- Industry: Energy
- Location: Germany
- Product: Platform
Context and Challenges
Our client is one of the largest energy suppliers in Germany and Europe. They are a key player in e-mobility and bring classic gas and electricity to millions of homes.
As they operate in a highly homogenous market, our client wanted to optimize their capabilities to process customer service requests and thereby establish customer service quality as a key differentiator. Customers who wish to contact our client with respect to a specific issue, for example entering into a new contract or talk about an existing one, mostly use one of two channels: email or phone. The established processes to handle such requests consumed valuable time. Time that customer support agents therefore could not spend on the kind of actions that drive customer appreciation.
Our approach
During 22 months, our product team collaborated with our client.
To meet their business needs, we:
- Set up a highly automated MLOps environment that allows business-focused people to automate processes by utilizing cutting-edge Natural Language Processing technology while integrating their extensive process expertise at the same time.
- Increased the efficiency and the quality of customer support through the development of NLP powered features.
- Set up a highly flexible and adaptable solution that enables our client to respond to new business challenges in the shortest time possible thanks to microservices.
- Developed and continuously improved various NLP microservices capable of domain-specific text classification and information extraction tasks.
- Trained business-focused teams to automate business processes by using an integrated low-code platform.
During this project, a new law regarding the way energy suppliers are allowed to sign a new contract with a customer came into effect in Germany. To this point, the main way for many industry participants to sign new energy contracts had been verbal agreements during a phone call between the customer service agent and the soon-to-be customer. However, the new law requires companies to be able to provide written documents as proof that the contract has been signed by the customer.
But thanks to their new platform built with NLP microservices, our client was able to comply with the law quickly and therefore continues to win new customers while other affected companies had to go so far as to completely shut down the affected sales channels.
In fact, in addition to the solutions developed for our client’s previous needs (optimize customer service request processing) we helped implement a new business capability that enabled them to be compliant with the new law in less than 2 months.
Benefits
Thanks to this project, our client’s customer service team can increasingly focus on valuable missions, complies with the law and benefits from enhanced speed, flexibility as well as reactivity to new business challenges as a competitive advantage.
In addition, our client benefits are:
- Automation of e-mail processing using NLP powered features
- Customer service agents save time: Automation-eligible emails are automatically detected, necessary information is extracted, required business processes are triggered and tickets are closed.
- Team autonomy: The power to independently set up additional automation processes while using the existing state-of-the-art capabilities.
- Scalable platform: Create business value quickly by reusing and combining existing microservices in a novel way to add new business capabilities.
- Efficient and reliable implementation of the new platform according to software development, cloud engineering and DevOps best practices.
Technologies & Partners
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