Enlightening the Future: Deepend's Role in Essential Energy's Digital and Streetlight Reporting Transformation
Essential Energy (EE) is one of Australia’s largest regional energy infrastructures providers, responsible for 183,612 km of powerline, traversing 737,000 square kilometres of landmass.
They have established a Transformation Program, which will run for the next 2 years, fundamental to progressing the company towards an energy company for the future.
At the heart of the program is digitalisation of many of EE tools and the modernisation of processes has created significant improvements in the efficiency and effectiveness of applications. For customers, it’s delivering improvements that enable a safe and reliable network now and for the future.
“The Contact Centre team asked me to say thanks for delivering a good, stable environment – well done team! Happy users are the best kind of users!"
Annie Belisle - Essential Energy
Part of Essential Energy’s responsibilities is the maintenance of streetlights within their area management, including taking customer fault reports and allocating field crews to fix streetlights.
The previous reporting tool, ‘NeatStreets’, had several limitations creating both legal and compliance risk as well as creating manual entry work for the EE business. The system was very difficult to use – resulting in members of the public not reporting lights, or incorrectly reporting lights, creating public liability risk if lights were not repaired within specific periods.
A project was initiated to build a new streetlights fault reporting Web Portal, to replace the “NeatStreets” solution.
Engaged in the modernisation of the streetlights outage tool, we partnered with EE to design, build, and deploy a new streetlights fault reporting web portal which was integrated with EE internal systems.
We worked closely with EE team members to develop a customer focused interface that displayed streetlights within the Google mapping technology allowing customers to select and report a streetlight fault quickly and easily.
The solution was co-developed with MakeSense to ensure that the web application integrated seamlessly with APIs to raise work tasks, obtain location and asset data, and notify customers.
The new solution leveraged EE’s existing website infrastructure (Sitecore CMS v8.2) and was designed so that a user experience would be consistent with other digital platforms’ experience.
Co-design workshops
Were key to ensure that the web application experience aligned with the data requirements of the internal EE downstream systems.
Precision design
As critical to ensuring that all customer workflows were accommodated, with the Deepend design team designing over 40 screens.
Design process
Convergent thinking ensures that clear solutions and outcomes move forward into the prototyping phases of the program.
Engaged stakeholder team
A priority project within EE, Deepend worked using agile techniques to deliver the web portal that not only had the customer facing experience, but also a secure staff view.
Composable digital solution
The final solution was a standalone web application that integrated with MuleSoft API’s that passed data to EE internal systems but was able to be injected into their existing corporate website.
Result Listing
Enabling a safe and reliable network now and into the future
The solution effectively captures streetlight fault reports from customers and automatically raises fieldwork tasks to quickly assign repair crew, with all of the information they need to repair the fault.
Creating efficiencies and improving accuracies in the contact centre
Reduced calls for streetlight faults to the contact centre and improvements in the efficiency of contact centre raising streetlight faults. It reduces manual intervention by automating processes, improving data capture quality and streetlight data accuracy.
Leveraging automation to increase customer confidence
Customers receive an automated response by Essential Energy via SMS or email when the fault is raised and another confirming that the streetlight has been fixed. This gives confidence to customers that their concern has been heard and resolved.
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