Operating in a commoditized energy market, Essent uses customer experience as a key differentiator. Migrating voice and chat to the Genesys Cloud™ platform has improved service stability and agent experience through AI and CRM integrations. As a result, Essent now enjoys greater control over service orchestration and journey management, and expects a 50% IT cost reduction.
100% reduction
in service-impacting incidents
32% increase
in employee workplace satisfaction
50% decrease
in costs projected
Part of the E.ON Group and sitting alongside sister brands Energiedirect and Vandebron, Essent enables millions of residents and businesses to participate in an energy transition as the Netherlands builds a more sustainable future.
Within a marketplace where electricity and gas are homogenous products, customer contact can be infrequent and triggered by a compelling event, such as a billing inquiry, moving house, a payment issue or simply understanding their consumption. Yet churn is predominately driven by price and bad experience.
“When our customers need us, we want them to receive the very best journeys possible,” said Michiel Kouijzer, Product Manager at Essent. “We closely track and measure against Net Promoter Score and customer satisfaction ratings to ensure their experiences are smooth, efficient, and stress-free.”
Dedicated to delivering on that promise every day are 1,000 agents spread between the company’s two main sites in Den Bosch and Zwolle, a near-shore outsourcer and a flexible pool of remote and part-time workers, respectively.
“When our customers need us, we want them to receive the very best journeys possible. We closely track and measure against Net Promoter Score and customer satisfaction ratings to ensure their experiences are smooth, efficient and stress-free.”
Michiel Kouijzer
Product Manager, Essent
To underscore its commitment to delivering exceptional customer journeys, Essent is investing heavily in contact center transformation. Supported by its trusted long-term partner Sabio, that program initially focused on replacing incident-prone legacy voice and chat technology that was no longer fit for purpose.
“Sabio inherited our previous on-premises phone system and helped to keep it running when it went end-of-support,” said Kouijzer. “However, it had become an innovation bottleneck for automation and service improvements. Likewise, our iAdvize live chat tool frequently required customized software builds and could no longer support our strategy going forward.”
Seeking to boost experience for customers and employees with a new Software-as-a-Service model, Essent set about consolidating voice and chat interactions on a comprehensive cloud platform.
Return on investment was front of mind when it came to due diligence, as was canvassing for opinions among internal E.ON stakeholders and peer groups in other contact centers.
“Speaking with colleagues who had successfully made a similar transition was both helpful and insightful, and we were able to reuse much of their original market research and tender documentation,” said Kouijzer. “All that saved us a great deal of time and energy.”
After a thorough adjudication process and careful consideration, Essent decided to advance its future customer experience (CX) strategy on the Genesys Cloud platform.
“Feedback across the E.ON group among Genesys Cloud users was overwhelmingly positive,” added Kouijzer. “And, in Sabio, we had a partner with elite skills and knowledge to get the most out of Genesys capabilities. So, it was a perfect win-win.”
“Feedback across the E.ON group among Genesys Cloud users was overwhelmingly positive. And, in Sabio, we had a partner with elite skills and knowledge to get the most out of Genesys capabilities. So, it was a perfect win-win.”
Michiel Kouijzer
Product Manager, Essent
Adopting an agile, phased approach to implementing Genesys Cloud, a joint project team of Essent and Sabio specialists conducted an initial pilot before switching over all remaining mission-critical voice services to the platform. This milestone was followed six months later by the successful migration of chat services.
All projects were completed with zero business disruption while preserving the customer experience, agent productivity and compliance.
“Pooling knowledge and resources helped head off potential risks,” said Kouijzer. “It also gave us extra confidence when it came to configuring our Genesys bullseye routing policies and call flows, as well as AI decision trees and handovers. That piece of work was essential in matching our customers with agents who have the right expertise, while also optimizing KPIs like waiting time and NPS.”
Additionally, Essent leveraged the Genesys platform to make two performance-enhancing integrations, neither of which had been possible before.
The first was introducing voice transcription for automated call summaries and logging. The second was unifying its CRM system within the Genesys Cloud Agent Desktop. The result is faster single-screen handling of interactions for agents with less effort and a greatly decreased likelihood for errors.
“Our agents feel less stressed and happier now and appreciate having all their tools and data in one workspace. That improvement was reflected in our recent quarterly survey, with a 32% rise in employee workplace satisfaction.”
Michiel Kouijzer
Product Manager, Essent
Consolidating voice and chat channels on Genesys Cloud has given Essent greater control over service orchestration and journey management as it looks to expand its digital and AI capabilities. Contact center operations are also more robust and benefit from improved service stability and uptime.
“Both channels used to regularly suffer P1 and P2 critical failures, degrading CX and agent productivity,” said Kouijzer. “Since moving to Genesys, we’ve not had any such incidents.”
Users quickly took to the intuitive Genesys Cloud desktop interface, which is designed to reduce cognitive load, shorten learning curves and fit naturally into how agents work. This allows them to concentrate on listening to and serving customers rather than thinking about the tools they’re using.
Similarly, agents don’t have to constantly toggle between different screens and applications, reducing the risk of inadvertently looking at the wrong customer information when dealing with multiple chat conversations, for example.
“Our agents feel less stressed and happier now and appreciate having all their tools and data in one workspace,” added Kouijzer. “That improvement was reflected in our recent quarterly survey, with a 32% rise in employee workplace satisfaction.”
Released from hosting and maintaining on-premises phone and chat systems, the company expects to achieve its 50% CX-related IT cost reduction target. Those savings could increase further should Essent decide to migrate its standalone email and social solutions onto Genesys Cloud as well.
“Our contact centers and customer journeys are in a really good place now and are no longer constrained by legacy technology,” concluded Kouijzer. “We’ve already had our first live agentic AI use case, a personal assistant that helps agents answer customer questions using our knowledge base. And there’s more to come.”
To learn more about the solutions featured in this case study, visit www.genesys.com.
