Driving platform unification
THROUGH DIGITALISATION AT NORLYS
Driving platform unification
THROUGH DIGITALISATION
Jess Bech, VP of Customer Service, Operations and Digitalisation at Norlys sits down with us to explore how the company prioritises digitalisation to serve its cooperative owners and customers.
ith 4,600 employees and 3.5 million customer relationships, Norlys is Denmark’s largest integrated energy and telecommunications group. Owned by more than 800,000 cooperative members, the company supplies energy, charging points, internet, TV and mobile services across Denmark. In addition to owning Denmark’s
largest fibre network, Norlys recently acquired Telia Denmark thereby securing half of the country’s largest mobile network.
The company has also prioritised sustainable initiatives, holding the majority shares in green and circular industrial park GreenLab, as well as leading developer of
DIGITALISATION AT NORLYS unification
solar and wind farms Eurowind Energy.
Joining us today to discuss Norlys’ work in streamlining its back-end platforms through digital innovation is Jess Bech, VP of Customer Service, Operations and Digitalisation.
To begin, Jess explores how Norlys’ customer ownership helps guide innovation within the company.
“We are a cooperative,” says Jess. “That means we are owned by a network of the households directly connected to our energy infrastructure and an elected representative group that the Board of Directors actually reports to. This makes a significant difference in terms of how value is created and kept within the cooperative. So we’re not owned by a foundation or even shareholders. Instead, we are required to be owned by our connected community and because of this dynamic, we’ve been on quite a journey in the past year.”
The journey so far has involved 47 mergers and acquisitions of internet and TV companies, leading to a process of amalgamating these companies with a unified back-end platform into one user-friendly hub.
“There are very few similarities between the various internet and TV providers we have been purchasing and acquiring,” says Jess. “So there’s a huge network of legacy systems to unify. Norlys is the friend that connects all the previous known brands, and
building up our brand awareness has been crucial.”
To address the complexity involved in integrating the diverse companies and services under its remit, Norlys is embracing digitalisation to propel the company forward.
“We’ve been investing heavily in the renewal of our core platforms on both the internet/TV and energy components of the company,” says Jess. “This has helped us prepare for our upcoming digital innovation. Of course, it would have been nice to carry out some of the consumerdirected, front-end transformations earlier – but the logic and data we need to put forward to the consumers is reliant on the back-end platforms we are now putting in place.
“This has been a massive undertaking of moving more than 600,000 internet and TV customers from four different billing systems, seven different networks and 35 CPE types into one system. But these changes provide us with the ability to actually do the digital transformation which should dramatically improve the customer experience.”
To expedite this process, Norlys has worked in close collaboration with Danish IT consultancy Netcompany.
“We’ve been working on getting customers into a unified back-end system across the internet divisions we have purchased, and that’s an ongoing process. This is a part of what
Netcompany is now helping us out with. They’ve utilised their experience in this field, which is comprehensive and very impressive.
“Netcompany has recently begun focusing more on platform solutions, completely reutilising their work approach and tooling. This is why we continue to work with them – they’re there for us, and they’re super skilled in driving transformation programmes.
“WE’VE BEEN USING NETCOMPANY FOR A LONG TIME, AND WE’LL CONTINUE TO DO SO BECAUSE THEY PROVIDE CROSS-INDUSTRY KNOWLEDGE THAT IS CRUCIAL FOR OUR COMPANY TO SUCCEED”
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“KMD IS HELPING US INNOVATE WITHIN A PERIOD OF HUGE TRANSITION. IT’S A SIGNIFICANT MIGRATION, AND VERY TECHNICALLY COMPLEX”
These aren’t transformations that we do every day as a company at Norlys, but they are what Netcompany do as a living, so they have become very experienced with them. They have the tooling, they have the methodology, they have the structure.
“To some extent, Netcompany is solution-agnostic, as they’re able to tap into different scenarios seamlessly. They are super structured and offer an agile methodology that they can roll out for us. We’ve been using them for a long time, and we’ll continue to do so because they provide crossindustry knowledge that is crucial for our company to succeed, allowing us to focus on our primary targets. I consider them not just a vendor, but a digital transformation partner.”
On the energy side of things, Norlys is working on a new billing solution in collaboration with KMD, one of Denmark’s leading IT and software companies.
“KMD is helping us innovate within a period of huge transition,” says Jess. “It’s a significant migration, and very technically complex. Our aim is to provide consumers with more information and insights into the energy that they’re using, when they’re storing and producing it and
what percentage of that is green energy – and therefore cheap energy.
“Right now, we’re looking at minimising capital expenditure (CapEx) spend and driving consumer behaviour in a more sustainable direction. To do that, we need to ensure there’s a higher degree of green energy flowing into the system, and make sure that this is happening in a transparent way that customers are able to understand. KMD has been such an important partner for us throughout this process because they represent the entire value chain, which is paramount for being present in this industry. They’re also able to provide us with consistent support.
“To facilitate such a complex transformation, we need to understand the work other energy companies are doing globally. We’ve looked at what Octopus Energy has done in the British market and how they have acquired customers. There’s also Tibber, which holds a huge portion of the market in Sweden and is gaining market value with simple services that are easy to understand, in a market that’s traditionally very conservative.
“In order to support that type of transformation here, Netcompany
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and KMD have been so important for us to have as technology partners, because they can help push us forward to succeed and develop the technologies we need.
“These two partners in particular are extremely important for us as a company. They have provided us with the best-in-class technology implementation, and I have no doubt that the way they run it is paramount to our success. Our growth could have stagnated if we weren’t working with the right partners, because a partnership is a huge investment that can be catastrophic if not run by people who know what they’re doing.”
For Norlys, a significant growth area has been using new technologies
to provide customers with a more personalised and cost-effective service.
“No two people’s internet and energy usage is the same,” says Jess. “And our service embraces that. For example, you could be a family of four and one member of the family is a gamer, meaning that they’re online constantly. This could be dramatically different to another four-person family’s internet usage.
“Part of what AI and big data do for us is they allow us to monitor consumers' usage on a personal level and build a profile from that information. By tapping into those customer journeys and usage scenarios, we can support customers more effectively.
“In particular, we can monitor their energy usage and even tell them if any household items seem like they’re using too much energy compared to their normal usage levels.
“This also helps us better understand customer’s pain points. We can now see that 85% of customers requiring support have the same queries regarding usage, payments and billing. For instance, we consistently see customers needing help with their payment method failing, or not understanding their bill. With these specific problems, we’ve been spending a lot of time digitising these transactions through AI and robotics.
“We have more than 600,000 customer transactions across our entire business each month, and over two-thirds of these are supported by AI and robotics, freeing up our agents. If a consumer contacts our customer support and says they have a problem with their energy bill, we can direct them to an agent who can solve their problem. But if it’s something more straightforward, like a customer not understanding their bill, our AI chatbots are more than capable of dealing with that issue. We introduced AI supported actions six months ago, and it’s been accelerating rapidly.”
One of the biggest benefits of developing these new systems, Jess
explains, is that they foster a sense of trust for the customer.
“We’ve been getting language models in place to rectify poor textto-speech translation,” says Jess.
“With this, we record the customer calls and summarise the pain point into three or four bullet points, and then the agent loads it into the system. This provides us with an extremely accurate summary of what has been said and done, which the next agent can see. So if a customer has multiple issues, they are able to see what the customer was talking about last time they were in contact and directly work with that.
“We want to know you as a customer, and we prove that we know you by how we engage with you, while also selling you the right service or
solution at the right time – based on your profile and your pain points. We’re not interested in selling you something you don’t need. We’re not overselling, but we are relevantly selling. And what we offer you is based on what we think you need when we compare you to similar profiles in our customer base.
“This has been a huge transformation in what we do, and a huge change in the way our operators work and support consumers. We’re just starting this process, but it is extremely promising, it works well, and it works very fast.”
Looking ahead, Jess hopes Norlys will become even more streamlined, and continue to increase its focus on sustainability throughout the company.
“I genuinely believe that every mobile customer we have recently acquired deserves an internet, TV and energy solution from Norlys,” says Jess. “And my goal is to make sure that they will be treated with those types of solutions. From a corporate perspective, there’s a focus on company growth here, but there’s also a focus on the green transition.
“If you come home with your electric vehicle (EV) then we can recharge the battery into the home, or use your solar panels. We transfer the energy into the battery and offload it into the grid at times when it needs energy, we charge it when we have enough or too much.
“We are working to support the average consumer and their behaviour, so we need solutions that are convenient for ordinary people. A big part of this transition is done through digital transformation – AI, big data tools and robotics. We’re very focused on investing in these technologies right now.
“The next phase is helping consumers better understand their energy consumption and what they could save or gain by using it in a different way. For instance, exchanging their refrigerator or buying an electric car. We need to balance this network as a whole. We want to bring the community together, and the only way to do that is through digitisation and AI.”
Learn more about Norlys here.
ADDED VALUE
TECHNOLOGY AND THE GREEN TRANSITION
“I believe that the only way to solve the environmental crisis is through technology, and more specifically AI,” says Jess. “And it can help in ways you may not necessarily expect. From working within the energy sector, I know that people often overcharge their electric vehicles. If you’re driving 100 kilometres per day, maximum, and you’ve got 600 kilometres on the battery – then you don’t need to charge it every day. But people do, because that’s the easy thing to do. But AI can check your calendar, your personal agenda and your habits, and charge your EV in a more efficient way. I really do think that there is a lot of hope for electric vehicles and sustainable technology, and this is the way to embrace it.”
Connect with Jess