How lekker Energie improves customer service productivity and accessibility with Amazon Connect

When we jointly assumed responsibility at lekker in 2013, the company was deep in the red. We strategically realigned lekker to prioritize “working backwards” from our customers’ needs and this resulted in a business turnaround. Since then, customer retention has played a major role in lekker’s sustainable profitability.  While customers come to lekker because of our attractive pricing, they stay because we offer excellent service and continuously work to exceed customer expectations.

Realigning around changing expectations

Our customers’ expectations continue to evolve based on their experience with companies like AWS. During a strategic review we realized that, in order to achieve our vision of being the “most customer-oriented provider for energy and more,” we needed to look outside the confines of the energy industry and align ourselves to what consumers experience with marketplaces like AWS.  Our current strategy is clearly defined: we’re leveraging information technology and new workflows to provide our customers with a world class customer experience.

To meet fast changing customer expectations for digital sales and service, we needed to align our teams to ensure they were focused on value-enhancing customer activities and developments. We determined that cloud technologies could free our teams to focus on what really matters to our customers. We sought a solution that would not only allow us to configure to our local market needs, but also eliminate the need for onsite systems and servers. Amazon Connect, which provides an easy to use omnichannel cloud contact center, delivered us both flexible configurability and a serverless cloud architecture to fit our needs.

The role technology plays

Forward-looking utility customer service requires more than the classic approach. Infrastructure as a service provides new alternatives. As IT infrastructure requirements become more comprehensive, lekker needs flexible server capacities, high-performance databases, data analysis tools, artificial intelligence (AI), and an integrated telephone system. We need a full range of networked possibilities and services.

To meet these needs, we deployed Amazon Connect. As a result, we’ve now aligned our service and sales teams to keep their fingers on the pulse of ever-changing customer expectations. The benefits have been significant. Amazon Connect frees up our call agents in the front and back office from non-value tasks with capabilities like automated call routing, caller ID, and callback.  And, with the help of machine learning (ML), natural text-to-speech is built in, enabling us to offer personalized advice and options tailored to individual customers. In addition, Amazon Connect and its machine learning services equips us to categorize calls, identify customers, automate contact entries, measure customer satisfaction, and determine unmet customer needs.

Shortly after the introduction of Amazon Connect at lekker, we set a goal of increasing the availability and number of calls per agent by up to 10 percent with the help of intelligent recall and better usability. We plan to continue to build on Amazon Connect to achieve lekker’s vision of being the “most customer-oriented provider for energy and more.”

About lekker Energie

With over 360,000 customers, lekker Energie GmbH is a leading supraregional provider of electricity and gas on the German energy market. lekker is customer and service-oriented and regularly scores top marks in comparison tests. As one of the most important suppliers of green electricity to private households, the company with its 220 employees stands for environmentally and consumer-friendly products. Two years ago, lekker joined the Berlin start-up tenant angel with a minority stake in order to gain additional experience with the digitization of analog tenant advice. In 2018, after taxes, lekker achieved a positive result for the fifth time in a row with 7.1 million euros. The net sales revenue was EUR 238.5 million.