Change and Transformation in the Private Sector
Royal Dutch Shell has a history deeply rooted in oil and gas, but its future is set to embrace the broader energy markets – focusing on supporting the delivery of net zero emissions across the customer supply chain, and aiming to become the largest electricity company of that kind in the World.
Within Shell’s portfolio is a retail energy business – the group’s home-energy offer for households in the UK. To play its part in helping Shell achieve its ambitions, Shell Energy recognised the need to accelerate the transformation of all its critical business competencies. This included a world-class Sales & Marketing function, allied to powerful analytics, without which Shell Energy could not hope to lead in its chosen markets.
Shell Energy approached PwC to help. The transformation used the latest immersive and collaborative approaches to shape the business’s future, and enable it to achieve low-cost growth of its customer base and product offerings.
Specifically, PwC was engaged to transform the sales and marketing capabilities; create and support an agile way of working to improve the customer experience; and implement Salesforce Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud and Interaction Studio, as enablers.
The programme used a fully functioning – but fictional – net-zero company, Kinetic Energy, and the accelerated design approach framed within PwC’s Business/Experience/Technology methodology. In considering Shell Energy’s challenge, PwC imagined what the future of the energy world and markets would be like, so Shell Energy could ascertain how to derive commercial value from that future landscape. This is where the Kinetic Energy fictional business helped, bringing to life the capabilities, experiences and technology of leading the energy transition, and showing the client what their customers would look like over the next five to 10 years.
Key to PwC’s approach was a number of stimulating creative workshops to inspire Shell Energy to push the boundaries and create a vision of their future business. In doing so, PwC developed its now flagship ‘Art of the Possible’ workshop series, which uses case studies, gamification and experience mapping, among other techniques, to understand the end-to-end customer experience for each customer journey, providing Shell Energy for the first time with a holistic view of the required communications across its various functions.
The reimagined marketing campaigns were built into the new Salesforce platform and delivered with minimal manual intervention. These integrated campaigns were highly successful, with engagement and conversion rates that outperform all industry benchmarks for customer acquisition, retention and management.
The programme has been a foundational component in driving Shell Energy’s commercial performance, with new ways of working improving team efficiency and effectiveness along the way.
Shell Energy found the transformation process itself highly stimulating (and relevant, fun and well-
balanced), and will continue to utilise the tools and approaches deployed during the process – in particular, the Kinetic Energy model company.
The final word goes to Shell Energy: “These are exciting times for us, and together with PwC, this
project has been a catalyst for change and growth across our organisation.”
View the PwC profile in the MCA Members Directory.