Essent.be

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Essent.be supplies electricity and natural gas to 500,000 consumers and businesses in Belgium, as part of the sustainable group innogy. They came to us with a focused question: what should social media actually do for a utility — and how do we run it well? We defined the strategy, then coached the internal team to run it on their own.

The engagement, at a glance:

• Strategy — defining the value, positioning and content approach of social media for the business and its customers
• Audit & design — assessing the as-is set-up and designing the way to run the targeted activities
• Transfer — coaching and training the stakeholders to run it autonomously

The challenge: make social media earn its place for a utility

A utility doesn't do social media for its own sake. The brief was to make it useful and sustainable:

• Define the value of social media for Essent.be's organisation and its customers
• Define the social media strategy and the content strategy that follows from it
• Coach the internal stakeholders to build the targeted activities and organisation themselves

The work spanned three dimensions of social media at once — communication, customer care and the human-resources side of running it — all tied back to Essent's key business challenges.

Strategy: positioning social media around real business value

We defined Essent Belgium's social media positioning and activities across communication, care and the team needed to run them — anchored in the business challenges the channel had to serve, not in vanity metrics. The content strategy followed from that positioning: what to say, to whom, and to what end.

Audit & design: from as-is to a workable set-up

Strategy only sticks if the organisation can actually run it. So we audited the as-is — working methods, skills, processes and partnerships — and defined the best set-up to run the targeted activities. From those strategy and organisation conclusions, we designed a transformative approach to move Essent from where it was to the positioning and activities it was aiming for.

Transfer: coaching the team to run it themselves

We supported Essent in deploying that approach, coaching and training the main stakeholders to reach and run the designed activities. The point wasn't to run social media for them — it was to leave them able to run it, sized to its real value for the business and its customers.

Why it worked: autonomy, not dependency

By defining the strategy and the organisation together, then coaching the stakeholders through deployment, we made sure the capability stayed inside Essent. The result: Essent.be manages its social media activities autonomously, at a scale that matches their value for the business and their customers' needs. The gains stay when we step back.