Utility Week

UTILITY WEEK | AUGUST 2021 | 35 Kraken will support the roll out of "smart grid" products and services in the future, it already has an intuitive user interface. "Anyone can log in, and they don't even need to have training because it's as easy to use as an iPhone," says Beers. Not migration, but transformation As an end-to-end cloud-based customer engagement and billing system, Kraken interfaces with consumers in their homes via the web, mobile and smart meters, and also with Kraken sta• , who have access to additional information such as consumption forecasting, and trading information from the wholesale markets. Kraken also contrasts with the indus- try-standard approach of bolting together o• -the-shelf packages, such as a customer information system (CIS) for customer data with a customer relationship management (CRM) platform for marketing – which tend to come with all the attendant di„ culties of integration and poorly synched updates. And rather than being an "o• the shelf " pur- chase, the system can be di• erentiated and modi… ed to suit clients' business models, and is designed to be scalable and † exible. During the Npower migration, no fewer than six existing platforms were integrated into Kraken. The practical di• erence that makes would be apparent to anyone who has racked up call time chasing a query across di• erent teams at their energy or broadband provider. "You call in multiple times on a sin- gle issue getting bounced around di• erent siloed departments, which comes with re- explaining yourself at every level. It's very frustrating and it's the rule rather than the exception," says Beers. On Kraken, customers are assigned to "teams" of 8 or 10 energy specialists, so that there's a good chance that a call or inquiry will be picked up by someone who already knows the customer. "Our energy specialists are the centre of our company. We've built our business around our customer, but what that means is actually building it around the people that service our customers." Certainly, Eon UK chief executive Michael Lewis is impressed. At the time the deal was announced, in March 2020, the company talked of becoming a "market leader" on costs thanks to Kraken, and it plans to trans- fer the rest of its UK customer base on to the platform, extending the new Eon Next brand. "It's a huge achievement, not just to com- plete the migration in such a short time but also to achieve such a positive response from customers – because customers are what this move is all about," says Lewis. "The next step is moving all Eon energy customers – millions of homes and hundreds of thousands of small businesses around the country – to Eon Next. This step is vital in building more e• ective and responsive rela- tionships with our customers, because it is in their homes and businesses that changes are needed in order to combat the climate crisis; that means creating warmer, healthier, more comfortable homes and more e„ cient and cost-e• ective businesses." Removing friction, saving costs Octopus Energy Group was set up in 2015 by co-founders Greg Jackson (chief executive), James Eddison (chief technology o„ cer) and Stuart Jackson (chief … nancial o„ cer) with backing from asset management group Octo- pus Capital. None of the founders previously worked in energy; Eddison and Jackson in fact shared a background in soŸ ware and digital tech, shaping Kraken with insights gained from platforms for the Labour Party, a drinks brand and e-commerce sites – the common factor being a focus on removing barriers and friction between customers and service providers. Kraken was also built with customer migration and business change in mind and to enable partner companies to take advan- tage of its technologies; Octopus sees this as a route to earnings growth alongside sell- ing green energy and empowering people to share, generate and store it. Jackson highlighted this in the Eon press release when he said: "We developed Kraken alongside our operations team to make it easier and cheaper for energy companies to o• er green energy while maintaining out- standing customer service levels – and Eon Next is already reaping the bene… ts of this technology. If more energy companies took the same approach as Eon, we'd see tremen- dous improvements for both the people and the planet." Beers herself has a background in "envi- ronmental tech", gained while working for US company Opower, a soŸ ware-as-a-service provider for utilities. Its acquisition by Ora- cle brought Beers to the UK, where she was exposed to Octopus and its ambition to build its own technology platform. "I stalked Octo- pus Energy!" says Beers, describing how she attended events, subscribed to podcasts and was generally being drawn to the infectious atmosphere of a disruptive start-up. The company's focus on tech means that its developers and coders now roll out incre- mental upgrades on a continuous basis, Beers explains. "With soŸ ware as a service, you might get three to four upgrades a year. At Kraken, we operate continuous deploy- ment, it's upgraded 80 to 100 times a day." She also says this puts Kraken in a good position as the energy sector "† exes" to meet net zero, adding more supply and demand- side connections. "We're able to really meet that future energy transition in a more pow- erful way than systems that were built for fossil fuels." In November 2020, Octopus Energy acquired a soŸ ware company called Upside Energy, a specialist in systems for energy and device management. That acquisition forms the basis of a new brand, Kraken Flex, which gives asset owners, energy traders and retail- ers control of devices such as smart batteries. Octopus has been named best energy pro- vider in numerous rankings, including those run by Which?, TechRadar, and Uswitch. It and "entech" rivals such as Ovo do enjoy some in-built advantages – including energy consumers' low expectations set by decades of mixed customer service, and the more recent tribulations of the smart meter rollout. But in a world where our daily tasks are increasingly being outsourced to the tech and apps in our lives, and consumers are starting to bene… t from the increase in pro- ductivity, Kraken embodies the growing realisation that technology and data will be a key factor propelling us to net zero. Elaine Knutt, interim UW Innovate editor Utility Week Live 2022 This article is part of UW Innovate's coverage of the customer service challenge. See it brought to life at Utility Week Live, 17-18 May 2022, NEC Birmingham "We developed Kraken alongside our operations team to make it easier and cheaper for energy companies to off er green energy while maintaining outstanding customer service levels." Greg Jackson, chief executive, Octopus Energy "We developed Kraken alongside our operations team to make it easier and cheaper for energy companies to off er green energy while maintaining outstanding customer service

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