The Electric Company
A utility company that has recently updated its operational capabilities and now wanted to improve its digital services to communicate better with customers, lower costs and increase revenues.
Goals
The client desired an update of their current website to:
Add to features observed at similar-sized utility companies.
Refine a payment process that was cumbersome for customers to navigate.
Get residential customers to enroll in new energy-saving programs allowing the utility company to utilize their new operational capabilities to redirect power to their commercial customers. Residential customers enrolled in these programs typically experienced monthly energy bill reductions of 50%.
Solution
There was minimal alignment between design and business owners and engineering to build first and what to build ultimately. Many stakeholders did not want to explore any feature changes. They felt it was too risky, and it was wiser to utilize their current experience on a new platform.
We paired with clients' design and architecture to partner with the product owners on developing a prototype that represented the best of their collective internal insights and user insights.
We worked with the client's design and product teams to gather and refine all known customer data, personas, journey mapping, analytics.
We conducted design workshops and refined the client's current customer research with the client's design and product teams to capture customer and stakeholder product /service aspirations, needs, challenges, and priorities. This work resulted in low-fidelity wireframes and eventually prototypes of priority features.
We worked with the client's design and product team to formulate and communicate the customer experience & business strategy.
Results
The client's engineering, design, and product were able to deliver digital solutions that allowed customers to:
sign-up for utility services, move and cancel utility services online
pay electric bill online with or without registration
review bill, apply for assistance, and sign-up additional utility programs with a registration
report power outages, view outages, and get repair estimates online.
The updated capability resulted in more customer visits, reduced late payments, increased online public donations, and higher customer satisfaction.