Deploying a Modern Service Solution for a Scottish Utilities Company

A large utilities company based in Scotland engaged Bluewave to update their internal systems and implement a Salesforce-powered customer service solution.

The project began in early 2019 and was successfully completed by July of the same year, with continuous development from the Bluewave team up to the present day. Find out more about this comprehensive digital transformation below.

About the Customer

Our customer is a utilities company that generates 100% renewable electricity, made by local wind farms in the UK. The organisation employs over 6,000 people, from highly skilled engineers, to tech innovation experts, offshore wind farm maintenance, to customer service providers.

The customer is dedicated to helping citizens and businesses reach net zero emissions by 2050, and helps to facilitate the UK reaching this goal by investing billions into UK green energy, every year, for multiple consecutive years. This work includes securing affordable and clean energy, modernising networks to improve quality of service, providing green electricity tariffs and electric vehicle chargers, as well as developing air source heat pumps and solar panels. The organisation has also contributed tens of millions to charitable causes over recent years and is proud to be a leader in wind energy.

The Challenge

Before working with Bluewave, this customer had numerous disparate Salesforce instances. One of the largest of these was a customer support system for case and contract management. There were also separate manual processes in place for issuing documents to customers. Customer interaction via email required multiple screens and clicks to identify, open attachments and respond. Additionally, the utilities company had significant data volume control issues, with a need to reduce storage capacity and free up space. Despite having an existing Salesforce partner already in place, this partner had made no plans to modernise these systems, despite the lengthy processes involved and lack of visibility between internal departments.

The customer’s initial service environment was built on Salesforce classic, with no console design, and was therefore quite out of date. Service level agreement KPI management was difficult to track with a high chance of multiple tickets being opened for the same thread. Additionally, complex assignment rules were in place which were not aligned to business needs, causing case rerouting at first assignment. These issues were all causing major delays.

The Solution

Our client had a business need to modernise its Salesforce solution, and got in touch with Bluewave to replace the organisation’s existing Salesforce services supplier. Bluewave was requested to audit the customer’s existing solution, improve it, and implement an updated system that would meet the needs of the organisation’s internal teams.

Bluewave suggested implementing Service Cloud, to provide a UX-focused case management interface. This would allow for more efficient data access, as well as improved customer response. Service Cloud allows businesses to build end-to-end engagement from anywhere, solving customer issues quickly and on any channel, automate business processes with intelligent workflows, get shared actionable insights to every customer interaction – and scale support with the help of AI.

The Process

Bluewave’s experts began the engagement with an ongoing review of the organisation’s environment architecture, processes and automations. As part of this project, significant data model and data storage changes were recommended. The customer was receptive to the findings of our audit and agreed to implement the changes we suggested, which is something Bluewave’s technical team got to work on immediately. These changes drastically improved data quality.

Following on from this, Bluewave redesigned our client’s entire service environment using Service Cloud and Lightning Console for customer service. These platforms provided a rich, consistent interface for improved customer interaction and support. Additionally, by leveraging extra support from tools such as CongaSign for automated letter-of-authority generation and signoff, the organisation’s customer service team could now smoothly facilitate the process of offering and sending contracts and other documents. This simplified the process and prevented errors.

The largest challenge in this engagement was the reverse engineering of existing legacy design which was in place within the organisation. This had to be done without affecting the customer’s internal team’s use of the system. Release management and business-as-usual controls were put in place to ensure there was no negative disruption. This engagement was successfully completed less than nine months after initial contact.

The Bluewave Way

The Bluewave Way is our agile implementation process, which has led to the delivery of over 250 successful Salesforce projects and engagements over the last decade – with this client being counted amongst them. Bluewave engaged with our customer on a scheduled process, with weekly engagements to discuss updates, challenges, and solutions, alongside any new project requests. This helped our experts to build a strong relationship with the customer. Leveraging our fully agile methodology and with a tactical team working together, the solution was deployed on time and within budget.

The Results

Bluewave replaced our client’s existing unsuccessful Salesforce partner and built a strong relationship, which exists to this day. Through our comprehensive digital transformation, Bluewave’s experts were able to improve the organisation’s internal systems. Our team was able to eliminate repetitive manual tasks, standardise data and reduce storage needs, automate assignments, and integrate the customer’s new system with intelligent document signing tools. Bluewave successfully redesigned our client’s service interface, which empowered the organisation’s users to provide better service to their customers.