Mercury – one of New Zealand’s leading energy retailers and generators – operates in a highly competitive industry that, like many industries, is facing increasing challenges from market forces and consumer behaviours.

Customers are more than ever likely to look at alternative and efficient energies than electricity, so Mercury needed to explore new ways of doing business by helping to connect people and technology.

Having a network of nine hydro stations and five geothermal stations in the upper North Island, as well as a retail arm and a focus on encouraging a greater uptake of electric vehicles and solar electricity generation, Mercury had a broad scope and diverse business model within which to innovate.

Mercury needed to look beyond isolated technology solutions and instead focus on developing a continuous technology stream across the entire business that would encourage rapid prototyping and ideation.

Mercury worked with Datacom to build a platform to improve customer service, manage disruption and support innovation across its entire business. This included the development of artificial intelligence (AI) driven solutions for electricity buying, voice assistance with Amazon’s Echo, Alexa skill technologies via AWS, and a smartphone app – Mercury Go.

As a result of the new solution, Mercury has not only created a more innovative culture that is constantly exploring new possibilities and opportunities for improvement, it has also seen the rapid growth of new projects coming to market as well as greater employee engagement across the business.

Instead of just focusing on standalone digital technologies, Mercury has positioned itself as a true innovator through a digital solution that will continue to deliver real and significant impact today and well into the future.

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