How QA & Testing helped Mercury confidently migrate 300,000 customers.
SECTOR / INDUSTRY
CAPABILITIES FEATURED
CASE STUDY PDF
OVERVIEW
With the acquisition of Trustpower’s retail business by Mercury in May 2022, a significant endeavour was initiated to unite all customers under a single brand and transition them to a unified enterprise software system for customer billing and management. The Retail Integration Program was established with a strong focus on maintaining the highest standards of quality control. With quality control an essential aspect of the Retail Integration Program, quality assurance specialists were engaged to support the software test planning and test delivery to enable Mercury to migrate hundreds of thousands of customers in batches to the single system with full confidence.
KEY OUTCOMES
ABOUT THE CLIENT
Mercury NZ Limited is a New Zealand electricity generation and multi-product utility retailer of electricity, gas, broadband and mobile telephone services and takes pride in generating electricity from 100% renewable sources: hydro, geothermal and wind. After acquiring Trustpower’s retail business, the best of both brands was brought together under Mercury by June 2023.
THE CHALLENGE
The Retail Integration Program merges the Mercury and Trustpower businesses into a single operating entity supporting a multiproduct bundling strategy, from a single unified operating platform. Once Mercury had completed the uplift of that system – known as GTV – it sets about preparing for the migration of up to 300,000 customers and their associated data.
“Testing is crucial to the success of this process,” points out Toni Warren, Mercury Program Test Manager. “The accuracy of information underpins what must be a consistent and uninterrupted delivery of service for all customers, with the goal that the acquisition should have no impact on them, no inconvenience, whether they are coming from Trustpower into Mercury, or if they are a long-time Mercury customer,” she explains.
With deliverables spanning everything from a new consolidated pricing catalogue and price mapping to support customer migration to the target system, the creation and delivery of new bills to onboarded customers, content changes on the Mercury IVR and new industry reconciliation reporting, through to new front end assets including websites, and iOS and Android apps, considerable development effort was required. This generated a similarly considerable demand for test resources for quality control.
While technical, the process is more than that. “It’s a bit of a question of faith,” adds colleague and Test Manager Robyn Greer. “Customers need to know that despite the changes in the background, they can have faith in Mercury, with a positive and unimpeded customer experience.”
OUR SOLUTION
Warren stressed the importance of selecting quality assurance specialists who have experience in testing large scale changes, including migrations. This was a critical factor in Mercury’s decision-making process and was carefully considered in order to ensure the success of the project. “The quality of the people and service that Assurity can provide meant a ready asset for augmenting our test capability during a phase of testing which was quite well outside of the demands of Business as Usual,” she explains. “This was a large and complex piece of work with multiple moving parts; with a decentralised test structure and approach, we managed to form an end-to-end testing regime where Assurity helped provide essential resources for building a highly skilled team.”
Assurity played a key role in the development of the plan for testing the data migration strategy. A challenging aspect of the project which was also central to the success of moving from one system to another with minimal impact on customer experience.
In addition to technical complexities, the project was challenging with a core capability uplift to support the rebranding and subsequent customer migration. Mercury conducted a dry run that surfaced some potential challenges which all parties were able to address before the event. “Customer migration is complex and with it comes an evolving understanding of what it is we are delivering. Testing helps uncover the realities we will face as we move into a batched process of moving customers into target system as their billing dates come due,” notes Greer.
RESULTS
Warren says that while the requirements Mercury had for Assurity Consulting were quite simple – test capabilities and capable testers – the project itself is anything but. “With Assurity, you get what you ask for with no nonsense. They became part of our team and part of the successful delivery of a comprehensive test program which helped uncover the requirements of the migration process.”
For her part, Greer says testing has delivered palpable confidence across Mercury as it takes on the task of migration. “There’s a happy vibe around the building. People are excited and want to get on with it.”
Nick Pudney, Head of Integration at Mercury, concludes, “Quality assurance is one of the cornerstones of our Integration Program’s success. In the face of a complex customer migration project, our Test team and Assurity have played a pivotal role in our journey towards a unified Mercury and helping us deliver outstanding customer service.”
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