ONE Nordic + Zendesk: Providing a seamless experience whilst scaling.

Sweden was one of the first European countries to embark on a nationwide deployment of smart electricity meters. Now more than a decade later, the country is currently experiencing a second wave of rollouts. ONE Nordic, one of Sweden’s leading suppliers of technical consulting services, maintenance services and contract services in the energy and industrial sector, is one of the companies contracted to install next generation smart meters.

“Starting in May 2020, ONE Nordic will be installing over the next four years smart meters in 1.7 million households and companies, as well as being responsible for the daily meter collection for about 1 million data points using its own-developed AMI-systems (Advanced Metering Infrastructure). I would say that we are the leading partner for the distribution system operators (DSOs) when it comes to smart metering,” says Jasir Sharif, Project Manager at ONE Nordic.

With the country’s deregulated electricity market, giving the electricity distribution companies’ end customers a good experience during these rollout projects is of crucial importance to the DSOs. For this reason, ONE Nordic must meet very strict requirements in terms of its Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI).

So, the pressure is certainly on. Not only are these rollout projects highly ambitious in having to replace meters in 1.7 million households and companies but ONE Nordic must ensure that while doing so, it offers the best possible end customer experience. Zendesk is playing a crucial role in helping ONE Nordic achieve this.

Getting onboard with Zendesk

Zendesk has been in use at the company for five years since Jasir Sharif took on his current role as project manager. “When I started in 2016, management thought that we needed a new business tool for ticket management to better be able to manage and track issues and requests and to be able to measure SLA (Service Level Agreement) in our measurement technology business. And therefore, I was commissioned to procure a new tool”.

“So, I did some research and overall, I was most impressed with Zendesk. I liked the user interface and its ease of use but also the scalability, which would be crucial for projects like the rollout project, and, of course, it would provide us with much needed insights into our business,” he describes.

ONE Nordic’s support teams, which consist of agents and light agents that are spread across offices throughout Sweden, are using the Zendesk support suite.

A large proportion of its use of Zendesk is for handling tickets. Predominantly for the rollout projects but also internally to handle tickets from the IT side for IT incidents and service requests, for example. For the rollout project, with help desk service outsourced to a customer service partner that also uses Zendesk, ONE Nordic’s agents predominantly use email and web forms to respond to customers. Most of these tickets are about confirming or changing the booking time for their meter installation.

According to Sharif, being able to respond to a large amount of tickets in a very timely and efficient manner has enabled ONE Nordic to scale up quickly as the rollout projects progress. “We have also been able to scale up the system as new processes and routines are developed. That has been very helpful especially as sometimes we need to shift focus or make changes and it’s been very easy to adapt in Zendesk” he says.

Gaining much needed insights

To gain insights into the customer experience and monitor important statistics, ONE Nordic uses Zendesk’s reporting and analytics solution, Zendesk Explore. This data is of importance to the DSO’s, which measures on a weekly basis whether ONE Nordic rollout performance and the management of tickets are at the right level with SLA (service level agreement). In combination with Zendesk explore ONE Nordic uses another tool that measures two different CSI scores on a weekly basis. The first score is for ONE Nordic’s rollout performance, which is how professional the customer thought the field technician was, and then the second is how the customer service was perceived if the customer then had to contact the Help Desk for any reason.

These insights are very useful to help ONE Nordic to improve agent productivity and efficiency as the data identifies any areas that need attention and, as such, action can be taken. “For instance, reports that show one-touch tickets and how successful agents are at resolving a query with just one contact, or how many tickets an agent solves per month and why it differs between agents. By having this data we can then offer support or further education to the agents that need it so that we can then improve those areas” says Jasir Sharif.

Results speak for themselves

“We see this score as being successful. Since we manage the largest rollout projects in Sweden, our high CSI scores are based on very time-efficient ticket handling. ” Jasir Sharif , Project Manager at ONE Nordic Following up on these insights and taking action to improve has certainly reaped the benefits as the majority of its tickets are now being solved in time according to the customer’s SLA. Metrics like this have an impact on that all-important CSI score that ONE Nordic is constantly being measured on.

“We see this score as being successful. Since we manage the largest rollout projects in Sweden, our high CSI scores are based on very time-efficient ticket handling” says Jasir Sharif.

A partnership that pays off

With the rollout project going full steam ahead and constantly having to meet the high expectations of its SLAs and achieve high CSI scores, ONE Nordic is under pressure to deliver the highest level of customer service possible. ONE Nordic sees this as a competitive differentiator and appreciates the close working relationship it has with Zendesk’s customer success team in helping it achieve this.

“Zendesk’s Customer Support and forums for troubleshooting are well-established, which helps a lot and is greatly appreciated. Additionally, with a lot of the configurations being “DIY”, it helps speed up any needed configurations,” says Jasir Sharif.

“Zendesk as a SaaS (Software as a service), combined with our on-going improvement in the process and education of our agents, has helped support our ambitious vision and crucially helps provide the end customers with a really good experience.”

For more information about ONE Nordic and their business, visit www.one-nordic.se.