EDF powers up customer satisfaction with Dynatrace

EDF is one of the UK’s largest energy providers and is on a mission to improve customer experience while helping the country achieve its Net Zero goals. At the heart of this strategy is the need to maintain its leadership in an increasingly competitive market. New entrants to the market were benefitting from agility driven by the absence of legacy technology, so EDF has put in place a strategy to differentiate through technology and the delivery of superior digital products and services.

To capitalise, EDF decided to bring its traditionally outsourced engineering and data capabilities back in-house, adopt a more agile DevOps model and team with leading cloud provider AWS to drive innovation. EDF also wanted to empower its engineers to directly access insights into the experience of customers using the applications they are responsible for, which would enable them to continually optimise and improve digital services for their customers.

To achieve this capability, EDF acknowledged that it would need a modern monitoring solution that could give engineering and product teams access to observability data earlier in the development cycle. After evaluating the market, EDF identified that Dynatrace was best suited to its needs, as it could offer the precise answers that enable engineers to improve the stability of new products and features. This would allow EDF to bring services to market earlier, with greater confidence in their reliability.

“We want to ensure our products surprise and delight customers, but in an increasingly competitive market it is impossible to do this without innovative technology that works,” said Jodie Kovacs, Senior Solution Architect, EDF. “It’s so easy when you’re working in technology to be detached from the end user, but with Dynatrace’s insights we can now equate a technical problem to real people. Dynatrace gives us the necessary view so we can bring together the underlying technology platforms with an understanding of the impact to our customers. Now our engineers can use this confidence to create innovative and exciting solutions without worrying about the customer journey.”

• Faster resolutions: With Dynatrace, EDF’s teams can now pinpoint the root cause of issues as soon as they occur and understand exactly how to solve them. For example, in one instance EDF’s Customer Web and Mobile Applications experienced an increase in network errors, which caused customers difficulty logging in and accessing account services. Using Dynatrace, EDF was able to quickly identify and resolve the root cause, then closely monitor the improvement for customers.
• Modernising technology stack: Dynatrace’s strong partnership and deep technical integrations with AWS helped ensure a smooth migration to the cloud. The collaboration between AWS and Dynatrace provided EDF with precise insights into user experience.
• Better customer satisfaction: With the insights from Dynatrace, EDF has been able to launch innovative new products like its ‘Beat the Peak’ and ‘Sunday Saver’ offerings, which challenge customers to change their energy usage. Dynatrace provides a bridge between the back end of these digital services and real-time user experience on the front-end, so EDF’s engineers can access insights that help to dramatically improve customer satisfaction.
• Greater ownership: Dynatrace enabled EDF to democratize access to observability across the business, putting data in the hands of product owners and driving a cultural shift toward SRE. This means that product teams are now pulling together their own dashboards in Dynatrace, measuring their KPIs, and understanding how Dynatrace can help them to continuously improve their services.
• Unlocking skilled resources: EDF needs to attract and retain good talent to continue to grow and innovate, but this isn’t possible without the right culture and technology to motivate and inspire people. By democratizing access to data-driven insights, Dynatrace has helped EDF to unlock more of the latent talent within its business. EDF has found passionate project owners and employees who have been truly enabled by the insights from Dynatrace. EDF has also been able to identify how many engineers are needed each week and find other work for those that do not have work booked in, making best use of its skilled resources.

“EDF has become a pioneer within five years because of our focus on innovation and Dynatrace has been vital in that by transforming our digital customer experiences,” continued Kovacs. “With Dynatrace, we are able to achieve our wider goal of Net Zero while dramatically improving customer satisfaction. These are no longer two aims with different solutions but go hand in hand because of the insights teams can leverage from Dynatrace. We now have other teams asking how we are able to launch and run products so effectively – and the answer is always Dynatrace.”