Integrated energy business Galp has adopted OutSystems as its standard platform for customer experience transformation. As a result, it has cut time to market thanks to rapid visual development; and reduced technical debt by reusing code across channels and between applications.
One such example is the launch of a new frictionless onboarding experience for new electricity and gas customers. Available via multiple channels, including kiosks, web, and mobile field sales, Galp was first to market with an AI-powered three-minute onboarding journey.
"We’re first to market with a frictionless energy switch app that works in kiosks, on handheld devices, on our website, and partner websites. We delivered the MVP in less than two months."
Decarbonization of the energy market places extraordinary pressure on oil and gas companies to diversify. Which is one of the reasons Galp Energia—traditionally known as one of Iberia’s largest oil and gas groups—is in a race to transform the organization into an integrated energy business.
The company is aggressively expanding its renewables business and was recently named Iberia’s largest solar player. However, the challenge for a brand best known for its petrol forecourts is how to get retail customers interested in its competitively priced green electricity and gas offer.
Galp set out to see whether it could cross-sell domestic energy contracts via its 700+ gas stations. The experiment required cutting-edge digital skills to transform a slow paper-based wet-signature process into a self-service, 100-percent digital experience that customers could complete in three minutes.
“The project was always going to be a job for OutSystems, which was fine with me, as it helps us to get to market much faster with consistent, beautiful user experiences for all screen sizes.”
And so was born the “Three-Minutes” app. Its product owner, Rita Pereira, takes up the story. “In a gas station, impatient drivers do not want to have lengthy conversations about switching their energy supplier. That’s why we needed a super-fast, self-service customer onboarding experience. The mission was to sell energy contracts inside three minutes—and that’s where the product name came from.”
Galp has used OutSystems since 2004 and has standardized on the platform for all CX transformation projects due to its proven speed, security, scalability, and class-leading UI/CX capabilities. Rita says, “The project was always going to be a job for OutSystems, which was fine with me, as it helps us to get to market much faster with consistent, beautiful user experiences for all screen sizes.”
Deliver omnichannel CX solutions
Speed up development and improve agility
Decrease application maintenance costAs a customer-centric initiative, the project started with design thinking workshops to explore how to remove all friction from the customer onboarding journey.
“Front of mind was how to reduce the whole process to less than three minutes and minimize data entry,” says Rita. This required the Galp team to ruthlessly examine every step that could be automated to remove time and effort from the customer journey.
“We decided that starting the process by scanning a customer’s previous electricity bill had the greatest potential to eliminate manual data entry by the customer,” explains Rita. “We could automate a great deal of the data collection via machine learning. And as an energy bill contains regulatory-required details like unique property identifiers, simply feeding a bill into the scanner would be much easier, faster, and less confusing than users having to carefully read their bill to extract critical information.”
“Our vision was also that a user would simply feed in the first page of their current energy bill, and the system would immediately show them how much they would save per month or year by switching to Galp for electricity, gas, or both combined. They could save the quote and receive it by email or continue with a frictionless sign-up process.”
Development started in March 2020. Three developers from OutSystems joined Galp’s project team, which included a tech lead and two developers. By the end of April, the team had an MVP demonstrator app to test with users that included OCR and machine learning integration and a pricing simulator with three options—green electricity, natural gas, or combined.
“One of the things we loved about the MVP was the foresight the developers showed, adding back-office features that we missed out from the specification,” says Rita. “The backend included a configuration portal, making the system easy to keep up to date without programming—for example, maintaining prices, adding gas stations, promotion codes, employees, and contract templates.”
A COVID lockdown caused a short delay before user testing could start in July 2020. Initial user testing included a touch screen kiosk with an integrated scanner at Galp gas stations. Galp extended user testing with an app that enabled Galp staff to onboard friends and family to Galp’s green energy offer.
Reuse of application components across channels was an important consideration. Galp needed to deploy the onboarding experience on kiosks, its website, a customer mobile app, partner websites, and a mobile app for field salespeople—all while minimizing the accrual of technical debt.
“We defined the solution architecture and received some insightful advice from OutSystems at the start of this project, which helped ensure we maximized reuse across all of the different channel experiences. Now we have everything in a common framework and no more siloed development.”
User testing and iterative enhancements to the tablet app continued for three months, constantly optimizing the user experience to maximize conversions and minimize the time required to complete the simulation and sign-up process.
Ultimately, the development was a significant success, making it possible to complete the end-to-end onboarding journey in less than three minutes. The Three Minutes app went live in kiosks across 80 gas stations in January 2021.
"We’ve found the integration capabilities of OutSystems extremely strong. We’ve integrated with all kinds of in-house and third-party services and can easily expose REST APIs from our OutSystems applications."
Galp was the first to market with this kind of frictionless customer onboarding process. “None of our competitors has anything like this,” says Rita. “To be able to get a competitive quote simply by scanning an energy bill and then complete the sign-up all in less than three minutes is a fantastic customer experience. That’s around 90% faster than the paper-based process. It creates an innovative first impression that we want people to remember and mention to a friend.”
With the kiosk app now live, Galp focused on expanding into multiple other channels using much of the same visual development modules from the Three Minutes app. Those channels included:
Now that all these sales channels are motoring, Galp’s integrated energy offer is attracting many more customers. “Web-based account opening has doubled this January compared to the same time last year,” says Rita.
Integration has been a crucial aspect of the development project, including OCR and machine learning tools, Adobe Sign digital signature, OneTrust to record customer consents, Galp's custom CRM platform, and Azure Active Directory B2C for digital identity authentication.
“We’ve found the integration capabilities of OutSystems extremely strong,” says Rita. “We’ve integrated with all kinds of in-house and third-party services while building this solution.”
Having consigned paper-based account application forms to the wastebin, Galp's back-office staff no longer have to rekey information into their CRM system. “The contact center’s work has become much easier,” explains Rita. “Training new staff used to take eight hours. Now the process is front-ended by OutSystems; training takes just one hour.”
Looking ahead, Galp continues to optimize the Three Minutes App based on user analytics. Regular enhancements are made easier with the full lifecycle capabilities built into OutSystems.
Innovation continues at pace as Galp forges new channel partnerships, where it can quickly integrate the Three Minutes experience into partners’ web properties. Galp is exploring new opportunities to use AI to make predictive offers to customers, both directly and in collaboration with channel partners.
Things are going so well for Rita that she has time to lead the development of a second digital experience. “We’re reusing lots of the Three Minutes app development to fuel similar CX improvements for our bottled gas customers,” says Rita. “There’s never a dull moment!”
