ZENNER Middle East: International Billing Platform

The objective?

Back in 2018, ZENNER Middle East required a secure and scalable billing platform to achieve their aims of becoming an established metering and billing provider for cooling across the Middle East. Whilst meeting local requirements for a high quality and effective service.

How Sycous helped?

Sycous provided our Mabdeck billing platform as a locally hosted SaaS solution. Designed for cooling networks, Mabdeck could be used to allow ZENNER Middle East to manage all of their installed cooling meters, PAYG and AMR equipment whilst allowing their in-house team to automate as many billing administration tasks as possible.

Alongside this, Sycous ensured Mabdeck could provide a premium experience to meet local expectation through a white labelling of web resources, full on-boarding and priority support for the local ZENNER Middle East Team, whilst taking onboard any Mabdeck feature suggestions into our road map.

How we did it?

Through a successful tender process, our Sycous Product Ownership Team worked closely with the ZENNER Middle East Team to develop an extensive project plan, covering, required customisations and key milestones.

To service the UAE market, Mabdeck required specific customisation to be fit for purpose. Local charging structures such as capacity charges that are not required, or allowed in other markets were needed to meet local expectation. Similar to the UK, the UAE and especially Dubai have experienced numerous regulatory changes in the housing market affecting metering and billing companies. This meant Mabdeck had to facilitate different methods of charging but also have the ability to share data and support payment methods from Super Apps, like Careem. As Mabdeck was being utilised for cooling networks, we also adopted a variety of non-standard metering systems to enable a standardised process of receiving data.

For ZENNER Middle East customers, localisation was key to ensure they could manage their utility account in a way that suited them. By developing ZENNER branded consumer resources in both English and Arabic, all residents could manage their account through multi-lingual bills and a multi-lingual consumer portal. During 2023, we also white-labelled a version of our mysycous.com consumer support website for ZENNER, where users can access their online account portal, submit change and tenancy requests and access help and support for managing their account.

To enable a smooth set-up, Sycous provided in-depth Mabdeck training for the ZENNER Middle East Team. Not only was training delivered through a series of online meetings but also on-site in Dubai, to be able to support their team at key times or to map out new requirements for Mabdeck together.

Sycous continue to support the ZENNER Middle East In-house Team on their business as usual requirements, through regular reviews to identify any new requirements they may have for Mabdeck over time to build into our roadmap.

The result?

Following the successful implementation of Mabdeck, ZENNER Middle East can now depend on a scalable and reliable billing system to complete their business functions, resulting a 30% YOY growth and exceptional levels of customer satisfaction.

For customers, through Sycous & ZENNER’s focus on improving online solutions they can now access their bills and online accounts in a simple and easy to understand way, including support for Super Apps like Careem to make payments and logging into their accounts easily.

The future

ZENNER continue to focus their efforts on improving their customer experience. Next steps will include the roll out of a new mobile App for customers to manage their account and an increase in the amount of available social sign on options. Whilst also working to integrate their business processes to automate customer account set up, removing additional administration for their team.

Business wide, ZENNER Middle East are also looking to implement our Sycous Orbit solution for remote disconnection, to enable prepayment for some customers at a lower cost and expand into gas and water metering in the region.