ENGIE Home Services reinvents itself by focusing on client relationships

As the leading provider of home heating services, ENGIE Home Services faces two major challenges — the energy transition and digital transformation. ENGIE Home Services seeks to develop its client portfolio and diversify its operations, and to achieve that objective, excellent client relationships must complement technical excellence. This is also in line with the commitment of the ENGIE group to be the leader in energy transition — and, in the end, who can better support clients in this endeavor than ENGIE Home Services? In order to combine relational excellence with its technical excellence and continue to meet customer expectations, the company reengineered its client relationships by leveraging a Salesforce solution designed and deployed with the help of DXC Technology.

Every day, 14,000 French homes welcome an ENGIE Home Services technician. This is a relationship of trust that compels and engages the leader in individual heating system installation, maintenance and repair to meet the two major expectations of its customers — to accompany them in the energy transition and in decarbonation efforts, where ENGIE group strives to be a leader, and to be in sync with new digital uses. To this end, technical competence, which is the strength of the company, must be combined with omnichannel relational excellence. ENGIE Home Services embarked on the major project of an in-depth transformation of its customer relationships based on digital technology.

A new client-focused approach

Much like an ERP whose main business was the boiler, ENGIE Home Services had until then a resolutely technical approach to its business. This vision complicated customer relationships, for example in the event of a move and relocation. “The challenge today is to customize, because we offer a proximity service with an industrial organization able to handle 5 million calls a year. For the customer, the size of the group should not be a burden but an assurance of availability, efficiency and integrity,” says Christophe Charré, director of client relationships at ENGIE Home Services.

In order to do this, the company developed a new client approach, instilled in its 500 consultants within a dedicated training structure, the School for Client Relationships and Consultancy (ERC2). And to support this transformation, these new principles had to be embodied in an operational tool that would also be the foundation of a technological ecosystem undergoing rapid change.

Standard tool and agile development

Two strong convictions led to this project. The first was that the tool could cover most of the standard requirements. This led to the choice of Salesforce which, moreover, had seduced users invited to test the models submitted by the competing publishers. The second key principle: to drive the project using a 100% Agile methodology, with the users, difficult to mobilize, being represented by a partner. This role was entrusted to DXC Technology, retained for its experience of Agile methodologies, and for its capacity of absorbing the trade, then formalizing often tacit processes and translating them into “user stories.” As a true transmission belt between agencies and headquarters, the DXC team was able to be an effective co-builder of the solution, sprint after sprint.

The tool that DXC developed manages client requests and complaints, which are recorded and processed in a unified workflow regardless of the contact channel. In this way, an urgent request is no longer in danger of being drowned in the 10,000 to 15,000 emails received per week by the agencies. The tool brings many practical advantages that make the advisers’ work easier and more reliable: no more re-entries, which are sources of error; selected tooltips and pictograms that illustrate the situation of a client at a glance; a search engine; and much more. “Management has unprecedented visibility and therefore new levers to steer its teams closer to help them prioritize actions,” says Mehdi Kallel, partner in charge of the Salesforce practice at DXC.

The challenge of deployment

At the end of this first phase, another challenge was to deploy the tool in 200 agencies in France. To this end, ENGIE Home Services once again engaged DXC, which, after collecting the knowledge on site, was now needed to help present the results.

DXC designed and implemented a double change management — at the operational level for advisers and at the level of managment to take ownership of the new managing possibilities. This requires a day and a half of onsite presence at the agency by the DXC team, and special attention and investment that have played an undeniable role in the excellent reception of the Salesforce tool.

“The humility and humanity of the DXC team in contact with the agencies were one of the keys to success,” says Christophe Charré. Well underway, the deployment continues at the rate of about 10 agencies per week, and is expected to be completed by the end of summer 2017.