“Built for faster onboarding”: Thijs van der Wal on Eneve's customer lifecycle platform

Behind the Screens at Eneve 

Eneve's customer lifecycle platform, previously GridHub, sits at the point where product configuration, customer onboarding and day-to-day energy customer experience come together. Product Manager Thijs van der Wal explains how the product earned its place at the centre of the energy supplier's day, and where it's going from here.

The story of Eneve's customer lifecycle platform: Built around onboarding quality

Three years ago, the team set out to solve one of the most painful problems in energy supply: customer onboarding. Suppliers were losing prospective customers in error-prone signup flows, and the orders that did make it through often arrived in downstream systems incomplete or incorrect.

The first version was built around fixing that. Suppliers could define customer-facing products, and combine propositions from the underlying ERP, then apply validation rules so that the right product reached the right customer and only clean orders flowed downstream. A self-service onboarding flow, embedded directly into the supplier's own website, could convert a prospective customer in minutes rather than days. Onboarding quality was the first promise; and it remains the foundation of everything else.

But customers asked for more. They wanted the platform to handle reseller and partner compensation, replacing spreadsheet reconciliation with structured, automated flows. They wanted retention logic that could trigger renewal offers based on contract end dates and customer segments. They wanted insight into how end customers used energy, so they could help those customers control costs and stay loyal in the process.

"It's a bit of a paradox," Thijs notes. "We help our customers' customers spend less with them. But customers with a low energy bill are happy customers... and happy customers stay."

Each new capability didn't just expand the product. It deepened its position in the supplier's operations. By the time several years had passed, GridHub wasn't sitting alongside other tools; it was the place where the operational day happened. Customer data, contract data, partner data, communications... All of it flowed through one place.

That centrality is what makes the next chapter possible.

To share a concrete example; Mega Energy, one of the fastest-growing suppliers in the Netherlands, runs the platform as their operational core. When Mega decided to tackle retention more aggressively, the natural step was to plug a retention intelligence partner (Churned) directly into Eneve. The results came in clean: in a controlled A/B test, the AI-driven group churned at 3.47% versus 4.48% for the control, a 5% reduction. Two further campaign types now have enough data to deploy the same model-based approach.

That's the story in miniature. The platform's centrality is what allows third-party intelligence to slot in cleanly. The validation rules, the partner compensation flows, the renewal logic, the onboarding integration. None of these are siloed features. They share a single customer view. And that shared view is the reason why a product that began as onboarding software has become something better described as a customer lifecycle platform. The dependable place where everything in a supplier's customer relationship connects.

Part of the Eneve family

That centrality matters not just to the suppliers who use it, but to Eneve itself. Most of Eneve's solutions sit deeper in the energy value chain. In trading floors, in balancing operations, in back-office contract management.

The customer lifecycle platform is where the supplier's own customers actually see the brand. White-labelled, embedded in the supplier's website, present in the mobile app, it carries the supplier's identity into thousands of households. Without that surface, the rest of the portfolio would be invisible to end customers.

With it, the whole Eneve family has a way of meeting the consumers. Belonging to the family makes the platform more useful to its customers, and the platform makes the family more useful to the market.

Investing in the foundations for scale

If the first three years of the platform were about breadth, the current phase is about depth.

"Since I stepped into this role, we're shifting from functionality to quality," Thijs says. The team has brought support organisations across the wider Eneve product family into one cohesive operational backbone, and is investing in the kind of depth that doesn't always show up in release notes; but matters enormously when a product moves from serving a national customer base to serving a European one.

"A dependable product is what makes everything else possible," is how he frames it.

Looking forward, Thijs wants the platform's mobile experience to do more than inform. Dynamic pricing notifications, home screen widgets, faster update cycles. The aim is for the app to actually help end customers change behaviour, not just observe it. Combined with the foundations work already underway, that's the shape of what comes next: a customer lifecycle platform that doesn't just store and orchestrate the customer relationship, but actively shapes it for the better.

Beyond the roadmap

Behind the roadmap is a product manager whose path to Eneve was anything but linear. Thijs joined in August 2025 after twenty years across consumer products, hardware, and digital experience. After scaling user experiences at top B2C brands like Liberty Global and TomTom; he joined Eneve to bring that passion to the next level. 

"I like to think about user experiences. This is the energy product that touches the end user the most; not just consumers and businesses who buy energy, but also partners of the energy companies and the staff working there."

His multi-market UX background turns out to be unusually relevant. Balancing standardisation with local needs is exactly what the next phase of the roadmap demands. But it also shapes how he talks about the work itself.

Asked how he'd describe the platform as a person, he doesn't hesitate. "I think it's quite colourful and expressive. The core is the same for everybody, but customers use it differently, so it shows a different face to different people."

What does an ideal day look like for Thijs? Cycling to the office in mild weather, joining a customer demo with Alexander from sales, ending the day with colleagues on the terrace nearby. The connecting thread, he says, is people: colleagues, customers, prospects.

"I want to delight our customers, and challenge our team. I want to make something that we can all be proud of."

Not a flashy mission statement; but for a product designed to help energy suppliers go faster, lighter, and further than the system they came from, it's the right one.

Behind the Screens at Eneve spotlights the people and decisions shaping Eneve's software suite. Want to learn more about our solutions? Get in touch.