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How British Gas uses CloudSense to power a convenient in-home customer experience

Joined-up sales experience

On-the-go sales, with or without internet

Real-time customer visibility

Background

British Gas is the UK’s leading energy and home services supplier, providing central heating, boilers, gas, electricity and other services to millions of homes.

British Gas employs a nationwide field team to supply heating and hot water solutions for its customers. The Heating Advisors visit homes by appointment to discuss their heating and hot water needs.

The Heating Advisor captures all information that will affect the required boiler, controls, radiators and pipework, combing with the prospect’s information to create a quote.

British Gas wanted to enrich the in-home experience for customers and Heating Advisors. As a business committed to using digital methods to transform its customer experience, the Energy provider chose Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) technology.

CloudSense's CPQ and Order Management platform proved the best technology to transform British Gas' boiler and central heating sales in the field and call center.

 

Challenges

The key to providing a better experience for both the Heating Advisors and customers was to make the sales process far more interactive and collaborative, while giving Heating Advisors more time to listen and talk to customers.

Difficulty showing full product range 

Slow proposal & quote generation

Limited visibility of customer information

The ideal solution would speed up the way a proposal was developed – letting advisors show the customer multiple options, reduce the time sitting behind a laptop, and increase the time interacting with the customer.

British Gas also needed a CPQ solution to work seamlessly across their field sales and contact center sales teams. This would ensure call center staff always had the correct information if a customer called to take any proposal further. Visibility and accuracy of information was key, as was the need to ensure that advisors had the very latest product information at their fingertips.

Solution

To overcome its challenges, British Gas chose the CloudSense platform, using CPQ for its call center and CloudSense Anywhere, the Mobile CPQ field sales app, for its Heating Advisors.

The CloudSense platform gives British Gas a Salesforce-native system to join its sales channels and provide a seamless customer experience in the home via iPads, with or without an Internet connection. With Salesforce and CloudSense Anywhere,  British Gas has a single app, to provide compelling sales collateral.

Because CloudSense is Salesforce-native, all British Gas users can now access the systems via a single interface – using the browser in the call center and an iPad application in the field.

Previously the teams had to wait for data to migrate between different cloud providers before it was visible on Salesforce. With CloudSense the Heating Sales Advisors can work quicker with real-time data and a single source of information for each customer. Instead of laptops, they now use iPads, which provide far more flexibility and let them concentrate on giving customers a better experience.

Results

British Gas has seen a number of benefits since implementing CloudSense CPQ.

David Bowring, Head of Technology, British Gas Central Heating, ran through some of the improvements:

“Because we now have a more agile and flexible quoting platform, our sales people can offer multiple proposals and quotations effortlessly, using different parameters, providing the customer with a wider choice of options than before.”

“The customer experience is much improved as the Heating Sales Advisors now spend less time focusing on the technology and more time listening to customers, hearing what they need and recommending a solution. Their sales experience is put to better use and the customer gets an improved consultation with a proposed solution that is better for them.”

“Because the sales information is always up-to-date the material can be quickly updated at source and pushed out to the team immediately. There are big innovations in the control of heating and water via smartphones and other devices. Now we can release product lines onto the market far quicker; Heating Sales Advisors are able to present them to customers on their iPads and have all the benefits and advantages at their fingertips.”

David concluded, “The CloudSense product has enabled us to improve the service to customers out in the field, and given us better visibility of the information with our advisors.”

"Our sales people can now offer multiple proposals and quotations effortlessly, using different parameters, providing the customer with a wider choice of options than before."

 

David Bowring
Head of Technology

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