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Alinta Energy is Australia’s fastest growing retailer on the east coast and one of Australia’s largest energy retailers, generators and developers servicing over 1.1 million customers nationally. Alongside its traditional power generation plants, the company is investing in a huge portfolio of renewable energy generation, including wind farms, battery storage and solar-gas hybrid energy. Alinta Energy is setting itself up for a successful future with its investments in new energy sources and new technology across the organisation.
Having undergone a major transformation to upgrade its underlying billing engine, Alinta Energy initiated a company-wide digital transformation project in 2023, where the team identified technology gaps that needed to be bridged. The business recently switched its call centres to a cloud-based approach, and with that success under its belt, the Alinta team turned their attention to the organisation’s digital experience platform.
Until February 2024, the Alinta Energy website was operating on an outdated platform that was slowing the business down. Its limited capability, and the upkeep required, were proving a drag on the business. Search engine challenges were making it tougher for the Alinta team to compete online and customers’ digital experiences were lagging when compared to their other utility providers.
“It was taking us a lot of effort to keep the system running, win new customers and get existing customers to engage in the digital world,” says Ankur Mahajan, Head of Digital Technology Solutions at Alinta Energy. “We had to use workarounds just to get the platform to do the basics, like forms, personalisation and A/B testing. It didn’t perform, and we just weren’t getting value.”
The team at Datacom recognised the opportunity to deliver a brilliant outcome for Alinta, thanks to their experience in similar projects for other customers.
“We knew that with AEM (Adobe Experience Manager), Alinta would be able to deliver a dramatically improved customer experience,” says Elias Billeh, Associate Director, Digital Platforms. “We were really excited to collaborate with Alinta Energy and the project has resulted in measurable benefits for their team and their customers.”
After a competitive RFP process, Alinta Energy chose Adobe as its new digital experience platform and Datacom as its implementation partner. The complete project from design through to delivery had to fit into a tight three-month window to accommodate for Alinta’s new brand launch, which Mahajan calls “the icing on top”.
Datacom stood up to the challenge and partnered with Alinta team to accomplish a mission which looked near impossible at the start. More than 700 pages were migrated, with 27 custom components deployed and around 1000 regional content personalisation points implemented.
Since going live in February, the new AEM platform has been an immediate hit with customers. It has allowed for vastly improved search engine performance, which has helped increase traffic to the site and led to more engagement.
“We’ve also had other initiatives to drive more customers to self-serve digitally. This has led to an overall uplift in digital engagement, because more users stay and finish their transactions on the website,” Mahajan says. “We would like to meet customers where they are, and about 70% prefer to self-serve using IVR, myaccount portal or website rather than wait on a call, so we’ve made that easier for them. And of course, our Australia-based call centres are still there if our customers prefer to speak to someone.”
All this has boosted our online customer engagement and simultaneously the ongoing cost and effort of maintaining the platform has dropped considerably.
“The first year will be more expensive due to the implementation costs,” says Mahajan,” but the year-on-year savings will offset that cost, mainly in eliminating hosting costs and cost/ effort to keep the platform secure and up to date.”
Mahajan says AEM has also been a big step forward in security, because instead of patching and monitoring in house, that work is now taken care of by Adobe. “Having a global platform we can trust and rely on is a key factor in security, because all the updates happen in the background. We’re getting value from the platform now, not just working constantly to keep the lights on.”
Watching all the challenges of the old platform being resolved was a fantastic result from Datacom’s perspective, says Billeh.
“We loved seeing all the data come back showing how well AEM is performing for Alinta. It makes all the hard work worthwhile when we can implement a solution that makes a really tangible impact for our customer.”
The Alinta team is now looking at how to get even more out of the new platform, with personalisation and analytics allowing the site to cater to the specific needs of various customer personas. They will be working with Datacom to explore the possibilities, after building such as successful relationship during the AEM implementation.
“Datacom played a big part in the implementation plan and rollout on a very tight timeline,” says Mahajan. “It was on time and under budget. I’ve done a few projects like this, and to hit the timeline is a milestone in itself but doing it under budget is amazing. Datacom was also very price competitive, so there wasn’t a lot of fat in the quote. Kudos to the teams on both sides – we really worked as one unit.”
Datacom is also working with Alinta Energy to deliver a more connected experience for their customers between the call centre and the digital channels, giving a fully seamless and frictionless transition between both channels.
Cindy Vandecasteele, General Manager Engagement at Alinta Energy, says the company recognised that it could better serve customers contacting its call centres with an omnichannel approach.
“With a move to renewable energy, our industry is transforming rapidly, and we want to make sure our customers can interact with us through a channel that suits them, whether that’s a website chat or app, via email, on the phone or social media.”
