TECHNOLOGY

We also track customers through our digital platform and through our voice platform so we know if they subsequently call back in . This way we know that people that use Ask First have a very high percentage of satisfaction .”

Identifying differentiators When choosing whether to invest in its own solutions or to work with what the market has to offer , the deciding factor for Wilkins is whether First Utility can differentiate in some way . It has its own modern technology platform that uses very few third party technology players and therefore has a very low cost of ownership associated with it , but there are solutions that First Utility looks to external partners for . Wilkins adds : “ Typically , if it ’ s a generic requirement and we can access it at a decent price and we think the price scales reasonably with our business model then we will buy . We don ’ t want to build for the sake of building .”

Building something bespoke together with carefully selected partners is also an option , and is

what Wilkins decided to do with the customer billing platform when its own system was no longer able to cope with the company ’ s growth . “ We scanned the market and we found a multi-product billing platform in Israel from a company called LogNet Systems . We had fewer than 50,000 customers at the time and LogNet was willing to work with us at our relatively small scale and treat us like a very important customer . So we then embarked on a three-year project to jointly develop a UK energy billing system - the system we ’ re on today - and one that we ’ re very confident will get us way up into the Big Six territories .”

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