How BCG helped Ergon Retail successfully lead a business and technology transformation in 300 business days, improving employee engagement, maintaining high customer happiness, and avoiding dual run costs.
Ergon Retail, a government-owned utility that is part of Energy Queensland, is the fourth largest electricity retailer in Australia. The retailer was facing an urgent need to overhaul its core technology platform, which was nearing its end of life. Modernizing it was critical for the flexible tariffs and customer-centric culture needed for the energy transition. The stakes were high and the task ahead was not easy.
The change would require migrating more than 1 million customer accounts and transitioning four systems in a highly regulated sector—all within a tight window of just over a year. This transformation would not only involve implementing new technology but also require a significant change in roles and ways of working for hundreds of employees.
To address these challenges, Ergon Retail partnered with BCG and leading technology platform provider Kraken, focusing on five key success factors—purpose, discipline, empowerment, experience, and culture. Together, we modernized Ergon Retail’s platform, significantly improving the company’s retail capability, including enhancing customer relationship management and billing, upgrading meter data management, updating its telephony system, and launching a new customer portal.
In addition, Ergon Retail adopted a customer-centric operating model and culture whereby every customer-facing employee was empowered to resolve customer issues end-to-end without handoffs to specialist departments. Since bringing people along was essential for making the transformation sustainable, BCG’s culture and change management expertise played a critical role in making communications a top priority for the company, including:
BCG also acted as strategic execution partner for the entire transformation journey, proactively addressing risks as they emerged and ensuring that the transformation achieved its business objectives and realized the value of the business case.
The initiative was a great success. In just 300 business days, Ergon Retail achieved its key goals. More than 1 million customer accounts were migrated to the Kraken platform, and the legacy platform was decommissioned on time, avoiding high dual-system run costs. Ergon Retail reorganized over 250 operations staff into a new customer-centric operating model. People enthusiastically embraced the journey, with employee engagement scores rising by 13 percentage points. Customers, too, were happy with the changes, as customer happiness scores exceeded 80% once the transformation was complete.
"BCG was pivotal in our transformation. Their experience and strategic insights helped navigate the complexities of the project. But what I loved most about them was they were with us every step of the way, delivering successful outcomes together."
This transformation has set the foundation for Ergon Retail to deliver on its mission of powering Queensland communities to thrive through the energy transition. Ergon Retail now has a solid foundation for delivering outstanding service to regional Queenslanders and achieving its strategic priorities.
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