Brimscombe Energy / BB-Demo – Demo
Callcompleted
Brimscombe Energy · 2024-10-14 12:15
Second demo for Brimscombe Energy. Siân Pritchard liked the honest single view and the dairy case, wants baseline measures first, and must take the £145k draft figure and date to her finance lead.
What was said
What this says
Current to 13 Oct 26Second demo for Brimscombe Energy. Siân Pritchard liked the honest single view and the dairy case, wants baseline measures first, and must take the £145k draft figure and date to her finance lead.
What happened: Hannah Lowe demoed a customer page, complaint deadlines, overdue bills against open complaints, call history and a live dashboard. Siân Pritchard was on the call without Nikhil.
Customer view: Siân valued that the tool shows where systems disagree and what it cannot see. She said the call was better than she expected.
Commercial: Tom Ashdown said the draft shows £145k for the whole Enterprise deal, implementation included and not a yearly price. Siân said the Christmas week date is unrealistic and will go to the board's finance lead before committing.
Watch: Siân will not put a value on a slide until it is measured, so Hannah suggested three baseline measures. A billing export change is coming, and the connector would stop loading unless BB-Demo is told first.
Themes
Current to 9 Oct 26Theme
Complaints and collections single view
Importance
praise
Sentiment
positive
Voice
champion
Who was there
BB-Demo
CRMmade from
Them
CRMmade from
Follow-up
Next steps
Current to 9 Oct 26- Tom Ashdown to send follow-up session options and a proposal showing implementation and the annual subscription as two lines.
- Hannah Lowe to send a note covering data location, the permissions approach, security review steps and the suggested measures.
- Siân Pritchard to take the figure and timing to the board's finance lead.
Risks
Current to 9 Oct 26- The 27 Dec 2024 order form date is unlikely to hold, and the decision still sits with Siân's finance lead.
- A planned change to the billing export could stop a connector loading if BB-Demo is not told first.
- Siân will not state a value until a baseline is measured, so the case for the price is not yet made.
Opportunities
Current to 9 Oct 26- A shorter session for the key account team on the same extract, letting them pick the customers.
- Enterprise includes SSO and SCIM, which fits Siân's need for group-based access for collections and key accounts.
Transcript
Tom Ashdown NoneHello, hello. Can you hear me alright, Siân?
Siân Pritchard NoneI can, yes. Afternoon, Tom. I can see Hannah's joined as well.
Hannah Lowe NoneAfternoon both. Sorry, I was fighting with my headset. Is that better?- Siân Pritchard NoneMuch better, thank you.
- Tom Ashdown NoneGrand. How's your week been so far, Siân? Mondays always feel like clearing up after Friday, in my experience.
- Siân Pritchard NoneBusy, but the good kind. It's the start of our complaints review, so the inbox is full. And it's raining sideways in Gloucester, so everybody's in a mood.
- Tom Ashdown NoneSame up here, no drama, just damp. Right, so we've got forty-five minutes, and I'd like most of that to be Hannah showing you the thing rather than me talking at you. Hannah, over to you, I think.
- Hannah Lowe NoneThanks, Tom. Before I share anything, Siân, what do you most need to know by the end of this call? I'd rather aim at that than walk you through every page.
- Siân Pritchard NoneFair question. Three things, really. One, can someone in key accounts, someone in collections and someone handling a complaint all look at the same business customer and see the same facts. One customer, one view. Two, can it help us meet the regulator's timescales on complaints, because that's the one thing I won't let slip. And three, where does the data actually live, because our IT people will ask me that before I've sat down.
- Hannah Lowe NoneGood. Let me take the third first, because it shapes everything else. The short answer is it lives in your own Snowflake account. We build and run the brain inside it, so the data doesn't get copied out to a platform of ours. The longer answer is about which sources you connect and who gets to see what, and I'll come to that.
- Siân Pritchard NoneRight. That's the answer I was hoping for, but I'll want it in writing at some point.
- Hannah Lowe NoneI'll put that in writing, yes. Let me share my screen. Can you see it?
- Siân Pritchard NoneI can see a search box and not much else.
- Hannah Lowe NoneThat's the right start. This is a test space loaded with the extract your team sent over last week: sites, contracts, billing records, call notes and complaint cases. So it's your data, not a made-up energy company.
- Tom Ashdown NoneWhich is a bit nerve-wracking for us, because if it's rubbish we can't blame the sample.
- Hannah Lowe NoneHa, no hiding places. Siân, can you give me a business customer name from your extract? Anyone you know well.
- Siân Pritchard NoneTry the cold storage group. Big multi-site customer, lots of history, and they complained last spring so I know the story.
- Hannah Lowe NoneOkay, typing it in. Now what you're seeing is a single page for that customer. Down the left, the sites. In the middle, the contracts, so which site is on which contract and when each one ends. On the right, the latest bills and the calls we have notes on. Nothing here has been typed in by hand, it's been assembled from the source systems.
- Siân Pritchard NoneHang on, go back up. That's nine sites?
- Hannah Lowe NoneTo be precise, it's showing the sites that are linked to that customer in the records you sent. If one site was loaded under a different name in billing, it may sit on its own until someone matches it.
- Siân Pritchard NoneMm. That's actually useful to hear, because that's our problem today. What does the record say? Well, it depends which system you ask. Sorry, go on.
- Hannah Lowe NoneNo, that's the point of it. Where the systems disagree, the page shows you both and says where each came from. It doesn't quietly pick one. Click on that contract end date and you'll see the source.
- Siân Pritchard NoneOh, that's nice. So the key account manager knows which version they're looking at.
- Tom Ashdown NoneThat's the bit people tend to like. It's less about clever answers and more about not arguing over whose spreadsheet is right.
- Siân Pritchard NoneWhich is half my week, honestly.
- Hannah Lowe NoneRight, let's try asking it something instead of searching. I'll switch to chat. Siân, you opened a lot of calls with what the teams asked, so what would your complaints team want to know first thing in the morning?
- Siân Pritchard NoneWhich open complaints are closest to their deadline. And who owns them.
- Hannah Lowe NoneOkay. Asking exactly that.
- Hannah Lowe NoneSo that's coming back with a list ordered by due date. Each row has the customer, the case owner, the date the response is due and the last note on the case. Now, to be precise, it's working from the due date held on the case. If your teams calculate a deadline outside the case system, the brain won't know about it.
- Siân Pritchard NoneNo, it's all in the case record, we're quite strict about that. Can I check one? Scroll down a bit. That one at the bottom, the dairy customer. I know that one was due last week and we answered it.
- Hannah Lowe NoneLet me open it. The case is still marked open. There's a note saying a response was sent, but the status wasn't changed.
- Siân Pritchard NoneRight. So that's a status problem on our side, not yours. I'm rather glad it surfaced, actually. Let's measure it before we claim it, but that's the sort of thing I'd want a weekly view of.
- Tom Ashdown NoneAnd that's a good example, because it didn't pretend. It told you what the record said and the record was wrong.
- Siân Pritchard NoneYes. Honest, at least. Carry on, Hannah.
- Hannah Lowe NoneLet's do the collections side now, because I think this is where your single view matters most. I'll ask which customers have overdue bills and also have an open complaint.
- Siân Pritchard NoneOh, I'd love that answer. Sorry, I'm going to say something. At the moment collections can chase a customer who's mid-complaint because they don't see it. We've had that go wrong.
- Hannah Lowe NoneThen this is the one. It's returned a short list. For each customer you see the overdue amount from billing and the open case from the complaints records, side by side. A collections agent would see that before picking up the phone.
- Siân Pritchard NoneShort list, but not zero. Which tells me we have a real number of people we could be calling at the wrong moment.
- Tom Ashdown NoneCan I just jump in? This is where I'd normally say a big number, but I won't, because we don't know yet what the true count is across your whole estate. This is a sample.
- Siân Pritchard NoneGood. I'd rather you didn't. If you'd said a number I'd have had to ask where it came from.
- Tom Ashdown NoneHa. No drama. Hannah, can you show the calls piece? Siân mentioned call history for the key account people.
- Hannah Lowe NoneYes. Going back to the cold storage group page, and I'll ask it: what was discussed on our last calls with this customer, and were any commitments made?
- Hannah Lowe NoneSo you get a short summary per call, the date, who from your side was on it, and any follow-ups that were mentioned. Each line links back to the call record. I'd treat the summary as a pointer, not the evidence. The evidence is the underlying note.
- Siân Pritchard NoneThat second one. It says a callback was promised. Is that something it can flag if nothing happened afterwards?
- Hannah Lowe NoneThe short answer is it can find a promise in a call note, and it can show you whether there's a later contact in the records. The longer answer is it only sees what's been recorded, so if someone rang from a mobile and didn't log it, it can't tell. I wouldn't want you to think it was a guarantee.
- Siân Pritchard NoneNo, I appreciate that. I'd rather have a tool that says what it can't see.
- Tom Ashdown NoneWhich is precisely why Hannah does the demos and I don't.
- Siân Pritchard NoneRight, can I ask about the regulator side properly? Our compliance people will want to know how a complaint answer is put together, because Ofgem rules are specific about what we have to say and by when.
- Hannah Lowe NoneOkay. So there are two parts. The brain can gather the facts for a complaint: the sites, the bills, the earlier calls, the previous cases. That's a big time saver for whoever writes the reply. What it doesn't do is decide your regulatory obligations. Those rules stay with your people, and I'd want your compliance team to say what the answer must contain.
- Siân Pritchard NoneGood. That's what I'd say too. It's the preparation, not the judgement.
- Hannah Lowe NoneExactly. I could show you what a prepared case view looks like if that's useful. It pulls together everything for one complaint on one page.
- Siân Pritchard NonePlease. Use the dairy one, we've already had a look at it.
- Hannah Lowe NoneSo there's the timeline down the middle: the original contact, the bills involved, a call where the customer queried a charge, and then the response note. At the top, the due date and the current status. Anyone picking this up cold would be oriented in a minute or two.
- Siân Pritchard NoneThat would have saved me a lot of last quarter. How does it handle someone who shouldn't see the commercial detail? Our collections people shouldn't see everything a key account manager sees.
- Hannah Lowe NoneGood question, and I want to answer it carefully. Access follows who the person is in your organisation. On Enterprise you'd have single sign-on and SCIM, so the groups come from your identity system rather than being set up twice. What each group can see is something we design with you in the connector and permissions work, and I'd put the exact approach in writing rather than describe it loosely now.
- Siân Pritchard NoneFine. Send me that and I'll pass it to IT.
- Hannah Lowe NoneWill do. I'll also include the security review process, because for Enterprise we support you through it, and your IT team will have their own questionnaire.
- Siân Pritchard NoneThey will. Two or three of them, probably, and they'll all want something different.
- Tom Ashdown NoneLeave that with me and Hannah. If they send the questionnaire early, we can start answering it before anything's signed. Saves a few weeks.
- Siân Pritchard NoneThat would help. Can we go back to the data for a minute? How do you deal with a source that changes? We're about to change how some of our billing data is exported.
- Hannah Lowe NoneUseful to know now. A connector is built against a source as it is. If the export changes shape, the connector can stop loading, and the thing we watch for is records flat for days when they should be growing. We'd see that and tell you. Better still, if you tell us before the change, we adjust the connector at the same time.
- Siân Pritchard NoneUnderstood. I'll make sure whoever's running that project has your number.
- Tom Ashdown NoneThat'd be Daniel, really, once you're live. Daniel Okafor, our customer success lead. He looks after the account after signing, so he'd be the one who hears about the change.
- Siân Pritchard NoneOkay. Good to know there's a name.
- Hannah Lowe NoneOne more thing to show, then I'll stop sharing and we can talk scope. Dashboards. Siân, you said you'd want to show what the data is worth. This is where a team can build their own view without us.
- Siân Pritchard NoneGo on, I'm interested. Though I'll say now, I won't put a value on a slide until we can measure it.
- Hannah Lowe NoneThat suits how this works, actually. I'll build one live. Open complaints by age, split by whether the customer has an overdue bill. It's two questions turned into a chart.
- Hannah Lowe NoneThere. Not pretty, but it's yours, and it refreshes with the nightly load. If you saved that and looked at it each Monday, you'd have a baseline within a month. Then you can say what changed, instead of guessing.
- Siân Pritchard NoneThat is exactly the language I'd want. Baseline first. What would you suggest I measure, though? I don't want to pick something flattering.
- Hannah Lowe NoneI'd pick things you already count and disagree about less. Time to assemble a complaint response. How often collections contacted a customer with an open complaint. How often a key account manager was surprised by a bill or a case. Three is plenty.
- Siân Pritchard NoneRight. I can get the first two from what we hold. The third is a conversation with the managers.
- Tom Ashdown NoneThat's a nice way to run it. A small number of measures, agreed up front, and then we look at them together at the first review rather than me arguing it was worth it.
- Siân Pritchard NoneI like that. Right, Tom, you'd better tell me what this costs before I go any further, or my finance director will ask and I'll have nothing to say.
- Tom Ashdown NoneFair. So, I don't like quoting from memory, so I'll confirm this in writing, but the figure on the draft we have is £145,000. That's the whole deal on Enterprise, implementation included, so it's not a yearly price. The yearly subscription is part of that and I'll set the split out clearly in the proposal.
- Siân Pritchard NoneOkay. So one hundred and forty-five all in, with the build included, and then I need the annual number separately.
- Tom Ashdown NoneExactly that. I'll make it two lines so nobody has to do the sum.
- Siân Pritchard NoneGood. I won't go around my finance director on this, so I'll need something I can put in front of him. What's the shape of the implementation?
- Hannah Lowe NoneFor Enterprise it's a fixed fee and a fixed period, with the security review support built in. The first phase is connectors and the core customer view, because that's what you've seen today. Permissions and the dashboards come after, once the data is right. I'll write the plan out with owners, so you can see what we need from your side.
- Siân Pritchard NoneWhat we'd need from our side is the real question. Usually it's one analyst who's already got three jobs.
- Hannah Lowe NoneYes. Honestly, the thing that slows these down isn't the technology, it's access and answers. Someone who can unlock the billing export and say what a field means. It's a few hours a week, not a full role, but it needs to be the same person.
- Siân Pritchard NoneThat I can do. I'd probably do some of it myself, to be honest.
- Tom Ashdown NoneWhich is partly why you're a good champion for it. Now, timing. We've pencilled the order form for Friday 27 December 2024 on our side, but I'll be honest, that's Christmas week and I'm not precious about it.
- Siân Pritchard NoneChristmas week? Tom, nobody signs anything that week. My finance director will be on a beach, or at least wishing he was.
- Tom Ashdown NoneHa, fair enough. Then let's treat it as a marker and not a promise. If it slides into January, no drama. What I'd like is to get your questions answered and the paperwork moving so that when people are back, it's quick.
- Siân Pritchard NoneThat I can work with. Let me take it to the board's finance lead before I commit to a date.
- Tom Ashdown NonePerfect. Anything you want from us to take in with you? A one-pager, a customer call, whatever helps.
- Siân Pritchard NoneA short note on the three things I asked at the start, honestly. Same facts for every team, how it supports the complaints deadlines, where the data lives. And the measures Hannah suggested. If I can say those four things in a page, I'm most of the way there.
- Hannah Lowe NoneI can do that. I'd write the data location part carefully, because it's the one IT will read line by line.
- Siân Pritchard NoneGood. Anything you're not sure about, say so. I'd rather a gap than a guess.
- Hannah Lowe NoneIf it's a security detail I'm not certain of, I check with our security lead before it goes in writing. You'd see that in the answer, not a vague sentence.
- Siân Pritchard NonePerfect. One more thing before we run out of time. Can I show this to the key account team with a real customer in it, not just me watching you drive?
- Hannah Lowe NoneYes. We could do a shorter session for them on the same extract. I'd suggest letting them pick the customers, so they can try to catch it out.
- Tom Ashdown NoneI like that. Let's get something in the diary. Siân, are you better with later this week or next?
- Siân Pritchard NoneNext week. This one's the complaints review and I can't move that. Early in the week if possible, and not first thing.
- Tom Ashdown NoneDone, I'll send a couple of options after the call. Anything else you want to ask while Hannah's still got the screen?
- Siân Pritchard NoneJust the obvious one. Who else are we looking at? Not for you to slag anyone off. I just want to say honestly to my finance director that I've done the comparison.
- Tom Ashdown NoneSensible. Without getting into who's good or bad, the usual alternatives are a big analytics suite across the whole group, a tool that only searches calls, a consultancy that builds you something bespoke, or doing it yourselves. What you've seen today is one view across the records, calls included, running in your own account. Whether that fits better is for you to judge. I'd suggest you ask each of them the same three questions you asked us.
- Siân Pritchard NoneI will. And the same data location question, since that's the one people wave away.
- Hannah Lowe NonePlease do. I'd rather you were comparing like with like.
- Siân Pritchard NoneRight. I think that's me. That was better than I expected, and I'd expected quite a lot. The dairy case was a good moment.
- Tom Ashdown NoneIt was, and it wasn't planned, so I'll take the credit anyway. Cheers, Siân. I'll send the options for the follow-up and a clear proposal with the two lines.
- Hannah Lowe NoneAnd I'll send the note with the data location, the permissions approach and the security review steps, plus the suggested measures. Thanks, Siân.
- Siân Pritchard NoneDiolch both. Speak soon, and good luck with the rain.
- Tom Ashdown NoneYou too. Bye for now.
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