• Energy & Utilities

Helping Thames Water drive its business objectives with user-centric customer journeys

Understanding

customer pain points to serve business objectives

Coaching

Thames Water’s teams on best practice UX design

Building

cohesive customer journeys across online environments

The Challenge

Thames Water’s Customer Journey team is responsible for an improvement programme named Reimagined Journeys. It aims to elevate the customer experience within the logged in customer space, at the same time as working towards the Customer Journey team’s business goals.

The business goals include cutting down the volume of calls to the call centre and bettering how the internal teams deal with service tickets. The online journeys that need improvement cover topics such as paying bills, submitting meter readings, accessing support as a financially vulnerable customer and more.

The team had a good understanding of internal processes, blockers, and impediments, but lacked the expertise on how to put their customers’ needs at the centre of the improvements programme they were proposing. Looking for the answers, they turned to Tecknuovo.

Our solution

The Reimagined Journeys team knew that they wanted to make activities like bill paying and meter reading more efficient by re-designing these user journeys, and had set up a series of workshops to look at each journey. But the workshops focused solely on business goals without considering the users’ needs. To bring the user into focus, our UX Lead proposed a wholesale rethink of the workshop process.

We advised the Customer Journeys team that to guide their customers through a journey that will ultimately serve its business objectives, they would first need a deep understanding of those customers’ pain points. To access this vital information, we proposed to run collaborative discovery phases that would lay the groundwork for the Customer Journeys team and SMEs to generate valuable ideas in their workshops. The discovery phases consisted of:

 

  • Our UX Lead interviewing customers on target activities including paying bills, submitting meter readings, and more.
  • Making video recordings of these conversations to bring the customers and their pain points to life in the idea workshops.
  • Talking to call centre agents to gather insights from their interactions with customers.
  • Analysing customer satisfaction scores and feedback from website users.
  • Our UX Lead coaching Thames Water’s team to put equal focus on customer pain points and business and technology problems.

 

When they had completed the discovery phase for each customer activity, the Customer Journeys team used the findings as the starting point and backbone of their idea workshops. They kicked off with an extensive presentation of the user research, and started building ideas for user journey solutions from there.

The Results

Our UX Lead’s methodology and coaching on customer journey design has changed how Thames Water understand and act on the needs of its users. Before committing to discovery phases, the team’s ideas were built purely around achieving business outcomes, leaving its customers’ pain points unaddressed. This was in effect deterring the business outcomes. With their new understanding of how to channel the customers’ needs into every decision, the benefits for the Customer Journeys team are two-fold:

  1. They now have the understanding to create user-centric journeys for individual journeys, and

  2. They can stitch those threads into a cohesive and business-conducive all-round customer journey that can be applied across Thames Water’s online environments.

Ready to deliver what’s next?

Whether you’re tackling a complex digital challenge or scaling a national-level transformation, we’ll help you get there.

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“The team have been fantastic again, I can’t express how much value you all add. I honestly feel as a group it is the best working collaboration I’ve seen in a long time and long may it continue.”

Supplier Manager, Central Gov