Utility Week

34 | AUGUST 2021 | UTILITY WEEK Analysis Kraken Technology reaches for customer service crown Eon UK's adoption of Octopus Energy's Kraken technology was a big endorsement of the platform – but Kraken's ambitions are for growth that is global, and expotential. Elaine Knutt reports. I n May, a press release from Octopus Energy offshoot Kraken Technologies and Eon celebrated the milestone achieve- ment of two million new Eon customers migrated to Kraken's customer service plat- form in just under a year, following Eon's acquisition of Npower in 2019. But this milestone is just a waypoint on the journey: Octopus aims to use Kraken's technology as an engine of growth, licensing the platform to energy retailers around the world with the aim of having 100 million cus- tomers on the platform by 2027. Octopus aims to partner with like-minded companies seeking a "transformation migra- tion" by sharing Kraken technology and the operating model it's built around. In the five years since Octopus Energy was launched, it has leveraged Kraken to sign 17 million customers globally: 2.2 million are Octopus accounts in the UK, while 15 million are licensees following strategic partnerships in Europe, Australia, and Japan. So that's 83 million to go, but Kraken is confident that "entech" – and the operat- ing savings it brings to energy companies – can be persuasive and profitable. "Half of that growth will be through our own [Octo- pus Energy] brand and organic growth, and half through sharing our operating model," explains Lara Beers, vice president for global sales at Kraken Technologies. Kraken is an end-to-end platform inte- grating smart meter and consumption data, billing and payments, wholesale market data and marketing. It's built to be efficient and intuitive for non-energy specialists in their homes or SMEs, and for the customer ser- vices teams in operations centres. It integrates all customer interactions and communications into a single history, rather than relying on data making the trip from one discrete system to another. And because customer services staff in operations centres are empowered by having a full spectrum view of clients' accounts, they can then take on the more proactive role of "energy special- ists" in managing them. Eon and other new customers are there- fore buying more than just sošware. "The culture is the 'special sauce' of Kraken: if you licence it, you licence the package. It's an operating model and a blueprint for a better business. We're in the business now of transformation, that's what we're offering Eon, Good Energy, Tokyo Gas and Origin," Beers says. But as well as adding flavour to the cus- tomer experience, Kraken's partners believe that the "sauce" makes sense financially. When Good Energy signed in March 2020, it said it expected its investment of £4 million to achieve payback through operating cost savings within 18 months. An energy platform for net zero life Kraken is also built on the assumption that consumer-friendly tech will be an essen- tial component of the net zero transition. If today's customers are going to become tomorrow's "prosumers", they need to be supported with intuitive sošware that can reduce the mental load of switching tariffs or scheduling EV charges or deploying home batteries. In other words, their relationship with energy providers needs to be similar to the relationship they have with Apple or Google: accessible through multiple synched devices, reliable responsiveness, and using machine learning to predict patterns and needs. While Lara Beers, vice president for global sales, Kraken Technologies

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