E.ON UK powers transition to renewable energy with Dynamics 365

Before Dynamics 365, E.ON UK used a homegrown legacy solution integrating internally built applications to manage customers, field employees, and products. IT teams spent much time on software maintenance.

E.ON UK adopted Dynamics 365 to enhance IT efficiency and customer satisfaction. The solution includes Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, and Asset Management, and integrates with third-party applications to support and automate processes.

Dynamics 365 benefits E.ON UK by providing a unified CRM system, reducing IT costs, increasing efficiency, and improving customer satisfaction with automated processes and mobile app support.

Globally, E.ON is a major provider of energy solutions and clean energy networks with around 47 million customers across 17 countries. In the UK, it serves nearly one in seven households and businesses and is the UK's largest supplier of electricity to industrial clients.

The company’s goal is to ensure the energy transition works for everyone. Through specialist brands including residential and SME focused, E.ON Next, E.ON Energy Infrastructure Solutions for cities and industries, and npower Business Solutions for large business energy, its mission is to help make energy more affordable and sustainable across homes, businesses, cities, and communities. Its UK team turned to Microsoft Dynamics 365 to enhance its IT environment and improve efficiency and customer satisfaction.

“Intelligent use of technology keeps our customer’s needs at the heart of the transition to clean energy, and that’s why we selected Dynamics 365 to support us on that journey given it is flexible, configurable, and aligned to our overall technology strategy.”

Lee Durham, Director of Digital Technology, E.ON UK

Seeking a unified view of customers and products

Through its Energy Infrastructure Solutions business area, E.ON UK has provided more than 4 million smart meters—devices that use digital technology and wireless communication to measure and transmit energy consumption data to utilities—to residential customers throughout England, Wales, and Scotland. “Smart meters enable remote monitoring of gas and electricity usage and provide more accurate consumption readings,” explains Andrew Preston, Product Lead at E.ON UK. “As we continue our transformation, we will also be offering sustainable solutions including solar panels, air sources, heat pumps, and electric vehicle chargers.”

But while the company looked toward the future, its customer service and field technicians needed a customer relationship management (CRM) solution to provide the best customer support and perform their installation and maintenance work every day, now and into the future. “We used a homegrown legacy solution that integrated a number of internally built applications to manage customers, field employees, and products,” says Rae Smith, Software Product Manager at E.ON UK. The company wanted a new solution that provided a unified view of the company’s customers and products.

Additionally, IT teams were spending much of their time configuring and upgrading software. “Our focus was on patching and fixing things,” Smith says. “We needed to figure out how to deliver capabilities to the business instead of just maintaining the solution. We also wanted to connect to other systems as the business grew. Overall, we wanted to create a consolidated environment that supported all business operations, improved efficiency, and reduced IT operating costs.”

Energizing the workforce with a modern CRM

That desire—for a more modern, unified CRM system that improved employees’ efficiency while reducing IT costs—became a strategic aim for the business, through which E.ON UK rolled out Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, and capabilities of Asset Management add-on for Supply Chain Management to 2,900 employees in channel management, sales, customer service, field service, asset management, and finance.

“With Dynamics 365, our engineers have confidence in the system working, with increased first-time install success and reduced job times, giving our customers a better experience. The richness of the Dynamics 365 platform enables us to grow our solution to introduce new products and services and quickly adapt to changing customer needs.”

John Somers, Field Transformation Manager, E.ON UK

Transforming field service with a mobile app

E.ON UK office staff use Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Field Service, and field technicians use the Field Service mobile app, to manage service appointments. “We have 1,500 technicians out in the field, and they’re all using the Field Service app on their mobile devices to book and manage appointments,” says Preston. “Field technicians are important workers, and we wanted to ensure they had technology they could feel comfortable with and adopt easily. The Field Service mobile app offers a user interface they’re already familiar with.”

The Dynamics 365 Field Service mobile app is transforming the installation experience for E.ON UK field technicians. “With the Dynamics 365 Field Service mobile app, we can get the right technician to the job faster, with a 20% reduction in job duration,” says Preston. “That means they can finish more jobs per day, and it also means less disruption to customers, which increases overall customer satisfaction.”

“With the Dynamics 365 Field Service mobile app, we can get the right technician to the job faster, with a 20% reduction in job duration. That means they can finish more jobs per day, and it also means less disruption to customers, which increases overall customer satisfaction.”

Andrew Preston, Product Lead, E.ON UK

Increasing efficiency with automated processes

E.ON UK sales, customer service, and customer engagement teams use Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Sales to manage customer relationships and communications. “We’re committed to offering sustainable solutions, and we wanted a customer relationship management system that would help us easily reach out to our customers and offer the right products to them,” says Preston. “We looked at a number of technologies, but we found Dynamics 365 Customer Service to be the best solution for our needs.”

Preston adds, “We’re looking to grow the business and make it easier for our customers to choose sustainable solutions over the next three to five years. We’re relying on Dynamics 365 Sales to support some of the new sales activity in solar panels and electric vehicle connections.”

With Dynamics 365, the company was able to replace manual, spreadsheet-based processes with automated workflows that are increasing efficiency. “Dynamics 365 has made life easier for our customer service advisors,” Preston says. “For example, we have a business process for managing property handoff from developers to customers. That process used to take 20 minutes per site for an advisor to complete. That time has been eliminated because it’s a fully automated process now.”

From patching software to transforming the business

The platform’s extensibility made it easy to integrate a third-party resource optimization solution in Dynamics 365 Field Service for more efficient scheduling and dispatching of field workers. “Dynamics 365 offers low-code/no-code features that simplify configuration changes to applications,” says Preston.

“With Dynamics 365, our engineers have confidence in the system working, with increased first-time install success and reduced job times, giving our customers a better experience," agrees John Somers, Field Transformation Manager at E.ON UK. “The richness of the Dynamics 365 platform enables us to grow our solution to introduce new products and services and quickly adapt to changing customer needs.”

“Our focus used to be on maintenance, and we don’t worry about that anymore with Dynamics 365. We now have the tools to deliver value to the business much faster.”

Rae Smith, Software Product Manager, E.ON UK

Replacing the legacy IT environment with Dynamics 365 has resulted in a more stable platform, with fewer incidents and less downtime. Updates and new features can be implemented in less time, and that, coupled with the IT team’s shift to an agile software delivery model, has helped to accelerate the pace of change at E.ON UK. “The ability to make configuration changes quickly in Dynamics 365 marries very well with our new agile way of working, helping us deliver change to the business much faster,” says Preston.

The E.ON UK IT team is now spending more of its time transforming the business and supporting the company’s strategic goals. “Our focus used to be on maintenance, and we don’t worry about that anymore with Dynamics 365,” says Smith. “We now have the tools to deliver value to the business much faster.”

Powering future innovations

E.ON UK is committed to adopting technology for added operational efficiency and better service delivery. “Intelligent use of technology keeps our customer’s needs at the heart of the transition to clean energy, and that’s why we selected Dynamics 365 to support us on that journey given it is flexible, configurable, and aligned to our overall technology strategy,” says Lee Durham, Director of Digital Technology, E.ON UK. The company is also testing the work order summary feature in Copilot in Dynamics 365 Field Service, available in the Field Service mobile app, which allows technicians to get a summary of their appointments from Copilot and reduces task duplication for back-office staff.

Next, E.ON UK plans to integrate Copilot with Microsoft Teams and Outlook to further streamline operations and support technicians in the field, who use Teams to report incidents to technical help desk employees. “We’re hoping to use Copilot to link to our knowledge base articles to help manage support demand,” says Smith. “We envision our field technicians being able to query Copilot from their handheld devices for help solving technical problems, resolving issues and closing work orders faster so they can move on to the next job.”

At E.ON UK, tomorrow has arrived and it’s never looked brighter. Says Smith, “We're confident that Dynamics 365 Field Service, Customer Service, and Copilot will support us on our growth journey towards installing sustainable solutions for our customers.”