Selectra - Providing a one-stop shop for home contracts

Providing a one-stop shop for home contracts

Providing a one-stop shop for home contracts

Ambre Exposito, Chief Operations Officer & Chief Resilience Innovation Officer of Selectra on the technology and strategy behind the company’s comparison service spanning several verticals.

started as two friends and today the company around the world.

electra provides a comprehensive home contracts comparison service for its B2C customers, from energy and telecom packages to insurance, finance and subscription services – alongside a growing B2B provision.

Prioritising personalised and effective advice, Selectra takes tremendous pride in helping people navigate the crowded marketplace for household contracts, informing its customers of the latest offerings and, importantly, saving them money in the process.

Ambre Exposito, Chief Operations Officer & Chief Resilience Innovation Officer of Selectra joins us to discuss the company’s ambition to become the leading platform to compare and subscribe for home contracts.

Selectra’s business model is free to end customers and commercialisation arises from service providers paying commissions on successful transactions, explains Ambre.

“Our customer needs are incredibly diverse across all our verticals and our goal is to provide the best advice we can and orientate them to the best offers,” says Ambre. “Predominantly, we serve B2C customers, but we also have a B2B department. Our value chain has two major strengths differentiating us from competitors and our success arises from the simplicity of our value chain.

“First, we attract a large volume of inbound lead generation through our SEO and SEA strategies which has allowed us to grow year on year. Our second strength is our service and it has two sub-layers: we take our informative role incredibly seriously and we strive to save money for the customers we serve. When people come to us with queries or problems it is our priority to ease pain points and resolve issues effectively, while lowering their costs in the process.

“A lot of people are still really afraid of changing suppliers or not being

with the historical suppliers, so what we try to do is inform customers of the realities of the markets.”

Ambre and her team focus on taking the sales dynamic of Selectra and innovating operations, not in terms of the lead generation side but instead exploring how to monetise the capacity of lead generation.

“To do this we keep our mission in mind,” says Ambre. “As mentioned, this is to inform the customer, solve their pain points and save money. Another aspect is to support the transition to a more sustainable future by finding providers who offer renewable energy, for instance.

“Underlying our mission and sustainability priority is a trustful connection with our customers. Sometimes there might be vendors who offer excellent commission potential, but we always ensure that they are competitive for our customers and meet our values before we then consider the economic implications of their arrangement with us.”

As Chief Operating Officer, Ambre oversees the sales operations and business development dynamic of the company with more than 350 colleagues in her team divided across the company’s main verticals. Ambre oversees the structure and strategy behind the sales of these teams to help them work effectively and efficiently.

In tandem, Ambre is the Chief Resilience Officer of Selectra. This side of her role arose from a discussion with Xavier Pinon, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Selectra, related to the rapid growth of Selectra in recent years and the employee demographic. As a relatively new company with strong year-on-year growth and a young, talented and internationally-minded employee base, Ambre identified a limiter on the development and growth at Selectra. Colleagues were enthusiastic and had excellent ideas, but they lacked the mechanisms or structures to introduce these fresh perspectives in a context of rapid growth. So Ambre successfully suggested building an

innovation department to develop an innovation strategy.

“In September 2022, I launched the innovation department business unit within the company,” says Ambre. “It started with a simple employee feedback mechanism and has grown organically from there. With these ideas and feedback in mind, we developed an innovation strategy for Selectra and decided to onboard two promising projects which we believe will change the future of the company.

“We are currently in an exploration mode where we test hypotheses for success with considered metrics,

“Underlying our mission and sustainability priority is a trustful connection with our customers”

Ambre Exposito, Chief Operations Officer & Chief Resilience Innovation Officer

before transitioning into an exploitation mode where we then deploy the new projects.”

The first innovation project at Selectra is exploring a shift in the company’s current business model. Lead generation is fundamental to Selectra’s commercial success but with constant new developments in fields like SEO or artificial intelligence and related customer drivers, the company must be agile and proactive on this frontier.

“If leads don’t arrive, we don’t survive,” summarises Ambre. “We cannot entirely depend on our SEO ranking since the algorithms could change drastically in the coming years and have a huge impact on sales.”

Ambre highlights the example of the recent energy crisis which meant the cost of acquisition per customer and the spiralling costs of the products

themselves meant the sales for this vertical plummeted.

In light of this, the innovation department at Selectra pivoted towards exploring and developing cross-selling functionality in the sales teams. The energy team turned its attention to other related products such as additional sales, so even if the sales of energy products were low the incoming revenue increased elsewhere.

The second innovation project at Selectra related to inbound calls, explains Ambre.

“Like many companies, we have struggled with being understaffed even in the sales teams,” says Ambre. “This dynamic combined with the huge volume of inbound calls we receive from customers or potential customers meant we were missing sales opportunities.

“But in the past two years, we have made a concerted effort to redefine our inbound calls strategy so we now address nearly all of our inbound calls.

“The transformation of our inbound call strategy did not stop at significantly lowering the rate of missed calls, it extended and developed beyond this to include increasing the retention rate and customer loyalty levels.

“We have developed several initiatives based on customer interviews, so

our strategies are deeply rooted in a customer-centric approach. By doing so we are developing our brand even further, to become the go-to company for all things related to household contracts and subscriptions – not just today, but with an eye on tomorrow as well.”

Beyond these two projects, Ambre stresses the increasing role of artificial intelligence within the innovation department at Selectra.

“Predominantly, we love doing things by ourselves,” says Ambre. “We are not the type of company that will externalise our evolution. But if we see new technologies or ways of operating outside Selectra, we ask ourselves how we can do it better in a relevant way for our brand and mission. Sometimes this entails partnering with companies to work together on these dynamics but build them in a way that is specific to us –for instance with AI.”

Selectra is developing an AI-driven solution called Coach which is focused on the compliance side of the business.

“It’s a great tool to assist our compliance department so they operate comprehensively and extensively,” says Ambre. “AI is hugely important as it assists us with ensuring perfect compliance but also in related areas like training, improving customer relationships and even seemingly small but incredibly

“At Selectra, the integration of more AI models is streamlining our processes and creating new opportunities”

important details like the tone of our phone calls.”

Here Ambre introduces her colleague Alexandre Bouju, Tech Lead for CRM and Telephony of Selectra, to elaborate on the use of AI at the company.

“At Selectra, the integration of more AI models is streamlining our processes and creating new opportunities,” says Alexandre. “Many processes have

been redefined and expanded to explore new possibilities.

“A significant breakthrough for us is gaining access to high-quality transcriptions of our calls. Large Language models (LLMs) then assist us in leveraging this new content to implement various validations for quality purposes.

“Our quality department agents now work more efficiently, allowing them

Alexandre Bouju, Tech Lead for CRM and Telephony

“I have been at Selectra for eight years and Zoho has been a fundamental partner during my time here and will be into the future”

to focus on what they enjoy most in their roles: providing advice and making a real impact on the quality of our work.

“Additionally, we utilise trained models to predict the volume of calls we'll receive throughout the day, enhancing our team planning strategies.

“Furthermore, we are actively developing a virtual agent whose role will be to welcome our customers and inquire about the reason for their call. The intention behind the

call is promptly transcribed and categorised, ensuring that the call is directed to the appropriate department. This not only enhances customer satisfaction but also improves our conversion rate.

“In conclusion, the repercussions of the revolution in the field of AI have a direct impact on our processes, their cost and their scope of action.”

On the topic of partnerships, Ambre highlights the crucial importance of Selectra’s Customer Relationship

When value is hard to find, Zoho makes it easy

want

Management (CRM) platform, provided by Zoho.

“I have been at Selectra for eight years and Zoho has been a fundamental partner during my time here and will be into the future,” says Ambre.

“Zoho’s platform is crucial to our operations as a central database but also a facilitator for our agents – it is a wonderful source of information and opportunities which helps us thrive.

“We are a relatively young company as are Zoho, which works very well for us. We like to work with people who are also in the development phase since we can collaborate organically on new features and they

can adjust to our business needs. We love that flexibility from Zoho. But more than this, with well-established companies that have grown beyond the development phase you can be trapped by their provisions and also the elevated costs that come with them. With Zoho, we have a valued partner that we know we can grow with, securing tremendous value at an affordable price. Partnering with Zoho has been a super smart choice and we have a special relationship with them.”

At Selectra, partnerships have been important to the company’s internal operations and technology, but also in relation to the providers its customers ultimately choose. Here Ambre introduces her colleague

“In France, the energy market has suffered various successive crises forcing us to reinvent ourselves and our approach to provider partnerships,” says Camille. “For instance, the global COVID-19 pandemic froze all French moves for several months and then, more recently, the conflict between Russia and Ukraine caused great instabilities in the energy supply markets. This had the direct impact of suspending the acquisition of new customers for most eligible energy suppliers in France.

“Selectra was able to overcome these difficulties thanks to an increasingly

Camille Servanton, Commercial and Business Director of Selectra to explain more.

Camille Servanton, Commercial and Business Director

“We offer our customers a more complete and therefore more relevant contract subscription service with extensive coverage in the contracts market which directly benefits from our robust partnership strategy”

efficient SEO (natural referencing) acquisition and the fact we have always had a strategy of working closely with all our energy suppliers and other contract providers – which has left doors open for us, unlike many of our competitors.

“We offer our customers a more complete and therefore more relevant contract subscription service with extensive coverage in the contracts market which directly benefits from our robust partnership strategy.”

Wrapping up our conversation, Ambre reflects on her journey with Selectra where she started as a Junior Manager, rising to the positions of Chief Operations Officer and Chief Resilience Officer today. In those nine years, scaling the company has required energy and intention, alongside a developing leadership style that has grown with the company, explains Ambre.

“From a human side of the business, it can be challenging to scale through

different growth phases,” says Ambre. “People, skills, tools, data and structure are essential to any company. But when you scale, you must adapt these dynamics to prepare you for the next stage because you are heading into the unknown. These moments offer huge opportunities for people to adapt and grow when they transition through these phases, and it is about recognising their strengths during the changes. It can be challenging from a human perspective, but with the right management and leadership style from the top of the company at Selectra, we have been able to make our people feel part of the story and trajectory of the company by wielding sympathy, empathy and clear communication about where we are going and why.

“It has been a beautiful journey to see Selectra evolve in terms of expanding into new verticals and global geographies, developing our customer service provision but especially in terms of the people we have here – it has been incredibly rewarding.”

For more information about Selectra, visit selectra.com.

ADDED VALUE

Teamwork and collaboration

Ambre emphasises that the growth, transformation, innovation and success at Selectra would not be possible without the hard work and dedication of all the teams across the company. One of her major sources of pride during her time at Selectra has been the high retention rates for hiring at the company.

“Underpinning the scalability and growth of Selectra has been the people, but also the unifying mindset and values we enshrine in how we operate – humility, excellence and kindness permeate how we work every day,” says Ambre. “It’s great to work in such an environment where ideas and contributions are welcomed with open arms. We learn from each other and by building together, we move forward together.”

Wanderlust

For Ambre, travelling has been an incredibly insightful and educational experience. She celebrates how Selectra has supported her travels with flexibility and trust.

“Travel is like oxygen for my brain,” says Ambre. “Whether you think about how it refines your empathetic social skills and cultural awareness, helps you build bridges and make connections or even serves as a space to foster creative thinking and find fresh new ideas, I deeply value the opportunity to travel and explore.

“Travel is my hobby, but it is so much more than this, and I recommend people embrace it for the self-knowledge and growth it provides.”