Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced that Octopus Energy has selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider. The disruptive UK energy retailer, is leveraging AWS’s proven scalability and security, as well as its unmatched portfolio of services, including compute, analytics, storage, databases, and machine learning (ML), to improve its customer experience and support the company’s plans for international expansion of its renewable energy business.
Octopus Energy built its customer service platform, Kraken, entirely on AWS. The platform uses the breadth and depth of AWS services to help Octopus Energy’s customer support teams increase their productivity, delivering a complete view of each customer’s journey and enabling the teams to answer customer queries through a single, easily navigable dashboard. Kraken stores customer data on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and uses AWS Glue to prepare and load that data for analysis. Kraken queries and analyses the data using a combination of Amazon Athena to engage with data directly in Amazon S3 and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), which makes it easy to set up and manage databases with high throughput and high availability. With the insights Kraken delivers, Octopus Energy can offer clear, personalized advice to more than 65,000 customers at a time with around 10 customer support staff, reducing its customer service costs by more than 50% compared to leading energy providers.
Octopus Energy uses the insights provided by Kraken and AWS to understand energy consumption rates across its business, down to the household level. To do this, Octopus Energy trains neural networks on billions of rows of smart meter data, looking at energy consumption at different times of the day. These insights allow Octopus Energy to predict energy use across its network and inform when it buys energy from the wholesale market. The Kraken platform has proven to be so successful that Octopus Energy has licensed the technology to other energy companies to use around the world, including recent licensing deals with major energy providers such as Origin Energy and Hanwha Corporation in Australia, and E.On and Good Energy in the UK. By leveraging AWS’s global cloud infrastructure, Octopus Energy has been able to scale its Kraken platform rapidly with support for 17 million customers worldwide.
“Using AWS we have been able to scale to provide 1.5 million households in the UK, around 5% of UK households, with clean, green energy. We have also enhanced the customer experience by introducing innovative services such as our revolutionary smart tariffs, giving us an unbeaten offering that has seen us named as a ‘Which? Recommended’ provider for three years running,” said Greg Jackson, CEO of Octopus Energy Group. “Cloud is a fundamental building block for a low-carbon, decentralised smart grid, and it is our ambition to drive the adoption of renewables and reach 100 million customers worldwide. With AWS we have access to the broadest set of technologies, which let us move quickly to respond to customer and market changes. During the ongoing pandemic, we have leveraged AWS’s cloud services to maintain Kraken’s performance and continue to operate as normal during the crisis.”
“It’s exciting to see Octopus Energy using cloud technology to transform the industry and accelerate the transition to a more sustainable energy future,” said Darren Hardman, VP & General Manager, UK & Ireland at AWS. “We look forward to continuing to work alongside them as they leverage the breadth and depth of AWS services to accelerate their global expansion and make the green energy transition cheaper and faster.”
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