Matt:
Hello and welcome to the CX Coffee Chat. I’m your host, Matt. I’ll be talking today to Octopus Energy.
I’m the director of the Nest by Concentrix here for the UK and Ireland.
And today we’re very excited to have James Doyle on the podcast from Octopus Energy who are a clean energy company here in the UK. In fact, the largest electricity supplier in terms of market share in the UK now which was crazy to me when I read that because in my mind, you’re still a young company, you’re still a startup. You’ve gone through an incredible kind of growth journey, which continues to go from strength to strength.
So welcome to the CX Coffee Chat, James, and thanks for joining us.
James:
Thank you, Matt. Pleasure to be here and thanks for the opportunity to share the story of Octopus and also my own.
Matt:
Nice. So I’d like to start maybe with a little bit of a background. Could you start off by giving our audience just a little bit about your journey there at Octopus Energy?
James:
Yeah, so I’ve been very lucky to have joined Octopus Energy since the start. So that’s back in 2016. I joined into operations back then when we were very small. There was around a dozen or two of us in a small shared office in Hammersmith in West London. And I’ve been with the organization ever since, in some respects, indoctrinated. And in other respects, very much the product of the growth that we’ve had in the UK and increasingly globally as well.
Matt:
Amazing. And what would you say is that that sort of sets Octopus Energy apart for you personally deciding to stick with the company for your for so long in your career? And similarly, you know, Octopus Energy has been such a major disruptor in the industry. In your view, are those are those two things linked?
James:
Yeah, absolutely. think I wouldn’t be sticking around with an organization that wasn’t making the impact that we’re making. And for me, the reason I’m still here is because that ambition that we have, the impact that we’re making, not just in the UK, but in other markets as well, is really, really significant. And it’s very exciting to be part of that journey. You if I look back to 2016, when we had a very small and uninfluential voice. And I look at where we are today in the UK market. In many respects, we’re one of the most listened to and influential energy voices. And we’re really continuing to challenge the status quo about how we build, how we regulate an energy system that is fit for a decarbonized future. And so that remains as exciting as it was back in 2016, probably even more exciting.
And for me, my current role is operations director for our German retail business. So I’m based in Munich doing that job. And it’s a great privilege to continue to be within the group, within the ecosystem of the group, but helping to grow in new markets around the world. Because our ambition is not just to transform the UK energy system, but to look at how we can do that in a global context and for me Germany is super exciting for a number of reasons.
Matt:
And it’s amazing that, you know, the extent to which you’ve been successful on that mission. And if you were to go back to those early days in 2016, did the ambition of the company look and feel the same? Did you want that influence across the entire energy sector at that stage? Or has that come with the power and the influence that you’ve gained by growing?
James:
Yeah, so I think that we always wanted to make a change within the energy market and we always wanted to do it by two means. The first is to understand customers, to really look after customers and to demonstrate that better than anybody else. And the second is using technology to deliver better outcomes for customers and better outcomes for the energy system at large. So I think that those were always super clear, right?
We knew that we wouldn’t make an impact across the energy system unless we achieved success with both of those. And then I think as we put a lot of effort into looking after customers and building a reputation for that, that nobody else really had, and building awesome technology and demonstrating how that can decarbonize the energy system, our voice became more listened to. And then I think we took advantage of that to a much greater extent. And now I think we’re very effective at using our voice to influence debate, definitely in the UK. And I also see that here in Germany, how we’re using our voice to challenge the status quo around, for instance, the rollout of smart meters in this market is very powerful and is not the same that we would observe in some of the incumbent energy companies that exist in the ecosystem as well.
Matt:
Nice. focusing a little bit on your customers then and your customer experience strategy, of course, that’s what we’re really here to talk about. I think Octopus Energy, you clearly have a customer centric culture. You’ve talked about that a lot and I think the results really show that. I’m interested in how you’ve embedded that kind of customer first mindset across your organization, particularly as you’ve have you scaled? How have you been able to maintain that customer first culture as you’ve grown?
James:
Yeah. So, so let me start by why it’s important, right? Having a customer centric culture and business is, is important in any business, but it’s particularly important as we’re seeking to transform the energy market and as we’re seeking to decarbonize, right? Transformation and decarbonization requires bringing other humans to places that they haven’t been before. And it requires winning their trust so that they will allow you to do such things as install a smart meter, move from a traditional tariff to a flex tariff, look at changing their gas boiler to a heat pump, explore putting solar panels on their rooftop, gain the trust to move from a diesel or petrol car to an electric vehicle, right? So all of these things which are going to contribute and are contributing to the decarbonization of the energy system require trust.
And for us, we we’re able to understand very early on that in order to build that trust, we need to really practice what we preach in terms of having a customer centric culture and really looking after customers in every scenario. So within our organization, everybody understands the importance of that. We’re quite purpose led and people are in Octopus for a reason because they care about the impact we make in that industry. And everybody has a very clear understanding of the role that looking after customers, winning and maintaining their trust has within that.
And that’s particularly important in an industry that, you know, for too long really didn’t have the trust of customers or didn’t have high levels of service for customers. So I think that’s some very important context. Now, how we’ve done it is that, you know, right through from senior leadership to everybody across the organization, nobody shies away from engaging with the customer, right? So I think oftentimes customer service can be seen as a dirty task or some people might view themselves as being better than speaking to a customer, particularly in a B2C context.
And so for us, we placed that as one of the most important and most valued tasks that we have in the business, right? So already in contrast to other businesses, where that may not, you know, they mightn’t say that it’s viewed that way, but the reality is it is not valued to the extent where, to the extent that it needs to be, we’re placing value on that task as the most important thing in the business, right? So the people who are able to influence decisions and to really have a voice in Octopus are the ones who know and understand what is going on with customers. And they know that by being on the telephone or by responding on social media or engaging with customers over email. So it’s not that everybody is doing that all the time, but it is something that is core to everybody’s onboarding when they join the business. And we bring them back to that task quite often when we need to do so. And so I think that’s really important. One thing that we’re doing a really good job of in Germany at the moment. So we’ve had a real… big period of growth and we’ve had bigger backlogs than usual and wait times that are bigger than normal. we’ve got 50 % of the team not working in operations, doing sales or marketing or finance as their main job. And so three times in the last three months, we’ve asked everybody to come and manage our phone line so that ops can get through the real challenging stuff and the rest of the business will manage our phone line and look after customers. Now, in many respects, it’s a bit of a risk, right? Because you’re putting people who aren’t experts in solving problems for customers on the telephone. But what we’ve done in doing so is we’ve brought the rest of the business closer to the customer. We’ve allowed them to gain access to understanding what’s going on with the customer and therefore make more customer-centric decisions.
And Ops has felt that there is people across the rest of the business that care about the work that we do and place value on the work that we do. So that’s one thing. And then the other thing that I think we’re particularly good at is the behavior and the prioritization that senior leaders in our business practice, right? Whether that is in the UK, and I spent time on the senior leadership team in the UK, everybody, you know, like being successful in that group is knowing what’s going on with customer.
And if you’re not, if you don’t know, then you’re not able to really be a high performer in that space. And it’s the same here, you know, on our senior leadership team in Germany, value comes from understanding what’s going on with customer and practicing that stuff.
Matt:
Amazing. No, that’s, that’s really nice. Thank you for that insight. And it, you reminded me of a story that I’ve heard before in the early days of your CEO or your founder, personally being someone that interacts on the frontline with customers and gets involved to directly talk to customers. And I think that’s a good example of, you know, leading from the front and driving those values from the top down, I think.
From talking to founders and leaders of companies that are growing into new markets, it’s a common challenge to have to maintain culture and values, particularly as you expand into new countries which have unique cultures. Also, you mentioned that, you know, the backlog at times, you know, when, when, when volumes are peaking and you’re, suppose in a desperate position to service your customers, it’s, it’s a lot harder to be selective about who you’re hiring and, and, and introducing to actually maintain that really high quality customer support is difficult when you’re in, when you’re put in those challenging environments.
And I think we’ll have two kinds of listeners, those who can relate to having everyone drop what they’re doing to help handle customer support and others that kind of are wary, it makes them very nervous. Have you got any other kind of examples where, you you’ve had to fight to remain that culture or even adapt that culture as you’ve kind of scaled up or expanded into new regions?
James:
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. your observation about Greg or group CEO was bang on, right? To be fair, is probably the best person at leading by example on this particular point, right? Almost to a problematic end, right? Because he knows too much of what’s going on with customers. But also that makes him a more powerful voice, both internally and externally. And he continues to… to really lead from the front on that. think one thing in terms of how we’ve adapted it, so I’m in Germany, I’ve been here for the last six, seven months. I don’t speak German, unfortunately, so therefore I can’t speak to customers on the telephone. But what I do do is I use Deepl rather effectively to make sure that I’m having pretty constant email communications with customers. So I think there’s never an excuse or a barrier that should get in the way of leaders doing this.
Now your question was how have we adapted that in new regions or cultures. I think that’s one example of how I’ve personally tried to adapt it in Germany. I think that headline, important behavior that we expect from leaders in the business is not to be adapted. is every leader should be close to the customer and your culture, your market, your business as a senior leader should never get in the way of that.
Matt:
Right. Nice. No, that’s really, really insightful and interesting to hear about. So changing topics slightly. You’ve mentioned already the kind of prevalence of technology in your business. So if we were to talk a little bit about technology, how you’ve implemented that and also how it interacts with kind of the humans in your business and your customers as well, because… at a very big picture level, AI is transforming many industries and particularly when it comes to utilities and energies, it’s doing something larger. So it’s helping to make a system much smarter and efficient and customer centric in your case.
I know that octopus Kraken plays a very large role in this. And for our listeners who aren’t aware, could you maybe share a little bit about Kraken Technologies and what that is?
James:
Yeah. So one of the things that is unique about Octopus or the Octopus Energy Group in contrast to energy companies across the industry is that we, alongside building a retail business and a generation business and a wider low carbon business is we’ve built the software to make all of that ecosystem work. So the software that is a one-stop shop to manage and understand demand and supply on the grid, how that is influencing demand from customers, particularly as we move from quite consistent supply of gas, coal, generated electricity towards intermittency with wind and solar. And Kraken is this business that we’ve been building for the last nine years alongside Octopus to… be the software that powers that. And the awesome thing about Kraken is it’s become so successful that now most of our competitors in the UK in particular have adopted it as their own software. when I talk about software, mean a one-stop shop billing system, CRM platform, industry gateway, Kraken does everything in that context. And that’s one of the other reasons by which we’ve been so successful.
Yes, having this customer centric culture and environment and value alongside technology that makes that easier to deliver. so now, yes, Octopus is the biggest energy supplier in the UK, but I think 24 % market share the last time I looked. But we have around 60 % of UK customers now being served from the Kraken platform.
The other reason that’s particularly important is in the decarbonization context. as we install smart meters, and just to paint a picture on the world of smart meters, in France, where I spent a number of months as operations director, we’ve got 98, 99 % adoption of smart meters by domestic consumers across France. In the UK, I think it’s currently at around 70%. And in Germany right now, it’s at around 2%, right?
And the reason a smart meter is important is because as we move to a more flexible grid, we need the smart meter to give the consumer more power and more access to their data around what they’re consuming and help incentivize them to change their behavior if needed and reward them for doing so. But also to give us the retailer that, you know, instant data on what’s happening with consumption and demand across the grid. And Kraken is… a key enabler in doing all of that.
Matt:
Nice and I think it’s at some level, a very relatable situation to be in, right? think lots of people in, you know, your position, you will eventually come across the having to choose your technology platforms and the systems that your business works on and which ones are right to actually help you service your audience, your customers correctly. In this case, the decision to build Kraken was it that you needed to have something that didn’t exist before.
Or was it that you just wanted to improve on what was kind of already there as your options?
James:
Yeah, good question. I think it depends on who you ask, right? So there was, we knew that there wasn’t the software on the market for us as an energy retailer to grow, drive customer centricity and make an impact in decarbonization of the system, of the energy system. So I think that was known. But then the other way to look at it is kind of a little bit more chicken and egg. Have we built Kraken to serve octopus or have we built octopus as an example, a platform to demonstrate Kraken to the rest of the market? And I think both things you might hear from different people in our organization, but the reality is Octopus, and the success of Octopus now being the biggest retailer in the UK and really raising standards of customer service is an outstanding example for selling Kraken to our competitors in the UK and across the rest of the world. And equally, the Kraken platform has allowed Octopus to be successful. yeah, a bit of both.
Matt:
And what role does the customer feedback, so going back to that customer focused mentality, customer centricity that you have, has that fed into the development then of not only Kraken, but how you interact with technology today? Do you have systems in place to make sure that you’re feeding back, your learnings from interacting with the customers. How do you make sure that when you’re using technology and you’re developing things like Kraken, that it is driving you towards that customer centrist ego?
James:
Yeah, sorry, one other thing I should mention is we have a unique operating model in terms of how we’ve set ourselves up, which also drives good outcomes for customers and Kraken supports this operating model really, really well. and I’ll hope, I normally draw this on a whiteboard for people to understand, but with just words at my disposal to try and explain, I’ll give it a best shot, but you know.
So, we have a traditional operation. We have a massive customer service team and behind that customer service team, we have a centralized billing, centralized complaints, centralized metering department. And so if I’m a customer and I want to call in, want to WhatsApp or email, I will engage with the customer service team and then they will take my query. Maybe they’ll be able to answer it, but more often than not, they’ll pass me to another department, right?
So, you know, practically speaking, if we look at that, that looks like a good way to manage an operation. But the reality is, if we look at it from a customer perspective, it does not deliver good outcomes for customers. there’s too many touch points. The customer is being passed from one department to another and… and the people that are engaging with the customer often don’t have the skill or the permission to be able to solve the problem for that customer. Now, we built a model that, as I mentioned, was very much supported by Kraken because in that traditional model, there’s so many different systems that you need to have access to, permission to use, the skill to use as well. And with those, Kraken does everything. So we built a model whereby instead of it just being customer service, we have an energy specialist that is excellent at customer service, but also is a billing specialist, metering specialist, complaint specialist behind that as well. So when you do speak to us, you’re speaking to somebody who uses the system to solve the problem, has access and permission to solve the problem, and is skilled enough to solve the problem too. And so that’s another real critical aspect in why our customer outcomes have been so good.
Remind me, the question you asked was… I didn’t answer your question just there.
Matt:
What, what’s your… No, but that’s, that’s good context. My question was around what’s your approach to customer feedback and turning insights into action.
James:
Yeah, so I think with that operating model and with Kraken, we have instant access and we have an instant understanding. Like it’s not hard to find out what’s going on with customers. And let me just take a real life example. We’ve had big growth here in Germany over the last couple of months and, you know, a sale requires the creation of an account on Kraken. The activation of that account and the delivery of a… two emails within the first couple of days, one to confirm contract confirmation and the other to confirm delivery, supply, start, et cetera. So there was a bug, we had an issue whereby that wasn’t working effectively. Within half an hour when we got two customers reporting it, our energy specialists have access to our… our client people and our client delivery folks in Kraken, we were able to identify it. Kraken looked quickly at it and very quickly we understood there was a problem and we fixed the problem. So within maybe 90 minutes, something that impacts, ultimately impacted maybe 200 customers that could have impacted 10,000 was fixed and solved because it’s easy to identify. And within our culture, our energy specialists are listened to, right? And they’re guided and coached to not everything is a problem, but when you believe something is a problem, then use your voice and we look at it quite quickly. And I think we’ve got a very effective feedback loop between frontline operations and the rest of the business to identify and solve problems.
Matt:
That sounds really good because I think maybe if we talked a little bit about sort of artificial intelligence and the role that that’s playing and without opening up too broad of a subject here but I think our listeners are always keen to understand from an operations perspective.
What are some of the most surprising or game changing ways that you’ve been able to utilize AI to help you improve either efficiency in operations or the customer experience? Do you have any examples of where you’ve implemented that successfully that have particularly or even surprised you?
James:
Yeah. Yeah.
So I think the whole thing has surprised me, right? Me personally, and we’ve started working on AI really heavily in the last two years. And let me start by our approach to AI, right? Because I think that’s really important. We don’t use AI as a tool to cut corners or as a tool to remove the human element to our business, right?
And one of the reasons octopus has been so successful is because there is a human touch. And our people are encouraged to solve problems for the other human on the end of the phone or the email. And that stuff is really, really powerful. So our approach to AI is how can we use it to enable our humans to focus on the harder, uglier stuff and be able to deliver faster, better outcomes to our customers. And so I think we’ve used it in terms of managing operations, we’ve used it quite effectively on the telephone. And so we see that we have live transcripts, we have live tagging of calls, and we have live summaries of calls. So therefore, if I’m an energy specialist on the telephone to a customer, very quickly in front of me, the AI is helping our team to do the work that they would do at the end of a phone call anyway.
But even more powerful than that is if a customer calls in, they’re often calling about something that may have happened on the account or maybe an email exchange that has taken place. so we’re using AI to allow our energy specialist to get a quicker understanding of what’s going on in the account, right? So let’s say there was an email thread with 16 interactions, 16 conversations between us and the customer over the last week or something like that, right? We very quickly use AI to provide a summary. So instead of our energy specialist looking back and trying to figure out what’s going on here, we’re using the tool to create a short summary so we can help that customer even quicker. In that moment. I think that for me was one of the most surprising ways that it allowed our team to help the customer in that moment even faster and more effectively than without it.
Matt:
Interesting. And we’ve seen the exact same thing. I mean, all the time in our business as well. It surprised me the, the way that people will interact with an AI assistant at their disposal that has all of that knowledge to kind of just enrich and speed up their memory. It’s like a useful tool. And to ask, I guess the opposite question of that question, which is you know, there’s a huge volume of tasks that AI and technology can solve. Where do you see the next step for you guys? Where do you see the need for, you know, is there any challenges that you’re particularly looking at overcoming?
James:
Yeah, so let me speak firstly to maintaining that, I’ll stay in that customer contact area. We’re looking at ways that AI can better identify customers that are unidentified in the beginning and to try and capture really effectively what that customer has an issue with.
Matt:
Yeah.
James:
And if they need a human to solve that problem, to give our energy specialists the best insight and the best indications in advance, or just live on that call. So that’s one thing we’re doing. But I think there’s huge potential for us to leverage it in the smart meter, smart flex tariff space so that we’re… Because success in the smart meter, smart tariff space is all about giving customers access to their data, helping them to understand their data, helping them to understand the impact of their consumption and rewarding and incentivizing them to make better decisions at certain times. And so for us, you know, we’ve already got a number of really effective ways for that to happen, but we’re not fully leveraging AI in that space.
And how we would leverage AI more effectively is using it to help the customer with a better understanding and therefore make better decisions so we can balance the grid when it needs to be balanced.
Matt:
I guess the energy industry as a whole is facing a lot of change and you as a business, the position you’re in now, you’ve grown kind of exponentially. How do you see kind of your customer expectations shifting going forward now? Like thinking to the future, what’s, if we were to look ahead, what do you see as the change and the challenges up ahead?
James:
Yeah, so our customers expect us to maintain and continue to improve on our levels of service. Our customers expect us to offer even more and better options for them to self-serve on their account. And our customers expect us to really be out in front of everybody else with offering new and innovative products, products and tariffs. And let me shift away from the customer and to the rest of the market, right?
We’ve never been to the rest of the market and to regulators, not just in the UK, but in Germany, for instance, we’ve never been an organization to wait for the rest of the market to move or to be, to wait for the regulator to create change in the rules-based system to allow us or give us permission to do something new. And so we will continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible so that we can demonstrate to our competitors and to the regulator that the system is changing and here’s what’s possible. So change your perspective, raise your standards and raise your standards and expectations of everybody else as well.
Matt:
Okay, really good answer, I like that. And as we’re starting to come to I question that, I don’t know if you’ll have an answer to this or one that you’ll be able to share about sharing secrets, but what’s an innovation that either you’re excited about coming from octopus or the energy industry at large? Is there anything that you can share?
James:
So I will try to answer your question, but I’m not sure I’ll answer your specific question. But there’s two things I’m very excited about right now. One is the debate on locational pricing in the UK, which you may have observed in the media recently. Quite simply, this is about how we solve the problem of UK customers having to spend one billion pounds turn off wind and solar generation because the grid cannot handle it. And for me, the debate is very exciting and really valid. And it’s good that there’s people arguing for and against it. But the reality is the status quo needs to change because the UK consumer should not have to pay a billion pounds to turn off generation that we should be consuming, right? It’s ridiculous. So I’m really excited about that.
And then in Germany, right now, what I’m really excited about, particularly in Octopus, is our ability to install smart meters at scale. And for us to demonstrate to customers that this is a useful tool and they can save money whilst doing so. sorry, I haven’t given away any secrets in particular, but those are the things that I’m… I’m most excited about. I don’t know if we have secrets. mean, we’re pretty transparent about what we’re everywhere. And there’s probably not much that is, well, of course, you know, happen first internally, but we’re pretty, yeah, we’re pretty transparent in terms of what we’re doing to the rest of the market.
Matt:
Good. With that in mind, I’m not going to ask you to spill more secrets. Final question for this podcast, James, is really what advice you would give to other companies, other CX leaders that are trying to lead a customer centric operations team. What advice could you share?
James:
Yeah, so I think if your mission is really centered around the customer, then you need to practice that, right? You as a senior leader need to practice that and you need to hold everybody else around you accountable for practicing that. And I think if there’s not a practicing of really understanding the customer and everybody spending some time doing so, you know, habitually or whether it’s every week or it doesn’t need to be every day, then it’s really hard for you to maintain a customer-centric environment. I think customers are humans and humans like another human to tailor a response to tailor an outcome, oftentimes to surprise them. And I think energy’s not, I find energy sexy, but most people don’t find it sexy. So they’re not… you know, they’re not, oftentimes they’re not that engaged or interested, but if you in a customer centric business can surprise and delight the other human, then you’re going to really succeed in building and maintaining a customer centric environment. And I think that has been one of the useful tools that we’ve used effectively over the last number of years.
Matt:
Thank you for that, James. And thank you for joining us today. Thanks everyone for listening. This has been the CX Coffee Chat and we hope to see you soon.
