Brimscombe Energy / BG-Demo – Demo
Callcompleted
Brimscombe Energy · 30 Sep 2024 12:00
First demo for Brimscombe Energy on its own extract in Snowflake. Siân wants traceable answers for regulator-bound complaints. Nikhil tests load timing, access and schema changes. The £145k deal figure is all-in, not annual.
What was said
What this says
As at Fri 9 Oct 2026First demo for Brimscombe Energy on its own extract in Snowflake. Siân wants traceable answers for regulator-bound complaints. Nikhil tests load timing, access and schema changes. The £145k deal figure is all-in, not annual.
What happened: Hannah Lowe ran live questions across billing, complaints and contract data on a test schema, then showed call search and the dashboards builder. Tom Ashdown quoted the deal on Enterprise.
Customer view: Siân Pritchard cares that every statement links back to a source record, because complaints run against a regulator clock. Nikhil Rao wants roles granted by a written list, a month of load history checked against the 07:00 refresh, and an answer on where model calls send text.
Commercial: Tom said the deal figure is £145k, implementation included and not the annual subscription. Siân wants Graham in the room and will not take it forward without him.
Watch: Value is unproven, as Siân will not claim a saving until it is timed. The data-flow answer is still owed from Hannah's security lead, and the security review sets the pace. The call does not show the outcome of the decision date.
Themes
As at Fri 9 Oct 2026Theme
Enterprise demo, single customer view
Importance
neutral
Sentiment
mixed
Voice
champion
Who was there
BG-Demo
CRMmade from
Them
CRMmade from
Follow-up
Next steps
As at Fri 9 Oct 2026- Hannah Lowe to send the written privilege list, a connector order and the data-flow answer from the security lead.
- Tom Ashdown to send a proposal that separates implementation from the annual subscription, plus a follow-up invite including Graham.
- Nikhil Rao to send the security questionnaire template and Siân Pritchard the test questions.
Risks
As at Fri 9 Oct 2026- Siân will not claim a time saving until it is measured, so the value case is not yet built.
- The security review and the unanswered model-call data flow question could slow the decision.
- Nikhil doubts the 07:00 nightly refresh until he has checked it against a month of his own load history.
Opportunities
As at Fri 9 Oct 2026- An Enterprise deal on the table, with SSO and SCIM and up to 20 connectors matching the scale Siân described.
- Test questions scored against known answers could give Siân the evidence she wants for Graham.
Transcript
Tom AshdownHello, hello. Can you hear me alright? I've got a little icon saying someone's muted but I can't tell who.
Siân PritchardYes, loud and clear here, Tom. That's probably Nikhil, he joins everything muted until he's got something to say.
Nikhil RaoHere. Audio's fine.- Tom AshdownBrilliant. How's your week been so far? Just the Monday, I know, but you never know what's already gone sideways by dinner time.
- Siân PritchardBusy, but good busy. The complaints team asked the brain about a whole batch of cases this morning, just to see how far back the call history goes for one customer. It's the kind of thing they'd normally spend an afternoon on.
- Tom AshdownAh, that's lovely to hear. Well, I say the brain, that's the test setup you've got so far, isn't it. Hannah's going to walk us through it properly today. Hannah, do you want to say hello?
Hannah LoweHello, both. Thanks for making the time. Before I share anything, can I ask what you most need to know by the end of this call? I'd rather spend the forty-odd minutes on what matters to you than march through every screen.- Siân PritchardFair question. For me it's one customer, one view. Our key-account managers, the collections team and the complaints team all look at the same business customer, and at the moment they each see a different slice. Sites in one place, contracts in another, calls somewhere else, bills somewhere else again.
- Siân PritchardAnd with complaints there's a clock. The regulator's rules mean we have to answer within a set time, and the answer has to be right. So what I want to see is whether somebody can ask a plain question and get an answer I'd be happy to put my name to.
- Hannah LoweRight, that's clear. And Nikhil?
- Nikhil RaoWhere it runs. Which role has access to what. And what happens when a source changes its schema, because that's what breaks things at seven in the morning.
- Hannah LoweGood. Those are three separate things and I'll try to hit all of them. The short answer on where it runs is: inside your Snowflake account, not ours. The longer answer is, I'll show you where that sits when we get to the architecture slide at the end.
- Nikhil RaoMm. I'll hold you to the longer answer.
- Hannah LowePlease do. Okay, let me share my screen. Can you see it? You should be looking at a plain search box and a list of sources down the left.
- Siân PritchardYes, we can see it.
- Hannah LoweSo, to be precise about what you're looking at: this isn't a mock-up. Nikhil set up a test schema in your Snowflake account and loaded an extract of your own records into it. A slice of business customers, their sites, contracts, the call notes and the billing history. Nothing here is made-up data.
- Nikhil RaoRead-only extract. Masked the contact fields before it went in.
- Hannah LoweWhich is exactly right, and you'll see the masked fields show up as masked. I'm going to start with the question Siân said her complaints team asked this morning. Let me type it the way a person would. Which of our business customers with more than one site have an open complaint and an overdue bill?
- Hannah LoweGive it a moment. It's pulling from the billing extract, the complaints records and the site list together.
- Siân PritchardMm, there we go.
- Hannah LoweSo it's returned a short list. Each row is a business customer, and if I open this one, you get the sites down the left, the contract dates in the middle, and on the right the timeline: calls, emails, bills, and the complaint itself.
- Siân PritchardCan you click into the complaint? What does the record say about when it was received?
- Hannah LoweYes. Received date, the handler, and here's the part I think matters to you: every statement it gives is linked back to the source record. So if I click on this sentence, it takes me to the case note it came from. It doesn't ask you to trust it, it shows you where it read it.
- Siân PritchardThat's the bit I care about. If I can't trace it, I can't use it in a response to the regulator.
- Hannah LoweUnderstood, and I'd say the same in your position. One caution, though: the brain can only cite what's in the sources. If a case note was never written up, it won't know about it. It reflects your records, good or otherwise.
- Siân PritchardWhich is fair. Honestly it's also half the value, because we'll find out quickly where our own notes are thin.
- Tom AshdownSorry to jump in, Siân. That's quite a common thing we hear, that the first benefit is people seeing the gaps in their own data. No drama, it's just useful to know.
- Siân PritchardMm. Let's measure it before we claim it, though. I don't want to go to our leadership and say it'll save a certain amount of time when we haven't timed anything.
- Tom AshdownCompletely agree. We'd rather you ran it for a bit and told us what it's worth than have me promise it.
- Hannah LoweRight, let me move to collections, since you said that team sees something different. Nikhil, did the billing extract include the payment promises?
- Nikhil RaoPromise-to-pay dates, yes. Not the free-text notes from the agent screen. That source has a field I wasn't sure about.
- Hannah LoweThat's fine, I'll ask about the ones we have. Which customers have broken a promise to pay in the last couple of months and also have a renewal coming up?
- Hannah LoweAnd while that's running, I'll say the question uses two sources that don't normally talk to each other. Billing doesn't know about the contract end date, the contract system doesn't know about the promise. The brain joins them by customer and by site.
- Siân PritchardWhich is what the key-account managers are doing by hand, in a spreadsheet, before every quarterly review.
- Hannah LoweOkay, results are back. Four rows, each flagged, and you can see why it matched. Here, the promise date and the amount, and the contract end sits next to it.
- Siân PritchardCan I ask something? Is that the same view the complaints team would get? Or do they see different data from collections?
- Hannah LoweGood question, and it ties into Nikhil's access point. Same brain, but what each person can see is controlled by roles in your Snowflake account. So you could give collections the billing and contract views and keep complaint narrative restricted to the complaints team. It's your role design, not ours.
- Nikhil RaoWhich role has access, in the sense of: does BG-Demo hold its own credentials into the account?
- Hannah LoweTo be precise, the application runs under roles you create and grant. We don't set our own permissions from our side. If a role isn't granted a table, the brain doesn't see it. I'll put that in writing, with the list of privileges it needs, so your team can review it against your standards.
- Nikhil RaoGood. I won't grant anything by email. Written list, then a ticket on our side, then I'll do it.
- Hannah LoweThat's exactly how I'd want it done.
- Tom AshdownAnd that's a good point for the security review, which Hannah handles for every Enterprise customer. I'll come back to timing on that.
- Siân PritchardBefore we leave the demo part. Can you show me a call? We record a lot of conversations with business customers, and that's the bit I think people underestimate.
- Hannah LoweYes. Let me search by that customer's name and open the most recent call. Right, here's the transcript, here's an automatic summary, and here are the commitments it picked out.
- Hannah LoweAnd if I ask, what did we promise this customer on the last call about their meter readings? It answers, and then points at the exact moment in the transcript.
- Siân PritchardOoh. That one would've saved a complaint last year. We had a customer insisting we'd agreed something on a call and nobody could find it.
- Tom AshdownThat's the sort of story I'd love to hear more of, honestly. Not for the sales pitch, I just find it useful to understand how people actually use it.
- Hannah LoweLet me show you one more, then we'll go to the architecture. This is the dashboards builder. You could build, say, a view of open complaints by age against the regulator's deadline, and put it in front of the team lead each morning.
- Siân PritchardDoes the dashboard update itself?
- Hannah LoweIt refreshes after the nightly load. The load finishes by seven in the morning your time on business days. That's the standard commitment, for every tier.
- Nikhil RaoSeven. I'd want to see that against my load history for a month before I believe it. Some of our sources take a long time on a Monday.
- Hannah LoweThat's reasonable, and I'd rather you tested it. The short answer is seven, the longer answer is that it depends on your sources finishing on your side first. If one of yours runs late, ours has to wait. We'd go through the order of loads together at kickoff.
- Nikhil RaoFine. And the schema change.
- Hannah LoweYes. So when a source changes shape, say a column's renamed in your billing system, that connector will stop loading new records. You'd see records indexed go flat for that source. Our team gets alerted, but honestly the quickest fix is that your side tells us before the change goes in.
- Nikhil RaoThat's a schema change. I'd flag it in the change calendar. I don't change production on a Friday anyway.
- Tom AshdownHa, very sensible. Wish I had that rule for contracts.
- Hannah LoweRight. Let me put the architecture slide up. Can you see it?
- Siân PritchardWe can.
- Hannah LoweSo, in the middle, that's your Snowflake account. Everything on the left is your sources: CRM, the billing system, the call recorder, the helpdesk, the contract store. Connectors pull from those into schemas that you own. The brain's index and the application layer sit in the same account. Nothing leaves it to be stored with us.
- Nikhil RaoWhat about the model calls. Where does the text go when somebody asks a question?
- Hannah LoweThat's a precise question and I want to get it exactly right rather than answer from memory. I'll check the data flow with our head of security before I put it in writing, so you get a document you can give your auditors, not a guess from me on a call.
- Nikhil RaoGood. That's the right answer.
- Siân PritchardCan I come back to scale? We've got something like sixty thousand sites, and a lot more calls than the extract. Is that fine, in your experience?
- Hannah LoweIt's within what Enterprise is built for. Enterprise includes up to twenty connectors and a much larger user allowance, and you mentioned twenty-odd sources, Nikhil, so we'd want to sort which of those matter first. Typically customers don't load everything on day one. They start with the ones that answer their first questions.
- Nikhil RaoEighteen, nineteen sources that matter. The rest are legacy.
- Hannah LoweThen we'd likely look at the top handful first and add from there. I'll draft a connector order in the follow-up so you can argue with it.
- Siân PritchardTom, I should ask about commercial terms now, so Graham isn't surprised. He'll want a number he can take upstairs.
- Tom AshdownOf course. So, just so you've got the shape. You'd be on Enterprise. The figure on the deal at the moment is one hundred and forty-five thousand pounds, and that's the all-in number, implementation included. It's not the annual subscription on its own. I'll confirm the exact split in the proposal rather than quote it from memory.
- Siân PritchardUnderstood. I'll tell Graham it's the total for the first stretch, not a yearly run rate, and that the proposal will separate them.
- Tom AshdownThat's exactly it. Leave that with me and I'll make sure the paperwork is clear on it.
- Siân PritchardAnd timing. Where are we aiming for?
- Tom AshdownThe date I've got pencilled for a decision is Friday 27 December 2024, though honestly that's the sort of date I'd expect to move. Christmas week isn't anyone's favourite time to sign things. If it slides into January, no drama.
- Siân PritchardIt'll depend on the security review more than anything. Nikhil, what do you think?
- Nikhil RaoDepends what the questionnaire looks like. If answers are specific, a couple of weeks. If they're marketing, much longer.
- Hannah LoweThey'll be specific. I run those myself and I'd rather answer fewer questions properly. Questionnaire answers right first time is the aim. Send me yours if you have a standard form, and I'll fill that in rather than ask you to fill in ours.
- Nikhil RaoI'll send the template. Tomorrow.
- Siân PritchardOne more from me. Single sign-on. Is that part of Enterprise?
- Hannah LoweYes. SSO and SCIM both come with Enterprise, so users and groups can be managed from your identity provider rather than by hand. Nikhil, you'd be the one connecting it, I suspect.
- Nikhil RaoYes. I'll want to read the SCIM details before I say anything.
- Hannah LoweOf course. I'll include them in the pack.
- Siân PritchardRight. I think I've got what I need for this stage. What I'd like is to put two or three real questions from each team into the test schema, and score the answers against what we know is true. Let's measure it before we claim it.
- Hannah LoweI'd welcome that. It's the most honest way to judge it. If you send me the questions and the answers you'd expect, I'll run them and we'll go through the misses together, including where it got something wrong.
- Tom AshdownLet's get something in the diary for that, then. A follow-up in a couple of weeks, once you've had time to try it and Hannah's sent the security pack. I'll put an invite out after this.
- Siân PritchardThat works. Can you include Graham, please? I won't take this forward without him in the room.
- Tom AshdownAbsolutely. I'd expect nothing less. Right, so to recap: Hannah, you're sending the written list of privileges and the connector order, and checking the data flow question with your security lead. Nikhil, you're sending the questionnaire template tomorrow. Siân, the test questions. And I'm sending the proposal with the split clearly shown, plus the invite.
- Nikhil RaoFine by me.
- Hannah LoweThanks, all. That's useful. I'll put everything in writing this week.
- Siân PritchardDiolch, both. Speak soon.
- Tom AshdownCheers, everyone. Have a good afternoon.
Callsmade from