Christophe Thomas, Stakeholder Relations Manager @Engie Green
Christophe Thomas is Head of Stakeholder Relations at Engie Green, in charge of the Prospection and Development teams. We went to meet him at the company's Bordeaux offices to gather feedback from Christophe and his teams after the first months of using Goodwill software.
In this interview, he returns in particular to first business benefits related to the use of the tool and on Explain support, which allows large groups as well as the smallest structures to quickly appropriate the tool by the various profiles.
Tell us about Engie Green !
Engie Green is the French leader in solar farms and wind farms in France. Our job is to support the implementation of the energy transition, which is a national policy. And our vision is that this national policy will only find an operational application through the territories.
What are the benefits of Goodwill for your teams?
Before the Explain software, our prospecting and development managers sought to find information via classic search engines like Google, but also via print media. The difficulty they encountered was that the information did not come to them in a regular, reliable and exhaustive manner.
Engie Green chose Explain for these reasons.
First, access to information is much broader than what could be done via search engines, because for a large number of media, access is chargeable. With Explain, this cost is integrated into the subscription.
Secondly, the mass of relevant information that is available is much greater, in particular thanks to the deliberations of local authorities, which allow prospecting managers to identify opportunities, but also development managers to monitor the climate or the atmosphere of their project in a territory.
What are the first benefits observed after these first months of use?
The expected result is already there.
We identified communities that wanted to revise their urban planning documents using alerts set up on the geographic areas that interest us. Some had deliberated on the fact that they were going to launch a call for expressions of interest.
This information is strategic for our business, and the speed with which it is fed back to us in the software allows us to immediately take commercial action, which is to contact local authorities to see how we can support them. And the sooner we get this information, the more likely we are to succeed in our commercial operation.
How was the solution adopted by Engie Green teams?
One of the challenges for Engie Green was to integrate an additional IT solution. We are a big group, we have a lot of tools. To allow the teams to take good control of the software, we worked hand in hand with the Explain teams. This means that today, we have collaborators who have very different uses of the tool, but all of them use it.
