Customer Obsession Is in Our DNA
As the nights are drawing in, the temperature is dropping and the supermarkets are already promoting Christmas lines, the focus within Procode is undoubtedly about ensuring that our systems are ready for the onslaught of winter. Procode is entrusted to provide the tech platforms that run the country’s leading pre-payment energy supplier, Utilita Energy, amongst other customers. At this time of year, it’ll be no surprise that customers top up more frequently as the darker nights and cooling temperatures drive increased energy consumption.
Prepay customers benefit from avoiding ‘direct debit shock’ that credit customers often endure by keeping ahead of their energy consumption through prepayment of their energy using the My Utilita app (another Procode platform). Our systems have to be resilient and available 24 hours a day as customers can and do top up every minute of every day. Customers need the reassurance of a technology platform that is always on, reliable and performant as it can literally be the difference between the lights being on or off!
Recently, I posted an article about delivering 100k top-ups at 100% success rate. Since then, we’ve continued to tune and improve the platform ahead of the winter rush, such that we’re now celebrating over 1mn top-ups at 100% success. This doesn’t happen by accident. This is the result of many engineers obsessing over the detail and tuning of the many Procode systems that play a part in transacting these top-ups. Whether that be the My Utilita app, our payments platforms in partnership with Visa, our industry leading DCC adapter (the technology that connects smart meters to the national infrastructure) that we call the IDA (Intelligent Data Adapter) and much more.
What’s unique about the Procode IDA is that it’s intelligent by name AND by nature as we’ve engineered our systems (in association with our partners at Secure Meters Limited) to automatically bypass the national Smart DCC (Data Communications Company) infrastructure in the event of a maintenance event or slow down. This happens automatically and invisibly to the customer – if we don’t receive a timely response from the DCC we will route the vending request for a SMETS1 Secure meter directly to Secure Meters. The DCC maintenance, yesterday was a great use case for this functionality – over 41k SMETS1 meter top-ups (that would have otherwise been impossible) were made during the event using the backup functionality that we have in place.
But it’s not just about customers topping up. Our obsession about every customer all the time means that everything we do has the customer front and centre. Take our engineers installing smart meters; the intelligence that we’ve built into our systems allows us to achieve what we believe to be the highest installation and commission rate of meters in the industry. This not only drives a positive customer experience but also helps drive engineer retention whilst delivering obvious efficiency gains. To be clear, this isn’t just connecting the meters; it’s leaving the property having performed a live top-up on the meters. Clearly, not all of the customers major in prepayment, but I think it’s safe to say that they all benefit from our obsession with detail. The devil really is in the data!
Our relentless focus on intelligent systems and customer-first engineering has enabled over 1 million seamless top-ups, and we’re just getting started.