Success story

Stadtwerke Gütersloh GmbH increases productivity with epilot cloud platform

By using epilot, Stadtwerke Gütersloh has already noticed appreciable improvements within a very short time:

More leads and contracts through the relaunch,
digital click section and online ads.

What was the initial situation?

Like all utilities, Stadtwerke Gütersloh must respond to changing customer needs brought about by technological advances and digitization. Here, most municipal utilities have some catching up to do in terms of responsiveness and agility. New sales channels were therefore urgently needed for its portfolio of electricity, gas, water and fiber-optic sales, as well as for its pools and transport operations. The previous websites were rather confusing, not intuitive, offered too much information at once, which made user orientation difficult and – an enormous disadvantage for lead generation: There were no clear order routes and little sales orientation. The commodities in particular were not presented in a particularly appealing or customer-friendly manner. Whereas the customer center and telephone contact used to be the most important touchpoints for customers (the degree of use here was between 80% and 100%), Stadtwerke Gütersloh noticed a change in customer behavior: The degree of use of the existing channels shifted more and more in the past from classic to digital channels in the direction of Internet marketing, comparison portals, and ordering processes on the company’s own website.

"Since we started using the booking route combined with marketing campaigns, bookings have increased steadily. The simple and straightforward booking via the epilot click route makes it much easier for customers to complete a product purchase."

Bildschirmfoto-2021-03-30-um-11.24.44-300x200

Thomas Primon

Head of energy management

Stadtwerke Gütersloh has been serving the people of the region for more than 150 years – with the consistency of an experienced traditional company and the innovative orientation of a strong service provider. In addition to the provision of energy, water and heat, the portfolio also includes the city buses as well as sharing products, stable telecommunications and fast Internet, and pool operation.

Fields of application of epilot:

Sales

Customer Journeys & Contact Forms

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"Especially the CI-compliant embedding of the customer journey was important to us, because our target group knows our proven corporate design. The order route and the complete processing of order and customer management in the background runs via epilot."

Thomas Primon

Head of energy management

What was implemented with epilot?

Together with epilot, the digital customer contact point was optimized: As part of a website relaunch, an intuitive customer journey in responsive design was embedded on the website, in which the customer is guided to their desired rate in just a few steps with simple questions. This means that customers of Stadtwerke Gütersloh can book power and gas rates online quickly and intuitively from anywhere.

Now there is more modernity in the commodities power and gas. With their own electricity and gas price calculator, the Power & Gas Journey, customers of Stadtwerke Gütersloh can now choose from a broad portfolio of a total of eight electricity and gas tariffs: including products such as classic, eco or heat pump power and classic or fixed gas. The Power & Gas Journey is now much more customer-friendly, mobile-optimized and tailored to the needs of Stadtwerke Gütersloh. This also includes that it visually adapts to the new website. It features consistent texts, user-centric navigation, emotional imagery, and intelligent checkouts for power and gas, which were created by the agency commissioned with the relaunch in close cooperation with epilot.

Interestingly, the collaboration with epilot has not only influenced the external presentation, but also internal processes: Agile working has now increasingly found its way into the working methods and culture of Stadtwerke Gütersloh, enabling collaboration across all media. For example, Kanban boards such as Trello for the daily prioritization of tasks in the team or Scrum methods have become lived project culture at Stadtwerke. Meanwhile, regular reviews, daily agreements or strategy days to test new methods are also part of the process. All this increases the feedback culture for better and more modern internal and external collaboration.

The process of mass customer business charging infrastructure also became significantly more efficient through epilot: What was previously compiled manually in Excel spreadsheets has been running digitally and more automatically since the introduction of the eCommerce platform.

However, the introduction of epilot was only one building block of the digital realignment: driving the digital transformation culturally and in other channels was also an important aspect. For example, in addition to social media channels such as Facebook and Instagram, Stadtwerke Gütersloh has also implemented the Google Adwords advertising system in order to be able to react agilely and flexibly to different market situations.

Conclusion

The result proves Stadtwerke Gütersloh right: thanks to the linked measures from the website relaunch, promotion of the online click path through campaigns on Facebook and Instagram, and also Google Ads tailored to customer needs, leads and contract conclusions were steadily increased. This development is supported by the new agile, flexible and dynamic way of working based on the epilot model. Thanks to its customer-focused imagery and user-oriented navigation, the new website not only creates experiences for customers, but also generates important leads that lead to the conclusion of contracts.

The most important steps of the joint project at a glance

Embedding of an intuitive customer journey in responsive design on the website
Customers of Stadtwerke Gütersloh can book power and gas rates online quickly and intuitively from anywhere
Service expansion through digital customer contact point and a better customer experience of the mobile-optimized click path, as the customer is guided to their desired tariff with simple and few questions
Active existing customer management and increased transparency through 360-degree customer view

Outlook for the future

The road to the digital future has only just begun for Stadtwerke Gütersloh: In the future, so-called custom products will also be used to completely individualize the products that can be configured in epilot.

The ambitious goal is to become the region’s leading energy service provider with the help of epilot as early as 2023. With the new agile start-up mentality that Stadtwerke has built up over the past few months, this goal should be easily achieved.

Webinar recording overall concept
"Living as a Service"

With this, Stadtwerke Gütersloh wants to make the lives of its customers a little easier every day. The basis for this is a broad product portfolio – from power and gas, supplemented by energy services for heat, e-mobility and renewable energy generation, to mobility services and telecommunications, right through to the leisure sector. As part of a medium-term target and implementation program, these products are to be increasingly linked with one another in order to generate a holistic benefit for customers and to open up new future business models for Stadtwerke Gütersloh. Together with Stadtwerke Gütersloh, PRO energy consult and MWP Consulting, we talked in a webinar about the target picture of Stadtwerke Gütersloh’s overall concept.

Thomas Primon

Head of energy management

Digitization and cultural change at Stadtwerke Gütersloh

Natalie Waletzko, Head of Sales Service at Stadtwerke Gütersloh, tells the epilot community about digitization and the culture change at the municipal utility as part of the collaboration with epilot.

Natalie Waletzko

Sales Service Manager

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