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 scalability and security, as well as its 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 industry leading 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.
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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, personalised 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 per cent 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.
