Mark Humphreys (Gentrack)
New Zealand-based utilities software provider Gentrack has inked a strategic alliance with global Salesforce partner Merkle.
Gentrack said energy retailers were looking to boost customer loyalty and water companies were refocusing from assets and engineering to the role they played in developing their communities.
To achieve such goals, the utilities industry needed a deeper understanding of their customers, including the services they used, how they used them, and what mattered to them.
In that cause, Salesforce consulting partner Gentrack and Salesforce platinum partner Merkle had both invested in expertise to integrate and implement Salesforce's Energy and Utilities Cloud.
In September, Gentrack announced its new g2.0 billing technology, which operates with Salesforce and AWS to help utilities to respond and adapt to customer needs.
The platform runs with composable architecture on AWS to ensure performance, security, and scalability while enabling rapid prototyping and innovation with minimal system change, the company said.
Mark Humphreys, Gentrack's general manager for Australia, said CIO’s want low risk, fast to market out-of-the-box solutions. Gentrack and its partners Salesforce and Merkle provided that.
“The delivery of water through increasingly extreme climate cycles and providing new ways to store and consume energy to move us to a net zero carbon future, require utilities to know more about their customers and how they consume their services," he said.
Based in Maryland, USA and with 56 locations worldwide, Dentsu-owned Merkle works with utilities to improve their end-to-end customer experience.
Merkle Australia's chief growth officer, Steve Yurisich, said the company was well equipped to be a partner of choice in the utilities space, offering the tools, solutions and Salesforce craft specialisation to deliver a "differentiated" customer experience.
Announcing g2.0 in September, Gentrack CEO Gary Miles said the platform offered a viable alternative to the "legacy" end-to-end CRM and billing systems that dominated the global market.
"These legacy systems are supported by too many Excel spreadsheets, manual processes and embedded running costs," he said. "The water and energy verticals face an existential need to transform as worldwide we tackle the sustainability challenge of a generation.”
