Salon Kaukolämpö
Customer service goes digital, one step at a time
Salon Kaukolämpö is responsible for the production and distribution of district heating in the Salo region. The company needed to modernise its customer service, and Sofokus was chosen as the partner to drive the renewal forward. Over a little more than two years, the cooperation has grown into a broad digital service offering that saves staff time, meets the notification obligations of critical infrastructure, and has at the same time strengthened the whole organisation’s digital expertise.
First milestone: online booking
The cooperation began by digitalising the booking of district-heating meter changes. Previously, meter changes were booked by phone, which ate into staff working time and was clumsy for customers. Sofokus built a booking system on the website through which customers can book and manage their own appointments. All consumer meter changes are now booked through the new system, and the time previously spent on calls has been freed up for more productive work.
The LämpöVahti customer portal for managing energy consumption
Salon Kaukolämpö’s next goal was its own customer portal, where customers can track their energy consumption, manage their contracts, and review their invoices and payment status.
Sofokus helped design and build the LämpöVahti portal, which replaced the old system and brought all the essential information together in one place, clearly presented. The project team included a consultant providing ongoing support, a UI designer, and a developer.
Technically, the portal was built reliability first. It was integrated with, among other things, billing systems, strong authentication, and a weather service that lets customers compare their consumption against outdoor temperatures. With the latest update, consumption data can also be viewed at hourly resolution directly from Salon Kaukolämpö’s own time-series database. In addition, property managers of housing companies can manage several properties with a single account, which is rare in comparable services.
Analytics were implemented by connecting the production database to BigQuery and from there to Looker Studio, enabling versatile reporting on service usage within the customer’s own interface. The portal was well received: during the first nine months, 30–40% of customers had already registered as users.
A cost-effective outage-notification system
As an operator of critical infrastructure, Salon Kaukolämpö is obliged to notify its customers of outages, so Sofokus built an alert system as an additional feature of the customer portal. The system sends outage notifications automatically by email and text message, and it can be used to create user groups based on, for example, postal code or property type. The system tracks message delivery and also allows external subscribers to join the notification list.
The investment pays for itself in under a year compared with the licensed software used previously.
Growing digital capability
Alongside the technical solutions, the cooperation has grown Salon Kaukolämpö’s own digital expertise. The organisation now manages a modern cloud environment itself and better understands the possibilities of digital services.
The whole runs on Google Cloud Platform and is developed using a multi-vendor model.
What we did
- Design and implementation of a digital booking system for meter changes
- Concepting, UI design and development of the LämpöVahti customer portal
- Integrations with several systems
- Building the analytics stack (BigQuery + Looker Studio)
- Design and implementation of the outage-notification system
- Ongoing consulting and maintenance services
Would you like to improve your digital customer service too? Get in touch!
