Alinta Energy: “CX is everything”

Alinta Energy's senior leader has said the customer experience is “everything” to the brand as it plays a large part in how the company differentiate itself in a competitive market.

The Australian electricity and gas retailing company holds around 1.1 million residential and business customers, according to Cindy Vandecasteele, general manager for customer engagement and retail markets at Alinta Energy.

Vandecasteele told a Genesys Xperience Sydney crowd that “we're in a highly competitive, price-sensitive industry where product differentiation is pretty minimal”.

“CX is everything. That's how we differentiate, so it's super critical,” Vandecasteele added.

“The whole transition to net zero means our consumers of energy become … prosumers.

“So, not just consumers of energy, but also producers with rooftop solar, EV, batteries and so on.

“That means that our whole industry goes from being a very low customer engagement, one-way industry …. to a much higher customer engagement industry.”

Vandecasteele said this means customers are more aware of their energy usage and “what's driving up the cost of their bill.”

“That's why CX transformation is important to us today”.

Vandecasteele said the company has spotted a few potential use cases for AI that could assist both customers and agents.

“First of around customer and growth, so deeper customer insights better, trends forward, forward.

“Looking in terms of what our customers need and want and then going into that productive engagement, so the next best action for active preventative turn”.

“Then we're on a very ambitious digital deflection agenda. We're already seeing a lot of good results there.

“We've recently deployed web messaging and our first bot, how we scale that is super important.”

Vandecasteele added the business has a lot of customers engaging digitally “and we want to keep them there.”

Also, supporting its customer service agents it’s another area with the company Alinta Energy “already digitally deflected” various enquiries.

During the talk Vandecasteele said through its partner Datacom the company implemented cloud CX last September, revealing a “few interesting use cases” such as speech analytics features.

“The first one is around compliance breaches… the second one is around picking up on keywords to prevent ombudsman complaints.

“There's a number of keywords we're picking up to prevent when our agents might have not raised it as an internal complaint first, then [also] what's the customer sentiment around any router market approaches.

“We're in the early stages, the technology is there it's about now using it and coming up with all the plausible use cases. That's the hardest at the moment in terms of where we,” Vandecasteele said.