ButanGas, flexibility and simplicity to focus on the customer
Success Stories told by our customers
In the history of a company, it can happen that social and economic evolutions require a major change or diversification of the business model. This is what is happening today to many Energy & Utilities companies, which are having to face an epochal change dictated by the energy crisis but above all by EU policies to favour the use of renewable energy and reduce CO2 emissions.
ButanGas, a Veroniki Holding Group company that has been marketing LPG gas for more than 75 years with a distribution network in the whole of Italy, also opened a new business unit a few years ago for the distribution of electricity, entering the Multiutility category. A very different market from that of LPG distribution: in the latter, in fact, the product distribution methods (installation of tanks for blocks of flats, businesses, etc.) require a link with the customer that in energy supply becomes much more weak. With the diversification of the business model, it was therefore also necessary for ButanGas to review the customer experience.
“Reviewing the business model from a customer-centric perspective was our first challenge,” Riccardo Morandotti, ICT Manager & Ciso of ButanGas, told EnergyUp Tech. “Before, we had very loyal, long-standing customers. Today we know that we have different needs: this is why the project we have completed with Intesa is part of a broader digitalisation process that has seen not only the digitalisation of contract signing, but also the implementation of a new CRM. Today, dematerialisation has become a ‘must’, because in order to expand in the market, customer acquisition must be made simple for the customer’.
ButanGas therefore turned to the Intesa, Kyndryl Company to integrate the CRM with a contract management and signing platform, Intesa Sign. Continues Morandotti: “We needed a simple product, which could be quickly interfaced via API and which at the same time gave us the flexibility to be able to manage the sending of contracts also in the ‘classic’ way with signatures of various types, from simple to qualified, and which was compliant with Italian and European regulations.
Intesa has implemented the Intesa Sign solution for ButanGas, managing the integration with CRM. In practice, from the company’s CRM it is now possible to generate a folder with all contractual documents, which are securely transferred to Intesa Sign. Then the customer can apply a simple electronic signature validated by an OTP. When the file has been signed by the customer, a workflow is started that notifies the second signatory, internal to ButanGas. The persons involved in this second step then affix a qualified electronic signature, for which a multi-year certificate was previously issued. At the end of the internal approval steps, the countersigned contract is automatically re-sent to the customer.
Since the implementation of the solution, the benefits have been immediately evident: “The first important gain was in the timing of contract closing. With a territory coverage like ours, it used to take up to a week to ten days to get a contract signed. Now it takes one day on average, but it could take up to an hour. The second important return is that of the customer approach: signing a digital contract is something that absolutely must be present among the services of a company, and in our context it also means guaranteeing trust. To conclude, we have made our internal process much quicker and more efficient, and above all we have avoided wasting paper, which is very important for a company that sells energy today’.
Morandotti concludes by listing the distinctive elements of Intesa’s solution: speed of integration, flexibility and simplicity: ‘Intesa in particular distinguished itself by its ability to listen, its ability to dialogue with technical figures, and it gave us the possibility to integrate quickly. I believe that solutions should be simple and maintainable over time, and from this point of view it was a really good choice. Intesa’s solution meets all our needs, present and future”.
