In 2021, Flux will complete its largest and most ambitious migration project to date: transferring 200,000-plus Meridian Energy customers from a legacy system to the Flux platform. Here’s how - and why - we’re doing it.
THE BACKSTORY
Meridian Energy is New Zealand’s largest energy gentailer, producing 35 per cent of New Zealand’s electricity via renewable sources and powering everything from tiny homes to huge businesses. Meridian also owns Flux - but in this case we treat them as a client with a different set of objectives to our business.
Meridian came to us because they knew their legacy platform wasn’t future-proofed to fit with their ambitious growth plans.
“We think many of the legacy platforms will not keep up with the pace of change in customer service, product innovation, or ease of implementation,” explains Meridian’s chief customer officer, Lisa Hannifin.
“With the accelerating pace of change in energy retailing, the need to balance both operating costs and driving innovation is more important than ever."
We understand Meridian’s needs because Flux’s product suite is designed to flex for the future. We know visionary companies don’t get ahead by looking backwards, or by relying on outdated tech. That’s why the success of this project is imperative for both Flux and Meridian. It’s enabling both companies to stretch and grow, with an eye on tomorrow.
When the migration is complete, Meridian will be able to manage their retail customers with Flux’s world-class SaaS application. It will reduce cost-to-serve for Meridian by aligning retail platforms and support structures. Operating on a more flexible platform means it can be faster to market, giving it a competitive edge.
For Flux, delivering this migration will prove our ability to successfully mastermind, manage and deliver a large-scale migration in a way that benefits our business, our client and their customers.
MAKING IT HAPPEN
Flexibility and integration are key to how we work at Flux. We pride ourselves on being nimble and agile, able to scale up or down at speed. We’re also smart enough to know that we can’t do everything on our own. That’s why we focus on smart integration, working with trusted, best-in-class services like Amazon Web Services, Gorilla and SendGrid.
That attitude to flexibility, agility and integration has stood us in good stead during the Meridian migration project, where we have been able to scale up our teams to get the work done on time and on budget. We partnered with some key development houses with proven track records in Ruby app development to support our existing teams. Conducting this kind of large-scale migration requires huge amounts of technical knowledge and a deep understanding of both our product and our client’s needs. It also needs high levels of trust, excellent communication and peerless client service.
Our service model is designed to solve problems and create mutually beneficial solutions and successes. That means that we provide all our clients (not just our shareholder ones) with a dedicated service team. In a long-running project like this migration, good relationships are everything. So is being able to roll with the punches, says Lisa Hannifin.
“While no project of this scale is ever a complete walk in the park, our business-led, iterative and agile approach has meant that to date we’ve managed the migration to the Flux platform without any significant service failures or customer experience issues.
“What we’re starting to see is that customers on the Flux platform require fewer service interventions and have less need to contact our Customer Care teams, while our agents are better able to service our customers, more quickly. These improvements help free our people up to spend our time working on high value customer activities – rather than day-to-day servicing – and managing an ever-growing customer base, without growing our staffing levels.”
THE FUTURE
While we’re excited to see how the successful completion of this project will contribute to Meridian’s future, it’s also played an important part in our evolution as a business. We know that we have a vital role to play in simplifying the complex digital needs of energy retailers who are committed to transforming themselves or the energy market. We want to support them to bill complex connections, move faster in market, reduce cost to serve, create a seamless customer experience and reach new markets.
As our work with Meridian Energy has shown, we can enable leading energy businesses to meet - and exceed - their goals. Why not find out what we can do for you?
