This year, the company capitalized on the big-spending holiday season and closed out an exciting 2018 by launching 3 new markets and bringing renewable energy to more than 1,000 new customers a day during peak sales periods. Overall, in 2018 alone, over 1,000,000 people benefited from Fenix’s solar home systems across five countries - Uganda, Zambia, Côte d’Ivoire, Benin, and Nigeria.
ENGIE’s acquisition of Fenix in April 2018 enabled this massive growth. As a company of ENGIE, Fenix was able to invest in building new digital technologies and to scale to additional markets, reaching an unprecedented number of customers while still delivering on the exceptional customer experience that is a core company value.
In mid-2018, Fenix piloted and launched a new product line: the Fenix Power Series
The Fenix Power Series is a culmination of years of user-centered product design. It’s the most inclusive product to date, engineered to enable mass-market pricing, and is expandable so that the system can grow to meet the needs of customers as their energy demands and budgets change.
It also contains new digital features to deliver an exceptional customer experience at scale. The systems are GSM-enabled, allowing Fenix to transmit commands and updates to the device and display information to the customer on the system’s interface, reducing the need for the customer to contact the call center for support. Fenix can also remotely monitor system performance and detect and respond to potential technical issues in real time. GSM connectivity allows Fenix not only to improve product performance and customer satisfaction, but also to understand customer behaviors and needs more deeply so that the Fenix team can design even better products and features in the future.
Meanwhile, Fenix’s commercial team incorporated new digital tools for salesforce
The aim is to provide a faster and more seamless buying experience for customers, while simultaneously reducing the load on the call centers and improving the team’s visibility and control over customer quality. The tool, called FenixGo, is a mobile application designed to enable Fenix’s distributed sales teams to complete sales in the field, replacing a process that used to require every sales agent to speak with a call center agent to complete a sale. By December, FenixGo was used to process more than 50% of sales in Uganda, and is estimated to have saved hundreds of hours of call center time while providing a better experience to our customers.
Ultimately, due to the hard work and entrepreneurial spirit of Fenix employees and ENGIE’s bold vision and investment, the company laid the foundation in 2018 to facilitate rapid growth of clean, reliable energy solutions to consumers in five markets in Africa, all the while delivering an exceptional customer experience that differentiates Fenix from its competitors.
Looking to 2019, Fenix is more prepared than ever to accelerate access to energy for millions of households across Africa as the company drives toward the shared goal to bring decarbonized, decentralized, and digital energy to over 20 million people.
