I am delighted to announce that international energy services company Centrica plc is the inaugural winner of the Citrix Fujitsu Connected Society Award.
We created this annual award with Fujitsu, our Worldwide Partner of the Year for 2020, to recognise Fujitsu customers running Citrix solutions. The award goes to a customer that has embraced technology innovation to improve their business and to:
- Provide the best employee experience
- Drive positive changes in society
- Contribute to sustainability goals.
In any other year, the Connected Society Award would be cause for a ceremony. In 2020, however, we had a working-from-home, socially distanced event.
And, that’s rather appropriate.
Centrica’s award-winning Workspace Programme was in place before the coronavirus, but the unprecedented situation has dramatically highlighted the benefits.
Providing the Best Employee Experience
When Centrica designed its new virtual desktop, it placed the employee at the centre, simplifying 1,200 different applications into a single, global desktop that could be securely accessed from any device, anywhere.
In turn, that means Centrica can continue to serve its customers, especially the elderly, sick, or other vulnerable customers, whatever the situation.
When the coronavirus lockdown came, Centrica — working with Fujitsu — responded quickly. Leveraging its Citrix-powered desktop solution, the energy company switched to remote work for its contact centres and sent its staff home. It rapidly scaled its new desktop from 2,000 users a day to 14,000 handling tens of thousands of customer calls.
As Darren Miles, Centrica’s Vice President of Enterprise Services, told us: “Because we could very quickly and securely enable people to use their own devices, we had people at home, taking customer calls in just a few hours. Citrix gave us the agility and scalability to meet our customers’ needs, and the ability to respond at the pace we did, to serve our most vulnerable customers.”
“When you see our agents on the TV ads, working from a laptop in their kitchens, that shows you how proud the company is of the capability we delivered.”
Where staff didn’t have access to a device at home, new laptops were procured and built by a joint Fujitsu and Centrica team in record time.
It was a dramatic, agile response, but the changes run deeper than “just” business continuity. While many companies slow innovation or transformation projects in the face of crisis, Centrica found its future plans accelerating. The changes brought by the situation have opened eyes to new ways of working that benefit both the company and its employees.
Positive Changes for Society
Miles explained how Centrica’s technology innovation is evolving the way people work: “We’re asking our colleagues to work in different ways and the platform provides the agility and flexibility to give them a bit more freedom and empowerment. We can provide a different way of working, which takes some of the stress out of life. It also reduces travel which helps with the environment. In return, we’re seeing that reflected in higher levels of engagement.”
Centrica is leveraging its technology to access new pools of talent, as Miles told us: “People who are at home doing school runs or caring for others often can’t manage a 9-to-5 office job, as well. But they have different and valuable life experience. At Centrica, we want to be problem solvers, so that different set of skills, talent and experience is valuable to us. When we enable people to work from home, for hours that fit with their needs, we can tap more easily into those skills.”
Flexible hours, or simply avoiding 30, 60 or even 90 minutes of commuting at each end of the day makes work accessible to more people.
Contributing to Centrica’s Sustainability Goals
Centrica has bold environmental goals. As a major energy business, it is committed to protecting the planet and aims to become carbon neutral by 2050. Its information technology is supporting this goal.
James Boswell, Centrica’s Global Director of End User Computing (EUC) explains: “There are a number of factors. Because the cloud auto-scales, we don’t have a large infrastructure footprint running 24/7 in a dedicated data centre. That means we save on compute power and, therefore, on electrical power. Also, as we’ve seen, it makes our workforce more flexible than ever before. That means fewer cars on the road and, potentially, fewer offices in the future. That really helps us reduce our energy consumption and commuting-related emissions.”
The Citrix virtual desktop means Centrica can extend the life of endpoint devices like desktop and laptop PCs. And, when it comes time to finally replace them, it will switch to lower-energy devices like Google Chromebook or thin clients.
Reducing business travel with a greater move to video is also shrinking Centrica’s carbon footprint. It saw an increase in the use of Microsoft Teams when its contact centre agents started working from home.
Centrica, Connected Society Award Winner
I am delighted that Centrica has won the Connected Society award. It is a business that is truly committed to being at the cutting edge of technology, ensuring its employees benefit from new functionality as soon as it’s available. The award reflects that commitment and Centrica’s own core values: to be agile, collaborative and courageous.
