Enercare Case Study
“During our research process, Zuora emerged as a top leader in the field. They collaborated with companies we knew and trusted, including PwC, and we leveraged these connections to learn more about Zuora’s capabilities and reputation.”
— Danny Gallo, Senior Vice President of Finance at Enercare
Enercare is a leading provider of heating, cooling, electrical, plumbing, and water heating and purification solutions for Canadian homeowners and commercial businesses. The company offers affordable purchasing options, with support available 365 days a year.
After its legacy billing program was discontinued, Enercare faced a significant challenge: developing an in-house subscription billing system and migrating over 1 million customers to its new platform — all while maintaining a seamless customer experience.
Enercare used Zuora’s Order-to-Cash platform to develop an integrated billing and revenue management system, enabling direct billing for over 1 million customers.
Zuora not only filled this gap by enabling Enercare to directly bill its large customer base but provided the company with a richer platform to manage customer relationships and support growth beyond billing, improving operations across the entire quote-to-revenue process.
“Many large organizations have implemented Zuora, showcasing its ability to accommodate diverse services, business models, and industries. Zuora effectively addressed our requirements during our discussions and demos. What particularly impressed us was the expertise of the sales team and the solution architects that we worked with — they demonstrated the capability to solve virtually every challenge we presented.”
For over 65 years, Enercare has been the leading residential home services provider in Ontario, Canada, serving more than 1 million homeowners and businesses. Committed to supporting Canada’s energy transition, Enercare provides affordable and sustainable solutions that make homes and buildings more efficient and less carbon intensive – helping customers reduce their carbon footprint.
Historically, 90% of Enercare customer billing was managed through a local utility provider, which handled all aspects of customer billing, including delivering bills, managing payments, and providing a digital customer portal. However, in 2022, this billing arrangement was scheduled to end, which presented Enercare with a new and complex challenge.
Searching for the right solution
When Enercare began exploring options to manage direct billing, the team found that many billing solutions require complex integrations and required long lead times for a project of this scale, according to Danny Gallo, the company’s senior vice president of finance.
“We discovered that many billing products native to ERP solutions, while highly customizable, require substantial time, investment, and resources,” he said. “Furthermore, these solutions often depend on integrations with external providers — such as payments, customer portals, revenue management, and various auxiliary services like collections — to fulfill all our requirements.”
Enercare realized that the transition from third-party to direct billing was more than just a change in billing processes. Gallo viewed it as an opportunity to strengthen customer relationships and bring the brand to the forefront — but this also made the search even more challenging.
Recognizing the complexity of the change, Enercare partnered with Zuora to create an internal billing and revenue platform to migrate more than 1 million customers to the new system quickly.
What Enercare needed
Enercare’s essential requirements included:
- A seamless customer experience: It was important for the solution to enable a seamless transition process for customers with simple interfaces and access to information.
- Full suite of services: The solution should have minimal reliance on external integrations and be easy to build.
- Best-in-class security: Enercare needed a solution that they were confident would protect all sensitive information and maximize both company and consumer confidence.
- End-to-end support: Enercare wanted a partner that was flexible throughout the order-to-cash process.
- Flexible pricing model: The solution needed to meet the unique billing and payment requirements of both its B2C and B2B customer bases.
Enercare quickly realized that Zuora met all its requirements at scale. “During our research process, Zuora emerged as a top leader in the field,” Gallo said. “They collaborated with companies we knew and trusted, including PwC, and we leveraged these connections to learn more about Zuora’s capabilities and reputation.”
Soon after making its decision, Enercare assembled a team of experts to work on the partnership, obtaining buy-in from leaders and alignment across management teams. Zuora worked closely with PwC, a professional services firm including audit assurance, tax, deals and consulting services, to manage and oversee the project.
“Our experience on previous projects with Enercare gave us insight into team dynamics and what role we need to play to support them,” said Talia Dabby, a partner at PwC Canada.
Zuora optimized the project delivery in several ways:
- Easy to get started: Zuora offered a full suite of services with no code and minimal integrations required.
- End-to-end solution design: Zuora supported the creation of enterprise architecture, quote-to-cash business process maps, and customer journey maps, and documented the design details for future use.
- Extensive program management: Zuora provided project management, reporting, and risk management for the Billing solution as part of the wider transformation program.
- Effective team collaboration: Zuora participated in governance structures to ensure timely communication and decision-making across teams.
The results
Zuora Billing enabled Enercare to smoothly migrate its million-plus customers, completing the process in half the time estimated by other vendors. This transformation extended beyond billing: Enercare gained direct control over customer accounts and requests, while customers benefited from self-service features via the company’s online portal. As a result, Enercare was able to establish a closer connection with customers to communicate relevant offers and updates regarding their accounts while gaining additional insight to customer needs to unlock growth potential within their valued customer base.
Also, Enercare’s transition away from its previous billing vendor gave it the opportunity to explore new product and pricing models. Zuora’s ability to seamlessly support these new pricing and packaging structures is critical in driving Enercare’s future growth. Enercare is already looking toward the future and how it can leverage the Zuora Platform to drive growth and provide a better customer experience.
