evm modernizes customer management with BSI

Baden, June 6, 2023 – The energy provider Energieversorgung Mittelrhein AG (evm) is the largest municipal energy and service company in Rheinland-Pfalz, providing hundreds of thousands of private and business customers with power, gas, and water. In order to make their customer relationship management more efficient and demand-based, evm relies on a Customer Experience Platform from the Swiss software company BSI.

evm’s goal: customer centricity across all departments

evm was also looking for a new technological foundation to accompany its customers purposefully along the entire customer journey, implement processes more efficiently and cost-effectively, and reduce the workload on its staff. Specifically, evm wanted to strengthen customer loyalty, reduce the churn rate, increase the cross-selling and upselling potential, and implement data-based campaigns for all this. However, this requires a 360° view of customers across all departments, as well as centralized control of customer interactions.

The current IT architecture unfortunately did not allow this to the full extent: Data was incomplete and distributed on multiple systems, making it impossible to have a comprehensive customer view in sales, service and marketing. Many manual processes and complex data processing were a burden on the staff. Moreover, the necessary system adjustments were time-consuming and costly. A new scalable and flexible solution shall now map processes more efficiently via automation and self-service offerings and prepare evm for future growth. Above all, however, it should serve as a foundation for consistent customer centricity in marketing, sales, and service.

The BSI Customer Suite bundles all customer interactions

In order to achieve this, evm relies on a digital marketing platform which bundles all customer-related activity and optimizes sales and service processes. This platform consists of integrated modules from both the BSI Customer Suite and the software company ePilot.

The new marketing platform is connected to the billing system and other peripheral systems within the overall IT architecture via an integration layer. Thus, the entire customer-interaction process can be mapped – from the first inquiry and consultation appointments through to the preparation of an offer and the finalized contract as well as subsequent automated support – across all of evm’s business areas. In this way, upselling and cross-selling potentials can also be implemented well on a trigger basis.

BSI is planning further offers for energy providers

Implementation started in May 2023; a pilot system should be established by the first quarter of 2024 at the latest, becoming fully operational by mid 2024. “With the BSI Customer Suite, we are introducing a comprehensive system which covers current and also future requirements for evm. The flexibility of the system and the partnership-based cooperation have convinced us that we have found the right partner in BSI. This puts us in a position to market our offers in a target and future-oriented manner,” comment Rainer Schwab and Ivonne Liedloff, project managers at evm.

BSI itself is already planning beyond this cooperation: “Through our energy-specific partnerships, for instance with ePilot and Powercloud, as well as extensive product investments, we can offer energy suppliers what BSI has already been able to prove in other industries in the past – market-leading and flexible solutions for efficient service centers and comprehensive customer centricity. There is high demand, and initiatives to relieve the burden on service centers and customer loyalty in the energy industry have only just begun,” adds Sebastian Louis, Community Manager Energy & Utilities at BSI.