UP-TO-DATE AND USER-FRIENDLY – THE NEW CUSTOMER PORTAL OF THE CKW
The customer portal of the CKW was rather outdated and to be replaced by a completely new solution. Our client wanted the new portal “MyCKW” to be particularly intuitive with an easy handling far away from technology and implementation in order to be consequently customer-focused. With this goal in mind, we developed a solution for a “seamless integration” of the customer portal to the existing website.
THE CHALLENGES
It was an ambitious goal for “MyCKW” to impress with a consistent brand image, perfect user experience and a convincing service experience, and at the same time tackle the complex or sophisticated interaction between many internal stakeholders and technical peripheral systems.
Besides the seamless integration to the already existing website and the Neos CMS, it was necessary to connect the existing backend systems perfectly and to avoid redundancies. For instance, the CRM of Microsoft Dynamics was connected to the portal and the central identity provider. We utilized the existing business intelligence infrastructure, thus enabling the user easy access for example load profiles, consumption and charges. At the same time the CKW’s plan also included the renewal and simplification of the product portfolio. This means that the new customer portal instantly had to be available for communication of new offers for the 140,000 private customers and 5,000 business clients. New functions like automatic product change should be tested intensively and optimized, thus enabling an intuitive use.
In the long run, a variety of existing, but fragmented stand-alone portals and offerings for private and business clients should be integrated to the MyCKW portal in order to establish a one-stop-shop for the following fields consumption analysis, cost control and the calculation of prices on electricity markets.
ABOUT CKW
The CKW group is a service provider for energy, data and infrastructure in Central Switzerland. For 125 years, the enterprise provides its 200,000 end customers from the cantons Luzern, Schwyz and Uri with power. In addition, there are innovative products and services in the fields of connectivity & IT infrastructure, electronic & light, energy technology, IT & communication as well as security. The CKW group employs more than 1,800 employees. It is the biggest commercial training center in Central Switzerland with approx. 300 trainees in 14 professions.
OUR APPROACH
After the initialization phase, the new customer portal was implemented within 8 sprints with the help of an agile Scrum framework. Based on our e.tility stack the middleware and webservices connection were realized with OData and REST API via SAP Gateway, which connected the surrounding SAP systems, third party systems like CRM and the frontend. After the initial implementation of the base system and the central identity provider further core functionalities like master data management and product change were successively realized. Two months prior to the launch of the new energy products, work on the MyCKW portal was finished in time and it went live accordingly. In a second and third project phase additional functionalities like management of third parties (e.g. property management) and single sign-on with an external ZEV portal were realized. The portal was adjusted to reach new customer segments in B2B, grid customers and trading and an independent pricing tool was integrated. Customer needs regarding IT security were met, by implementing a modern two-factor authentication system.
The existing processes “Invoices”, Contract overview”, “meter reading”, “relocation” and “product change” were expanded and region-specific templates were added.
We accompanied this ambitious project in role of project lead, Scrum master, requirements and test engineer and with a diverse development team, we also assumed the lead in conception and implementation. Extensive testing and quality assurance were of course indispensable.
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THE RESULT
"MyCKW" is the foundation for a completely new brand experience and perfect customer engagement. It consequently reflects the new CKW brand positioning. With its intuitive offerings, the new portal significantly reduced customer service requests and also made it possible to integrate the existing CRM. CKW was able to decrease significantly its process costs with the help of digital self-services for change of address, meter reading and change of product.
Our client was very happy to receive the reward for all the innovation and customer orientation, when he learned that the CKW customer portal was granted with the worldwide issued bronze Neos-Award.
