S U C C E S S S T O R Y

E N T E R P R I S E I N F O R M A T I O N M A N A G E M E N T

INDUSTRY

Energy

CUSTOMER

Electrabel

PARTNER

TBSCG

CHALLENGES

• High costs of paper-based communications

• Inability to create and publish fresh digital content quickly

• Need for modern, mobile-friendly customer experiences

SOLUTIONS

• OpenText™ TeamSite• OpenText™ OpenDeploy • OpenText™ LiveSite

BENEFITS

• Reduces call center volumes significantly• Speeds up time-to-web of digital content

– from one month to one day• Achieves new corporate image with a

fresh look and feel, aligning with the group’s image and branding

Electrabel Realigns Digital Image and Cuts Expenditures with OpenText™ TeamSiteEnergy giant improves customer experiences with modernization project

Marketers are increasingly focused on improving the customer experience; three out of four companies name this as a top business priority, according to Forrester. Recent Gartner research affirms this area as a key battleground in the near future, with 89 percent of market leaders expecting to compete primarily on the basis of customer experience by 2016.

For Electrabel, the No. 1 supplier of power in Belgium, this battle is already being fought and the competition is fierce.

Several years ago, the firm decided it required a vast modernization project for its website, aiming to improve communication with its customers, reduce operational costs and deliver a level of interaction expected by customers today.

Electrabel wanted to differentiate itself from competitors by giving customers more than just information about the energy tariff they were on.

ChallengeGoing Paperless

Historically, the company communicates a lot with paper. This is a very expensive method of communication, costing the company millions of euros a year. A push towards paperless correspondence was therefore vital to the overall project.

Electrabel’s developers found that the inability to create fresh content that could be quickly published to the website was hampering their overall digital image. It lacked a way of effectively communicating key company announcements to the press.

Electrabel also wanted to improve its communication with customers at all stages of the buying journey, across all devices, all the time. A cohesive platform that enabled a smooth customer acquisition and engagement and retention lifecycle was vital.

With more than a century of experience in generating and supplying energy, Electrabel is one of Belgium’s most important employers. Electrabel offers its customers energy solutions with an added value and customized service through its website built with OpenText TeamSite.

E N T E R P R I S E I N F O R M A T I O N M A N A G E M E N T

S U C C E S S S T O R Y

Creating a Fresh Look and Feel

Electrabel sought a fresh look and feel for its website that aligned with the corporate branding of its parent group, ENGIE. It also wanted to improve its overall digital image by giving its customers better ways to review and control their energy consumption through an interactive, online portal.

To achieve this, Electrabel needed a centralized place where all important data could be easily managed and visualized through custom, web-based applications and tools. Electrabel’s entire IT ecosystem would need transforming, to cater to its large B2B and B2C customer bases.

Electrabel would also need technology that supported its mobile strategy and further improve the customer experience. The company sought a platform that could easily and seamlessly push content out to any smart device its customers may use to access information.

SolutionMaintaining the Mark of Excellence

Electrabel’s primary concern was giving customers a better digital experience across all channels and devices.

Electrabel turned to OpenText partner, TBSCG, for the implementation of a part of this multi-layered project. In 2012, the company deployed the first stages of the customer experience management solution, by purchasing TeamSite and its related OpenText™ LiveSite and OpenText™ OpenDeploy modules, to begin the task of revamping its web channels.

“Our partner, TBSCG was able to commit to the full support of the infrastructure and the support of the OpenText stack. The modernization project changed the whole ecosystem from SAP®, to ESB, to web integration and eventually even call center systems. The full project took around two to three years to realize because we had so many systems to split and align, and a new service catalog to set up,” says Kris Jansen, head of IT delivery, Electrabel.

Improving the Customer Experience

Electrabel wanted to take customers on a journey while also giving them more control over their energy consumption and billing data. It wanted to offer its customers something more.

“We looked at what the customer would like to do. We defined the journey, and so the design of the website reflects this. In the past,

“OpenText TeamSite has given our website a completely new look and feel, and we’re now able to communicate faster and more effectively to those who matter most to us – our customers.”

KRIS JANSEN, HEAD OF IT DELIVERY, ELECTRABEL

it was about producing content. Nowadays, it’s about the journey the customer has on the website,” explains Jansen.

Now, B2C customers can easily look up and compare their energy usage with peers in real time from their computers or smart devices and make any adjustments if needed. These adjustments are then seamlessly integrated in their contract data so Electra-bel’s next billing runs automatically adapt to the changes applied by the customer.

B2B customers can even build dashboards within Electrabel’s site to create a more personalized experience that showcases only what they want to see. They can adapt their energy prices dynamically directly from within the website. All this fits perfectly into a self-service approach.

Electrabel’s multi-channel delivery is mainly driven by the service-oriented architecture of its IT environment. Any changes applied on any channel are available at any place. For example, a custom-er’s interaction on the web is retrievable by a call center agent and vice versa.

BenefitsAccelerating Time to Market

TeamSite has proved to be the ideal solution to take Electrabel forward in the market. The company now has greater agility and freedom to try out new ideas with marketing campaigns and targeted content.

Electrabel can now quickly design pages, content and business applications, across all devices. After de-coupling the front-end and back-end and setting up a service-orientated architecture, Electrabel produces content faster without being dependent on release cycles of its SAP systems.

Reducing the time to market of digital content – from one month to one day – has been hugely beneficial to the company, espe-cially in terms of issuing press releases. For Electrabel’s custom-ers, this is crucial.

“Speed is really important, especially related to critical press releas-es for instance. Say a nuclear power plant unexpectedly cuts out or there is a mass loss of power, we need a platform that allows Electrabel to immediately communicate this through our corpo-rate website. Thankfully, TeamSite enables this,” says Jansen.

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“In the past, it was about producing content. Nowadays, it’s about the journey the customer has on the website.”KRIS JANSEN, HEAD OF IT DELIVERY, ELECTRABEL

Cutting Operational Costs

Operational expenditure is also reduced through TeamSite. The solution will enable it to migrate eventually towards a fully paperless environment with predicted savings running into the millions of euros. Jansen explains, “Electrabel is aiming at the full push to ‘E,’ meaning that we are a company that historically produces a lot of paper-based communications, but this all comes at a huge cost.”

Electrabel is now well placed in its market to move forward in the energy sector, which continues to evolve. Electrabel will continue to build efficient and adaptable systems corresponding to business needs and objectives.

TBSCG’s reputation is built on providing complete solutions to improve the management of customers’ experiences. Long-term customer relationships are the company’s primary focus, which it achieves by working in partnership with its customers to develop real and tangible business benefits.