a few days we were honing and focusing on a couple of issues, we saw 30 percent improvement in our CRM performance.”

“The real benefit to that is not that the system performs faster but the outcome for our business is that what we call average handle time, the amount of time a customer takes on a call with us, dropped by 100 seconds. Now that’s substantial because it means you can take more calls, it means you can answer a customer’s query much more quickly, which obviously they’re happy about, and the cost to serve overall decreases as well. And that’s a fantastic example around the benefits of Max Attention,” Mark added.

James Kilty, General Manager Sales and Customer Experience, mentioned, “It was critical to me to get assurance around the subject matter that I’m not that comfortable with, ICT, and that we were adopting best practice processes and systems in our implementation. So that advice and support from our parent company, coupled with the utilization of MaxAttention has made the whole process a heck of a lot easier for us.” He continued, “We went live with our system 6 months ago. At that point we set out a forward path for the stabilization of the business and then a real push into starting to drive the benefits of the business.

With the work we did, prior to go live on testing our performance work and the reviews and support we had from MaxAttention, the stabilization process for us here at Contact Energy has gone very well.” Mark added, “What you can do from the business side of things offsets multiple times the additional cost from a technology perspective. Looking at MaxAttention as a part of that, it’s ‘how’ we compress the speed at which we get those business outcomes by making sure the technology operates as ‘effectively’ as possible. That’s probably the key for introducing MaxAttention into the SAP landscape and as part of the implementation.”

Mark continued, “All of the transactions have been sub-3 seconds, which from a performance perspective immediately after go live is for us pretty spectacular. The actual batch processing itself has fallen within the window 90 per cent of the time early on and right now it’s 100 per cent of the time.

The key point for me around both MaxAttention and Active Embedded – is that you don’t need to know the right questions to ask. You get two weeks of attention and you see a 30 per cent improvement in your transactional performance results and a reduction in handle time. That’s fantastic.” James stated, “The system implementation is a challenging thing in and of itself, and it’s really important that you get first class advice to do that really well because the last thing you need when you’re trying to transform your business and drive a culture change is to have a system that isn’t working. And MaxAttention is a critical part of making sure you get that right.”