British gas

The market is changing

The utility retail market is under heavy pressure. Industry leaders and big companies are getting challenged by new market entrants, which leads to vicious competition.

The new and smaller companies are more agile and can deal much faster with the accelerating pace of change in our digital world.

That’s why British Gas, one of the industry leaders in the UK utility retail market, immediately started to look for different ways to innovate and improve their processes. They knew they had to be able to offer a custom proposition, tailored to the needs of the clients. And there’s the rub. Their IT pricing system simply cannot handle such a product offering, which means calculations require manual intervention. That takes a lot of time and is without a doubt a key blocker to win clients.

Our challenge: a rigid pricing system

The process of quoting required the pricing and sales teams working along with each other in a CRM and a pricing system. It required a lot of manual interactions to get a custom quote out for an I&C prospect and included workarounds and calculations in spreadsheets. 

The pricing system was too rigid. 

• It did not allow the team to create the new products they needed and

• It couldn’t easily handle pricing per connection at half-hourly granularity, which meant manual aggregation was required.

• Lastly, it didn’t allow to react swiftly to market changes, impacting the competitive position of British Gas

Ralph Smith, Pricing Manager I&C at British Gas, put this challenge top of the agenda. “We have to stay competitive with new market entrants. That’s why we are currently working differentiating our product portfolio to allow for a range of products with a different risk divide. At the same time, we increase our efficiency by automating part of the currently manual process of getting bespoke quotes out.”

“We have to stay competitive with new market entrants.”

So we built a solution for them.

It consists of two different types of software. The first one, Gorilla, is responsible for creating and maintaining the products and data to calculate them. The second one is called Vlocity, a CRM solution on top of Salesforce tailored to the utility industry, that is responsible for the sales process.

From problem to live solution in only 4 months

Even before we started, in only a couple of days we built a Proof of Concept that could prove the Gorilla and Vlocity solution could be easily integrated.

The project team, consisting of members of British Gas, Vlocity and Gorilla, used the agile methodology to shape the project. Instead of a large waterfall project, the scope was defined and delivered sprint per sprint, securing a swift delivery in only a couple of months.

A dedicated British Gas pricing expert collaborated with the Gorilla team to translate the pricing components into requirements. In the next stage, those were picked up by the Gorilla team and translated into cost components. 

These building blocks allowed the pricing expert to configure and test all British Gas products himself, without needing an extra pair of hands. 

On top of that, we made sure the CRM integrator Vlocity could go ahead with the implementation of the sales flow and integrated with Gorilla in a matter of days, while we were building their bespoke cost components.

Results

Only four months after the project kick-off, the first version of the solution went live successfully. Today, British gas can build any product they want with the components they have. 

Without manual interaction.

In addition, we managed to bring down the quote lead time to under 3 minutes.

“Gorilla is a very intuitive system and easy to self-teach. I’ve picked up the principles pretty quickly, and I’ve found using the system easy and straightforward. The implementation of the system has been much faster and transparent than other pricing systems”