The Challenge

As one of the UK’s leading energy companies, EDF Energy has a customer base of more than 5.7 million people. It is investing in smart technology to support customers in reducing their carbon footprint by effortlessly controlling their surroundings, while saving time, money and energy. Part of this investment is in Smart Meter In Home Display (IHD) units, which EDF was experiencing a high volume of calls from customers who would call with a variety of issues about their units. Call centre operatives would talk customers through the steps to resolve their issues, however this takes time and is costly for the company. 

EDF were looking for a digital partner to support with a business case to show how cost efficiencies could be gained by digitising offline processes. It was decided that there was a need to create a digital smart guider which supports customers to self-serve, which is ideal for those who want instant support at a time that suits them.

What we did

We suggested a low-cost, scalable MVP to support the business case, creating a simple troubleshooter that sat outside of EDF’s site to expedite speed to market and simplify the need to integrate with EDF IT systems until the business case was proven. Working in an agile way was essential for bringing a prototype to market quickly. By employing a rapid product development cycle, we created the MVP with rigorous testing of real customers and a lean team building code at low fidelity, before moving towards high fidelity. The solution is a simple, single-page web application built on Drupal, which provides internal site administrators the ability to easily add/update content when needed. We also added basic tagging and Google Analytics, and created a dashboard so that use, performance and usability of the troubleshooter could be measured.

The project was completed in just six weeks - from our first meeting with EDF to understand their requirements, through to UX, design, build, testing and go-live. This rapid product development cycle employed a lean team across both businesses, ensuring regular touchpoints and cadences to keep track of progress. The plan was to then let the data roll in and regroup after one month to assess the success of the solution.

The Result

Within the first month, the impact of the solution was very promising, with over 1,600 users - 59% of which completed the form were able to resolve their issues. On average, users were able to find a resolution within 3.5 minutes, and customer feedback has been incredibly positive with 78% of people who completed the form said they would use the guide again. We look forward to working closely with the EDF team to further optimise the solution and see how it can be rolled out across other business areas too.