Essent Cuts Contact Center Costs in Half with Genesys Cloud

Essent, part of the E.ON Group, is the Netherlands' largest energy supplier, serving roughly 2.5 million customers. Despite its strong market position, Essent's legacy on-premises contact center voice and iAdvize live chat systems had become strategic liabilities, running on an unsupported platform, hemorrhaging money for maintenance, blocking the artificial intelligence-powered capabilities that modern customers demand, and driving up licensing costs.

On top of that, Essent's more than 1,000 agents spread out across two locations were forced to juggle multiple disconnected screens simultaneously, creating workflows that were as stressful as they were inefficient.

"Our agents were constantly working with different screens—multiple chat instances open at once, multiple agent desktop instances. It was messy, and in some cases, quite stressful," recalls Michiel Kouijzer, a product manager at Essent.

To reverse this, Essent made cloud migration an urgent priority, provided it could be executed without disrupting service. It had to be invisible to customers, with no degradation in service levels or response times.

Essent chose Sabio Group as its migration partner. Sabio's approach went well beyond conventional implementation. Technical consultants were embedded on-site at Essen's headquarters, working directly with Essent's agile sprint teams and managing complex coordination across telecommunications carriers, group networking, and CRM ntegrations.

After careful consideration, Essent decided to advance its customer experience (CX) strategy on the Genesys Cloud platform. In doing so, it had to reset its routing policies, call flows, decision trees, and handovers.

Additionally, Essent leveraged the Genesys platform to add voice transcription for automated call summaries and logging and to unify its CRM system within the Genesys Cloud Agent Desktop.

Essent now has in place a unified agent workspace with voice, chat, and customer data consolidated onto a single screen, giving the company greater control over service orchestration and journey management.

"Feedback across the E.ON group among Genesys Cloud users was overwhelmingly positive," Kouijzer said. "And, in Sabio, we had a partner with elite skills and knowledge to get the most out of Genesys capabilities. So, it was a perfect win-win."

Rather than a full-scale cut-over that could have affected service to millions of households, Essent and Sabio specialists conducted an initial pilot before switching over all remaining mission-critical voice services to the platform. This milestone was followed six months later by the successful migration of chat services.

The December live chat migration was executed at the peak of the winter demand season, and the entire migration was completed in less than 12 weeks. And despite concerns that the transition might impact service quality, the migration was invisible to customers, with no degradation in service levels or response times.

"A lot of colleagues were saying I was mad for even suggesting this approach. It kind of feels like a victory on a personal level that it did work out. You just have to be a little ambitious and have the right expert partner who can make it work," Kouijzer said.

Not only did the change-over work, but it fundamentally improved the daily experience of Essent's front-line staff. Agent workplace satisfaction scores jumped by 36 percent.

The benefits have been far more dramatic across the rest of the company. The wholesale transformation of its contact center infrastructure cut technology costs by 50 percent. And since go-live, Essent has recorded zero critical incidents, a stark contrast to several outages that periodically plagued its legacy environment.

With a stable cloud infrastructure now firmly in place, Essent is turning its attention to capabilities that were impossible in its legacy environment. These include AI-powered call summarization, agentic customer self-service, and next-generation workforce optimization. Essent is also weighing whether to migrate its stand-alone email and social solutions onto Genesys Cloud as well.

The Payoff

Since implementing Genesys Cloud through Sabio Group, Essent has seen the following results:

• 50 percent reduction in technology costs;
• 36 percent improvement in agent workplace satisfaction; and
• Zero critical incidents.