Clever

The war in Ukraine has placed all of Europe in a new reality with skyrocketing energy prices and surging inflation. For Denmark’s largest charging operator, Clever, the high energy prices have left their mark, but it hasn’t dampened their belief in a greener and brighter future.

For the green transition in transportation to succeed, it must be both easy and safe to choose an electric car in everyday life. This is the ambition at Clever, the country’s largest charging operator—an ambition they’ve maintained despite an energy crisis and sky-high electricity prices that impacted the company in 2022.

"As a direct consequence of energy prices, we launched a temporary energy surcharge on our subscription solutions in the spring. We wished it could have been different, but it was necessary due to significant financial losses that could have also limited our work to roll out charging infrastructure nationwide," says Andy Kelly, Technical Project Leader at Clever.

Until now, Clever had been using an old, in-house billing system called Billing Engine. However, with the energy crisis, the company decided to retire and replace it with a new, more simplified CRM system that could handle the increased complexity of customer data and integrate with Clever's ERP system, Business Central.

In many cases, a CRM system is just a tool to store customer data, but Clever chose from the start to use CRM (Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement) to also maintain and develop customer engagement. Marketing, sales, customer service, and finance should all have access to the same system to view customer data—not only basic information but also the history of purchases, usage, service cases, and where they are on their "customer journey."

The "customer journey" involves more than just subscribing to a service; it also includes an installation process. Installing a charging station requires digging and laying cables, which makes the process more complex than simply setting up a subscription. This entire onboarding process needs to be visible and accessible to Clever's service staff so they can inform customers about the progress and how they can assist them.

Automated customer service maintains high customer satisfaction

As the electric car market has grown steadily in recent years, Clever has seen a significant increase in customers.

To keep up with this growth, automating various customer management processes became necessary. Fellowmind helped Clever automate many processes using Dynamics 365 as the focal point, connected to Clever's financial system, Dynamics 365 Business Central.

"Today, we have just over 30 employees in our customer service department. If we hadn't automated many of these processes, we would need almost 200 employees to handle everything manually," says Andy Kelly.

At the same time, automation allows customer service employees to focus on more value-creating tasks and have a more exciting approach to how they can support customers. It gives them a bit more freedom to be creative rather than just executing routine tasks.

"Our customer service employees have always been skilled at handling our customers. But the development we’ve seen is that we can maintain the same high level of customer satisfaction, even though the number of inquiries has increased 100-fold over the years. This is clearly a result of automation," concludes Andy Kelly.