Trustpower delivers a more consistent customer experience online and offline

Trustpower, one of New Zealand’s largest energy and telecommunications companies, provides customers with everything they need to connect their homes and businesses. This includes standalone and bundled services for power, gas, broadband, and most recently, mobile.

One of the challenges for Trustpower as it’s scaled has been to ensure a consistent customer experience across these services and that’s why it has been on a journey with Salesforce to bring employees and data onto one platform. The company’s successes so far include connecting marketing and sales and streamlining quoting and customer registration. Trustpower has also enhanced field sales by equipping its team of “door knockers” with greater customer insights.

Trustpower’s history dates back to Tauranga’s first power station in 1915 and for much of its first 100 years, the company was focused on power and gas. Then, in 2007, Trustpower launched phone and internet services and business suddenly became more complex.

“When we became a multi-utility provider, sales and provisioning became more difficult. We needed to know more about our customers and ultimately have a view of all the services they have with us,” said Nadia Herriott, Campaign Program Manager for Trustpower.

With the adoption of Salesforce, Trustpower has begun working towards this single source of truth for customers’ products and transformed its sales processes. One of the most significant benefits so far has been a new streamlined process for quoting. Previously, potential customers would spend an average of 45 minutes on the phone with Trustpower as sales reps went back and forth between different systems to input data and build a quote.

Sales Cloud and Salesforce CPQ has helped Trustpower to simplify the quoting process; sales reps enter customer details into just one system and the quote is prepared automatically according to business rules. Trustpower has also rationalised the number of questions it asks, helping to bring the average call time down to 15 minutes.

“The benefits we’ve achieved in relation to quoting alone have been amazing. We’ve reduced the average booking time by 30 minutes, there is less risk of error, and we’ve improved compliance,” said Herriott. “We’re also building a much richer data set so we can analyse things like how many customers received a quote, how many signed up and how many went all the way through to provisioning.”

Trustpower has more recently rolled out Salesforce to its field sales team. These reps go door-to-door, selling to households and in the past they had no way of knowing whether the door they were knocking on belonged to an existing customer. Salesforce provides them with this information along with access to the same tools that telesales reps use for quoting and customer registration.

Now, all sales teams are on the same platform and can deliver a consistent customer experience. In addition, all information flows through to Salesforce to provide Trustpower with a more complete view of customers’ products and its business.

“Rolling out Salesforce to our field sales team has reduced the amount of technical maintenance and data integration we had to do previously and given us greater transparency. We can track what’s happening in the field almost minute by minute,” said Herriott.

Trustpower plans to extend on these benefits in the future by using Salesforce Maps to show live data on what solutions customers currently have. This will allow reps to have better conversations with customers about their wider needs and increase opportunities for cross-selling.

Trustpower is now using Marketing Cloud to enhance the customer experience through more automated and personalised engagement. One of the first journeys it has launched is a new onboarding series to welcome new customers and explain processes like billing. Journeys for cross-selling will come next and it is not just about selling more services, but ensuring each customer is on the right plan based on their consumption.

“Our initial focus is on providing customers with the right information at the right time, but we are also looking at ways we can keep the lines of communication open with customers,” said Herriott. “Loyalty is very important in our industry and just as we provide incentives to bring customers into the business, Salesforce will help us provide them with reasons to stay.”