Revolution in Customer Service at Orange Energia, Thanks to the Implementation of a Self-Service Portal

Facing the growing demand for more efficient customer self-service and the need to scale the customer service department, Orange Energy was faced with the challenge of transforming its digital services. The key objective of the project was to reduce the load on the call center and introduce modern solutions for online customer self-service, especially through mobile devices.

Orange Energy, the largest independent electricity supplier in Poland, serves over 120,000 customers. Its offer covers more than 97% of households in the country. Interestingly, Orange Energy also supports customers with photovoltaic installations, offering them the opportunity to return 100% of the energy fed back into the grid. Orange Polska uses wind energy, which accounts for 12% of its annual electricity demand, with plans to increase this share to 60% by 2025.

These facts confirm Orange Energy's position as a leader in the segment of independent electricity retailers in the market.

ENYU is a fully customizable customer service portal and mobile application for the energy sector, integrated with, among others, the SAP solution ecosystem and industry solutions such as AUMS. The platform allows energy consumers to independently manage payments, invoices, financial settlements, and personal data online, enabling customer service departments to focus on more complex cases. It offers optimization of service and operational costs, increases customer satisfaction through self-service, and facilitates their control over energy consumption. ENYU is a flexible tool that adapts to new business requirements and challenges related to the energy transformation, as it is also a fully open software platform.

Thanks to the use of ENYU, Orange Energy was able to implement a new customer portal in just 4 months (technical go-live), while the standard implementation of such projects takes about 8-10 months. ENYU meets 80% of the requirements "out of the box," which significantly also reduced the project's costs, with a significant effort focused on integration, automation, and ensuring the highest level of security, which is a standard in the Orange group.

Project Architecture and Infrastructure

The innovative ENYU architecture based on the MACH concept, implemented on Google Cloud Platform, provided the project with the necessary flexibility and scalability.

Security Standards

The new solution had to meet the rigorous security standards of the Orange group. This was verified with a wide range of security tests and securing the application on the functional side through SMS password operation authorizations.

Cloud and Terraform: Revolution in Infrastructure

The use of Terraform as an "Infrastructure as Code" tool enabled quick and trouble-free implementation in the production environment, ensuring ease of management and flexibility.

Terraform allows users to safely and efficiently configure, deploy, and manage infrastructure in the cloud, on physical or virtual servers. Using a simple, declarative configuration language, Terraform enables the automatic creation, modification, and sharing of infrastructure across different environments, reducing the risk of human errors and increasing efficiency.

Its modular structure allows for easy adaptation to the specific needs of the project. Terraform is valued for its ability to manage complex dependencies between resources and for introducing infrastructure as code practices, which are key for modern DevOps practices.

Technology Selection Supporting the Daily Needs of Orange Energy Employees

Adapting technology in companies often poses a challenge. Therefore, at Hycom, emphasis is placed on selecting tools that not only support the business goals of our Clients but also align with their organizational culture and can be easily adopted by employees.

For this reason, the Contentful platform was chosen for content management. Its intuitiveness allowed Orange employees to quickly learn and adapt the ENYU system to their own needs within just a few weeks.

Choosing the right IT tools is just one method of relieving tensions between people and technology.

Agile and Transparency in Project Management

This project proved that it is worthwhile to implement elements of agile work even in a corporate and formalized environment. Together with Orange Energy, we decided to introduce Agile project events such as sprint, daily, planning, and review.

The agile approach and transparency in decision-making had a positive impact on the project, leading to its faster and more efficient realization.

It is worth noting that in the first weeks after the implementation of the portal, nearly 10,000 Orange Energy customers logged in. The strategy of incrementally inviting customers to use the new online customer service channel also proved successful. This minimized the risks associated with the launch, and the scale of problem reports to the customer service department was minimal.

The project was realized at an impressive pace, saving time and resources. The achieved project scale and the satisfaction of the end customer, Orange Energy, allow for consideration of jointly developing the project in further stages.