ButanGas, flexibility and simplicity to put the customer at the centre

Success stories told by our customers

In the history of a company, it can happen that social and economic developments impose a major change or a diversification of the business model. This is what is happening today to a great many companies in the Energy & Utilities sector, which are facing an epochal shift driven by the energy crisis but above all by the EU policies aimed at encouraging the use of renewable energy and reducing CO2 emissions.

Even ButanGas, a company of the Veroniki Holding Group that has been marketing LPG gas for more than 75 years through a distribution network across the whole of Italy, has for some years now opened a new business unit for electricity distribution, entering the Multiutility category. This is a very different market from LPG distribution: in the latter, the ways in which the product is distributed (installation of tanks for apartment blocks, businesses, etc.) create a bond with the customer that becomes much weaker in energy supply. With the diversification of its business model, ButanGas therefore also had to review its customer experience.

«Reviewing the business model with a customer-centric approach was our first challenge» says Riccardo Morandotti, ICT Manager & CISO of ButanGas, to EnergyUp Tech «Before, we had very loyal, long-standing customers. Today we know we have different needs: that’s why the project we completed with Intesa is part of a broader digitalisation journey that included, alongside the digitalisation of contract signing, the implementation of a new CRM. Dematerialisation has now become a “must”, because to expand in the market you need to make customer acquisition simple for the customer themselves».

ButanGas therefore turned to Intesa (Havant Group) to integrate its CRM with a contract management and signing platform, Intesa Sign. Morandotti continues: «We needed a simple product, quickly interfaceable via API and that at the same time gave us the flexibility to also handle sending contracts in the “classic” way with various types of signature, from simple to qualified, and that was compliant with Italian and European regulations».

Intesa therefore implemented the Intesa Sign signing solution for ButanGas, managing the integration with the CRM. In practice, from the company’s CRM it is now possible to generate a folder with all the contractual documents, which are securely transferred to Intesa Sign. The customer can then affix a simple electronic signature validated by an OTP. Once the case has been signed by the customer, a workflow is triggered that notifies the second signatory, internal to ButanGas. The people involved in this second step then affix a qualified electronic signature, for which a multi-year certificate had previously been issued. At the end of the internal approval steps, the countersigned contract is automatically sent back to the customer.

Since the solution was implemented, the benefits have been evident from the start: «The first significant return was in contract closing times. With coverage of the territory like ours, getting a contract signed used to take up to a week, ten days. Now it takes an average of one day, but it could take as little as an hour. The second important return is in the approach to the customer: signing a digital contract is something that absolutely must be among a company’s services, and in our context that also means guaranteeing reliability. To conclude, we have made our internal process much faster and more efficient and, above all, we have avoided wasting paper, a very important factor for a company that sells energy today».

Morandotti concludes by listing the distinctive features of the Intesa solution: speed of integration, flexibility and simplicity: «Intesa in particular stood out for its ability to listen, its ability to engage with technical teams, and it enabled us to integrate quickly. I believe solutions should be simple and maintainable over time, and from this point of view it was truly an excellent choice. Intesa’s solution meets all our needs, both present and future».

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