Customer sign-ups, without the manual keying.

About Frank*Energy

Frank*Energy – previously known as Energy Online – has been focused on making power easy and affordable for Kiwis for more than 20 years. It provides no-contract power and gas. A ‘fiercely’ autonomous offshoot of Genesis Energy, it has a goal of being fully digital, making sign-up and account management intuitive and easy for customers.

The challenge

Until Betty the robot appeared, all sign ups required manual input from Frank*Energy’s customer care agents (CCAs). Whenever a new client signed up and filled out the online forms, a CCA would take that information, paste it into another system and run manual checks on aspects such as location data, along with a credit check.

The solution: Betty the robot

Betty picks up customer details from the Nexus system and enters it into a Gentrack system, relieving staff of the manual process of copying and pasting data. The robot also initiates ICP checks and credit checks.

Quanton helped Frank*Energy map the end-to-end process and look at where there was waste to enable optimisation of process as well as digitisation.

“It’s a case of don’t try to automate a process before you’ve optimised it, otherwise you’re automating a flawed process,” says Chris Malcolm, Frank*Energy Senior Product Owner.

What changed

Betty the robot completed 2.5FTEs worth of work in August – removing a need to hire additional staff. Signup times have reduced from up to four days to within hours.

“Before the Betty the robot, it took about eight minutes for a customer care agent to complete the signup,” says Malcolm. “Now, for many sign ups, no CCA is involved as the robot does the work. If a CCA has to step in to complete the work, the average time spent has been halved to about four minutes. That’s a massive improvement.”

“We’ve had such success with Betty that we’re inspired to keep exploring how digitisation can help our customers, and spur productivity among our people.”