Executive summary Executive summary
Client background
Our client is a leading energy technology company determined to create a world with clean, affordable energy for everyone. The company unites multiple brands and has over 8K employees across the globe. Our client serves millions of customers with digital energy services, allowing people to take control of their energy and take advantage of energy storage technology. It is one of the UK's largest energy suppliers that provides energy to over 550K local residential customers. Renewable energy sources include wind, solar, geothermal, hydro, and biogas.
Business challenge
Our client needed to streamline internal digital marketing processes to improve the quality of provided services. Also, the company needed to boost the user experience and scalability of its products to be able to efficiently handle a growing customer base.
N-iX approach
The N-iX team helped the client choose the technology stack for upcoming projects. Our engineers built several POCs and MVPs to validate the proposed technologies. These POCs and MVPs were accepted by the client and served as a starting point for the development of fully-fledged solutions.
Value delivered
The new internal system helps our client conduct more effective marketing activities while reducing the dependency on third parties and the costs associated with them. Additionally, the N-iX team helped improve the performance and the user experience of the client’s website.
Success story in detail
As a growing multi-brand company, our client wanted to make their internal systems and processes more efficient to better serve their growing customer base, as well as improve the user experience and scalability of their products. Our client relied heavily on third-parties to create offers and gift cards for customers and prospects. This caused certain difficulties when making changes to customer journeys and hindered the process of launching new campaigns. Additionally, gift cards and product discounts could only be created through digital marketing campaigns.
To improve the quality of the offered services and keep up with the growing customer base, our client needed to accomplish the following:
- Develop an internal marketing system that would allow marketing managers to easily generate new gift cards and product discount offers for their clients;
- Build an end-to-end signup flow for smart heaters;
- Improve the efficiency of the Customer Management System (CMS) and internal user processing engines;
- Modernize the website by boosting its performance and improving user experience.
Our client engaged N-iX in 2018 to work closely with their in-house team based in the UK. The N-iX team was involved in promoting technical decisions on the project. For example, our professionals built a PoC of an in-house offer management platform from scratch and chose the technologies for implementation: Java, JavaScript, and Angular. Even though the client had little experience with this technology stack, they accepted it as the PoC proved the efficiency and suitability of these technologies.
Additionally, our engineers helped create an end-to-end signup flow for smart heaters. The N-iX team has released the MVP of the redesigned signup flow and is developing additional features.
Our client lacked the functionality to create offers for customers and prospects: they could only offer gift cards on 3rd party products, only do this in digital marketing campaigns, and rely on 3rd parties to fulfill the offers. This made it difficult to introduce changes to customer journeys and set up new campaigns. The key goal was to build an in-house offer management platform that allows marketing managers to easily generate new gift cards & product discount offers. The N-iX team built the PoC for an internal marketing system using Java, JavaScript, and Angular. The system can verify whether the user is a client, determine what is the client's plan, and manage gift certificates among clients.
One of the biggest technical challenges that the N-iX team had to overcome was integrating the solution with a variety of internal and external services. The customer wanted to have quick access to all the necessary information, such as financial reports and customer data. Therefore, we integrated the system with Salesforce, Divido, and Stripe using Kafka and Akka.
Also, the N-iX team created the end-to-end signup flow for smart heaters. We received a legacy flow that lacked the payment functionality and was unfinished. The task was to redesign it, develop the frontend, refactor the backend, and build a production environment. A new flow created by our team allowed the user to choose the smart heater and create a request to analyze the house by an expert. To develop the solution, we used Scala, React.js, and AWS. The N-iX team released the MVP to production and developed additional features.
In 2019, N-iX took over responsibilities for developing CMS projects and internal user processing engines, which required technology modernization. The N-iX team has contributed to the development of the website on Netlify. Previously, the website was built on Hippo CMS and was inconvenient to use. Also, by using Gatsby.js the N-iX team improved website performance by an average of 20%.
Together with the client, we built the PoC for an internal marketing system, released the MVP for an end-to-end signup flow for smart heaters, took over responsibilities for developing CMS projects and internal users processing engines, and developed the new website with improved performance by an average of 20%.
- Developed a PoC for the in-house marketing system that gives our client more control over the customer journey and reduces 3rd party dependency along with the associated costs;
- Built an MVP of the end-to-end user flow for signing up for smart heaters. A new flow allows the user to choose the smart heater and create a request to analyze the house by an expert;
- Contributed to the development of a modernized website that enhanced customer experience and improved performance by an average of 20%.