Origin Zero sharpens customer focus with Salesforce

Origin Energy’s business and industrial focused arm, Origin Zero, is making progress with a single view of customer project after shifting delivery responsibilities to Accenture.

Speaking at Salesforce's annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco late last week, the utility's general manager of operations and service Daniel Lamb said there was a growing need to understand large Australian businesses in order to help them to decarbonise.

In 2020, just 14 ASX200 companies had Net Zero targets; this has now grown to "over 100", Lamb said.

That placed new requirements on Origin as a supplier of "conventional electricity and gas" services to many such businesses.

"We no longer want to provide conventional electricity and gas to these customers - we actually want to help them accelerate to Net Zero [emissions]," Lamb said, adding this change is equivalent to the 'DVD rental versus streaming' shake-up for the energy sector.

Lamb noted that there are one or more systems associated with every traditional energy product.

That created a "highly fragmented" and complex environment, with respect to understanding customers' energy use and needs.

"What do we do about this complex web of systems?" he said.

The company briefly contemplated large-scale systems replacement but Lamb noted those projects are complex and did not always produce results.

Instead, Origin Zero set out to create a unified customer view across all these existing systems, leveraging Salesforce’s energy and utilities cloud platform.

"We decided to put Salesforce Customer 360 as the single user interface, really to do two things. One is, in shielding users from this complexity, we give them end-to-end visibility of what's happening for customers, and two, we start to surface different insights to them that help them decarbonise [customer operations]," Lamb said.

Origin Zero is already two years into the project, though it had only recently started producing the desired results.

Part of that's due to a change in the functional delivery model, with Accenture taking over work that was previously being performed by internal IT.

"We started out in this process, like we do with everything, [by] just putting [delivery] through our internal IT teams," Lamb said.

"We've got a phenomenal IT team, but their experience really lies in kind of capital-heavy, customised projects. and so through this process they just weren't able to deliver the way we needed to.

"This year, we pivoted our delivery approach to a partnership with Accenture, and since making that change, we've seen a radical difference in the way that this serves up for our users.

"We start in a place of curiosity around what can this do for us, instead of a shopping list of requirements; we're really clear on business value; and ultimately, we don't do things that aren't going to drive value for the users."

Lamb said that had helped shift the needle on user satisfaction. 

One of the other "lessons" that Origin had taken from its experience was to move faster generally; he said that too long was spent on paper-based due diligence, but the project team learned more by having the Salesforce platform in place.

The time, in Origin's case, would have been "much better spent doing proof-of-concepts and getting curious about things."

Kate Weber attended Dreamforce 2023 in San Francisco as a guest of Salesforce.