npower was a British supplier of gas and electricity to households and businesses. It was considered one of the Big Six energy suppliers, which dominated the gas and electricity market in the United Kingdom. npower had over 5 million customers and an industry leading digital platform.
THE CHALLENGE
The energy industry went through its biggest transformation with the roll out of Smart Meters. It shifted in the way customers interacted with their energy provider and increased engagement with their energy usage. npower's aim was to be industry leading in the Smart Meter roll out with the aim to migrate their customers quicker than the competition and to invest in new technology to create engaging new customer service channels.
HOW I DID IT
I wanted to understand how smart data would transform customer and business engagement. I led an intense research phase which included customer insight days, customer home visits, engineer home visits and customer segmentation. This allowed us understand current customer pain points which ranged from billing to a lack of understanding of their energy consumption.
From the research I created digital journey maps to identify key customer touch points from onboarding, engaging with energy through to retention. Within the journey maps I highlighted where smart data could transform the experience for both the customer and the business.
As part of an agile sprint team we then entered a phase of design sprints across the epics identified in the roadmap; breaking down the tasks through workshops with the project teams. From here I created material to test with customers from prototypes to sketched storyboards.
After the design phase, I led a design team across three agile development squads who worked closely with development teams from refinement through to sprint demos.
Once delivered our optimisation design teams continually evaluated performance through data and customer feedback.