British Gas Availability Engine

Client: British Gas

Each year 9M homeowners experience issues that need a quick fix – whether it’s a boiler that’s on the blink, a blocked drain, or a tripping fuse box. However, despite being a household name across the UK, British Gas’ share of the home repair market was under-delivering compared to local tradesmen who were seen as more trustworthy, reliable, and accessible.

British Gas’ ability to service households in times of distress is greatly dictated by the number of engineers they have available. For locations with poor engineer availability at a given moment, this can often lead to a poor customer experience, particularly if you are without hot water for potentially several days in the middle of winter. From a media perspective this has two outcomes: 1. Short Term Media Inefficiency 2. Longer Term Sales Decline To maximise media efficiency, and ultimately customer experience, we partnered with British Gas’s Engineering & Marketing teams to connect engineer availability to their Paid Search activity, in real time. The objective was to maximise investment in areas where availability was high, minimise investment where there was poor availability, and ensure coverage for all locations. Despite the technology only being live for 1 month, we saw an immediate increase in performance. The deployment of the Availability Engine has been so successful that British Gas will now be expanding the technology across 3 further business units which rely on engineer availability.