How 1KOMMA5° scaled customer engagement with telli's Voice AI

About 1KOMMA5°

1KOMMA5° is one of Europe's leading home energy companies. Hundreds of thousands of solar systems, batteries and heat pumps are installed and connected to Europe's largest virtual power plant. The company wants to replace fossil fuels with a new energy system, and its Heartbeat AI platform is the starting point. Heartbeat AI optimizes when and how each home uses energy, so customers get cheap, clean energy for heating, cooling and driving.

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Challenge

Reaching every interested customer at the right moment

Choosing solar panels, a battery or a heat pump is a considered decision. People have detailed questions long before they are ready to speak to a specialist, and those questions lose their urgency quickly when nobody is available to answer them.

Across several markets, there were interested customers that the team was not reaching in time.

Jan Hemmersmeier, Customer Journey at 1KOMMA5°, set out to close that gap together with Torben Diekmann and Oliver Heider, with a clear goal: get in touch with more customers at the right time.

Solution

AI voice agents that answer the first questions and route to the right expert

With telli, 1KOMMA5° now gets back to interested customers while their question is still fresh, answers what they want to know about the company's energy products, and books qualified appointments in Germany, Sweden and Australia.

The AI agents take on the opening of the conversation, where speed matters most:

• Fast follow-up: the agent gets in touch with people who have already shown interest.
• First questions answered: the agent covers the opening questions on 1KOMMA5°'s energy products.
• Routing to the right person: once the agent understands what someone needs, it decides which human expert should take over.
• Qualified appointments: conversations that are ready for a next step end with a booked appointment.

“The AI agent is really good at answering the first questions from the customer, and then deciding which human expert to route to.”

Setting the agents up was a matter of weeks. The area where 1KOMMA5° wanted support at the start was prompting, and telli supplied templates, specific feedback on what to improve, and lessons from other companies working on similar problems.

Results

Live in four weeks, and reaching 40% of previously unreached customers

1KOMMA5° went live with customers in a matter of four weeks, and the agents now reach people the team was not getting to before.

Australia and Sweden followed, and the step from deciding to launch to having agents live took about two weeks.

“We can get from ‘we want this in the country’ to ‘this is live in two weeks.’”

The results:

• 40% of previously unreached customers now reached
• 4 weeks from kickoff to live with customers
• 2 weeks to launch telli in an additional country

Reaching more people also means more conversations to keep track of, far more than any one person can follow. Jan uses Charlie, telli's assistant for building agents and reviewing calls, to keep track of what happens across all of them.

Buy-in from the teams mattered just as much as the numbers. telli takes over the repetitive part of the work, which leaves 1KOMMA5°'s specialists more time for the conversations where their expertise counts.

Next, 1KOMMA5° plans to extend the same approach into its after-sales process, and to keep raising customer satisfaction.