FIRST UTILITY
you support retail energy in the UK – because we couldn ’ t afford to go to SAP and buy their solution when we were a young company – so we had to hire a lot of smart software engineers and do a lot of that primary platform development ourselves .”
In-house innovation Keeping the software engineering team engaged has been key to enabling the flow of innovation , by providing regular research days and encouraging contribution to open source communities . A good example is the successful research and development project that resulted in natural language processing techniques that works out what a customer is asking for in an intelligent way . Wilkins adds : “ It handles a good proportion of our inbound customer contact traffic now via mail but also in our mobile platform , so customers can chat to what they think is an agent but it is an artificial intelligence brain and it ’ s available 24 / 7 helping fix a direct debit , find out what the last bill was or even submit a meter reading .”
It was important to Wilkins that Ask First , as this product is called , wasn ’ t seen by customers as a barrier to good service or as a deflection technique . He adds : “ We wanted Ask First to actually answer the question , not just give back some standard request . So when we build a product , there is instrumentation inside the product to make sure we know who is using it and what questions they ’ re asking .
56 September 2016