Origin Energy says a cloud- and AI-based tool that prepares accurate price quotes for rooftop solar and battery storage installations may wind up powering a white-labelled service offering.
The company launched the ‘Origin Solar Assessment Tool’, built with Accenture and Google Cloud, in May this year, initially just for its own use.
The tool handles the specification and quotation process online instead of over the phone and/or with an occasional site visit.
Speaking at Google Cloud Next '22 this morning, Origin Energy’s general manager of retail sales and marketing Duncan Permezel said the tool had already led to customer service improvements.
Permezel said customers received accurate quotes much faster.
“We are getting higher interaction net promoter scores through the new platform than previously and the customers can choose what time of day they choose to interact with us and consider the purchase options,” he said.
“We're also seeing lower cancellation rates on orders due to the increased confidence in the system design…. This lower cancellation rate leads to more efficient operations.”
Permezel said the company’s teams, as well as the machine learning built into the platform, means updates are being constantly proposed and made.
He also flagged different uses for the tool.
“I would also note that the platform allows some of our partners to consider white labeling the competency, to allow them to introduce their customers to renewable and distributed generation and storage in a way that they can trust the experience, that it's going to be customer experience accretive and that the customer won't be delayed or held up in any transfers or movements between the organisations,” Permezel said.
Permezel said the tool had purposely been brought to market as a minimum viable product (MVP) “so that we could test and refine the customer's experience with real insight and data.”
“Our MVP focused on limited geographies and house types in the first instance, and then expanded beyond there,” he said.
“After building the MVP it was just a matter of iterating and iterating through until we had most of the geography and building types covered - and now we're circling back on other ideas and opportunities we saw along the way as well as thinking about how we continue this experience all the way through the sales cycle and included all the way through the installation cycle.”
Permezel added that the MVP status and continuous improvement process was important, because customer preferences around rooftop solar and storage “change rapidly … so our ability to adapt the proposition is very important.”
