Can "removing the faff" help SMEs survive the cost crisis?
With uncapped energy costs up more than 150%, the backbone of the UK economy needs all the help it can get
Price comparison firms. In our personal lives we use them, we love them - even though there's a dearth of deals around at the moment.
If the situation is bad for private citizens, it's worse for business owners. Not only do they have to deal with rising rates, they also don't benefit from the energy price cap, meaning they could be paying anywhere between three and four times as much for power as you do at home.
Rates for home use have ‘only' risen about 54% so far this year, thanks to the cap, but out-of-contract business rates have spiked as much as 180% for gas, and 130% for electricity.
For small firms - which represent nearly two-thirds of UK employers and more than 90% of the country's private businesses - the soaring costs could be a death knell.
"You've got about six million'ish small businesses in the UK...ranging from upholsterers in Horsham through to coffee shops in Shoreditch," says James Lomas, Group CTO at Bionic. "They're not necessarily tech entrepreneurs and start-ups: it's people who've started their hairdressing business, started their therapy business... From customer research, we know what they really want to be doing is making life brilliant for their customers. They want to be creating new propositions, new experiences, making their customers happy; but what they tend to spend a lot of their time doing is all the faff: sorting out vehicles, insurance, telephony, energy, water, etc...
"The backbone of the UK economy is largely underserved, grafting away trying to make their hairdressers, their coffee shop, their upholsterers be as brilliant as they can. And they're kind of dragged down - not just by Brexit, not just by COVID, not just by the cost-of-living crisis, but all this faff that gets in their way."
Is it even possible for one supplier to remove all that hassle?
Bionic claims to be able to remove the faff. The company operates in a similar way to consumer price comparison sites like Compare the Market - where Lomas was CTO until last year - or uSwitch, but specifically for the SME community.
Lomas left the consumer market for the SME space because he saw it as something with "a societal purpose" that could "make the world, at least in our remit, a better place."
It sounds good - Bionic promises "a fusion of human support and smart technology to simplify the hassle of business ownership" - but does it really work? There are lots of moving parts in business; can one company really bring it all together?
The user journey, says Lomas, is "best-in-class." We're all familiar with going to two or three different comparison websites and entering the same details over and over again; Bionic cuts down on that process by pre-populating fields using industry data, and uses MPANS to judge energy consumption. Once the basic information has been filled out, the human takes over:
"As part of the transition from digital to human, the agent will pick up the journey, share their screen, and then click through step-by-step to guide the customer through the journey. They'll provide the customer with the prices and once they've seen the prices - assuming they want to purchase then - will then go through the process of liaising with the existing supplier to terminate, the new supplier to do the switch, and effectively take [the customer] end-to-end to the point where they've changed their provider."
Lomas readily admits this hybrid approach has been around for a few years. The next step is to go "seamlessly omni-channel", realising that different people benefit most from different approaches at different points in time.
"You might want to start off your journey on the web; you might want to flip and start a web chat with someone; you might then want to have a voice call with someone, because you're just a bit stuck and you need hand-holding through it; you might want to go away and think about it and once you've thought about it, just digitally press the Buy Now button... [It's] essentially more inclusive and convenient for customers, because it's not always timely and convenient to take a phone call."
The platform continues to evolve, and Lomas is already thinking about the next steps after omnichannel: an approach tentatively known as the Reusable Product Platform, which Bionic is building on AWS. The platform will make it possible to optimise existing products and launch new ones at lightning speed.
"The platform uses an event-driven architecture, and with an event-driven architecture, which means we can start doing some really cool and interesting things...which ultimately means getting smart with personalisation. We can look at things like ‘people like you' and 'next best action' models. So, it's effectively taking what is a somewhat linear digital experience today and it's making a multi-product experience."
Those products include telco, insurance and finance services, all of which Bionic handles today and are as important to SMEs as energy supplies. The vision is to bring them all together into a single platform to help the UK's millions of SMEs.
"The prosperity of the UK is basically hinging on the success of those businesses who are struggling, who have to deal with the faff instead of keeping their customers happy... I think that's quite an inspiring cause."