Essent supplies electricity and gas to more than two million customers and helps them understand their energy use. The Energy Insights team makes that possible by building these insights into the online portal, the Essent app, and the customer service dashboard. Flocker Tom joined the team in July as a full-stack engineer.
Together with Essent's UX researchers, the team asked customers what they needed most. Two needs stood out: understanding what their appliances use, and learning how to save money. Both pointed to the same gap. Customers could already see a clear graph of their monthly gas usage, but a graph only shows what happened. When their usage goes up, customers also want to know why. To help answer that, Tom and his team built a weather information feature. It retrieves weather data for the customer's postcode, compares each month with the average of the past five years, and shows the difference next to the gas usage, so a customer can see at a glance that a month was, for example, two degrees colder than normal.
Tom works mainly on the frontend, but building it meant working with the whole stack: Angular for the web applications, React Native for the mobile app, and Node.js serverless functions on AWS Lambda. All bound by the same API contract, making the feature appear in both channels at once.
Now, instead of a number on a graph, customers get an explanation: where their gas goes and why. That insight gives them the tools to change their habits where it matters most. Helping people save energy, being a part of building the whole feature and helping the Netherlands become more sustainable in the process, is what makes this assignment stand out for Tom.
