AboitizPower amps up efficiency and shines light on customers with Zendesk

AboitizPower, a subsidiary of Aboitiz Equity Ventures and one of the Philippines’ largest power providers, manages electricity generation, renewables, and distribution, supplying power nationwide since 1998. The company aims to uplift communities with reliable power supply at reasonable prices and with minimal impact to the environment.

While AboitizPower uses several franchises and distributors to provide electricity to different cities and municipalities due to local regulations, its customer service is managed by two contact centers and 14 walk-in service centers. “Even though we have multiple brands under our banner, we want to create a cohesive experience across channels. We want all our customers to receive the same standard of service,” explains Melody Lim, head of customer experience at AboitizPower. To deliver premium service, AboitizPower sought to upgrade its outdated legacy data systems.

Fragmented systems, frustrated customers

When Lim took over the Customer Experience department in 2023, emails, calls, chats, and in-person tickets were handled separately, resulting in fragmented service and virtually no data collected. “If a customer who called with a concern wanted to follow up in-person or through chat, they would need to repeat the same scenario to a new agent each time. There was no clear or consistent record of each customer interaction,” she says.

Ticketing and reporting were also completely analog. Agents would manually mark each new ticket on paper and transfer it to a spreadsheet at the end of the day. “It just wasn’t practical. Agents prefer spending time on a call instead of keeping a tally. Often, things would fall through the cracks,” says Lim.

AboitizPower needed an omnichannel solution with robust reporting—a platform that would integrate multiple channels into one system, assign roles for different users, and most importantly, enable clear visibility across the entire customer communications network. “During the pitch, what stood out was how well the Zendesk team listened to our needs before coming up with solutions. Even after winning the bid, they spent more time understanding the nitty gritty details and particulars of our customer experience requirements,” Lim says.

Efficiency, powered by automation

Since deploying Zendesk in March 2024, AboitizPower has saved approximately 309 man-hours per month by automating tedious manual tasks. Tickets are now raised and tallied automatically, freeing customer service agents from toggling between screens or searching for missing tickets. Automation has also eliminated manual transfer of tickets since queries that need to be resolved by other departments are automatically updated and assigned to the right team.
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Even morning huddles for the contact center staff—which used to be done in person around a physical bulletin board—got an upgrade. “We used to print out the day’s numbers and take time pinning them to the board. Now, the data is updated on everyone’s dashboards and the morning huddles happen over the Zendesk workspace. It’s a huge time-saver,” says Lim.

Complete communications visibility

For walk-in customers, a queuing system at the service centers automatically raises and integrates tickets with Zendesk. This ensures that agents have accurate, up-to-date data on all customer queries across channels. “With everything integrated into Zendesk, there’s complete visibility. Whether customer calls, chats, or walks in, agents can quickly pull up the right ticket and access all the necessary information,” explains Lim.

The team also integrated Zendesk with a third-party voice-of-the-customer platform to automatically collect feedback on every resolved ticket—an integration that was completed in one day. “Previously, while we tracked customer satisfaction, the data was collected in isolation and lacked context. Now, when we receive customer ratings, it’s automatically linked to their tickets, allowing me to see the reason behind their experience—whether positive or negative—and take steps to address any issues,” says Lim.

A data-driven strategy for success

“When I started looking at customer data two years ago, most of it was anecdotal. I remember looking at a spreadsheet with multiple tabs where each row was a specific customer concern. It was a challenge to determine the right drivers to prioritize,” she recalls. This is no longer the case now that customer data and analytics are instantly accessible. “With Zendesk, we can look at customer experience more objectively and identify where we need to refine our processes and set up action plans based on the right insights.”

Next in the pipeline is quality assurance. “With Zendesk QA, I can measure the quality of service that we’re putting out there, compute the effort that customers have taken to interact with us, and identify the pain points in specific interactions,” says Lim. “This will help us ensure that the quality of service in the front lines meets our golden standard.”

Through the entire transformation process, AboitizPower has stayed true to its mission of powering underserved communities. “Outdated systems held us back from doing what we needed to do to help our communities and customers. Investing in digital technologies like Zendesk enables us to do our jobs better, and empower the evolution of our cities so that we can make our country better than it was yesterday,” concludes Lim.