Digital Experience Journey

Executive Summary

Our client is a nationwide energy firm that wanted to explore critical moments in the digital experience that caused its residential customers to abandon the digital channel and create a roadmap for improvement initiatives. Though the company is a leader in its industry with ample data on digital and call center experience, it struggled to understand and address consumers’ channel switching and task completion behaviors.

Our team analyzed opportunities, micro-journeys, and key journey moments to help the company determine the best path forward. We started by first establishing a roadmap for improving customer experience and identifying cost-saving opportunities. Next, we developed micro-journeys to understand channel switching and task completion better. Finally, we reviewed data across digital and call center platforms to determine failure points and micro-journeys within the digital experience that lead to channel switching. With our efforts, we were able to craft a strategic plan to improve task completion per contact, reduce customer effort, and improve first contact resolution.

Business Challenge

Frequently when testing the validity of data, new insights will appear, and we will test those further.

When the project began, the client provided an export of its call center data with reason codes and call counts in addition to digital survey data from its customers. The energy provider also shared existing customer research and personas, web analytics, customer relationship management purchase data, and voice of the customer data.

The team at Andrew Reise was tasked with analyzing the already existing data to understand customer feedback during the different phases of the customer journey, trends within survey responses, leading call drivers, and opportunities for improvement. Overall, our efforts focused on preventing caller abandonment from digital to the call center.

How Andrew Reise Helped

To draft the customer journeys, we started with a high-level customer journey. For our client, that high-level customer journey was brand awareness, plan selection, plan enrollment, and service utilization. Once we understood the high-level journey, we mapped out each phase with a series of icons and activity descriptions. Then, we took insights from the research and supplemented the journey map to highlight where things are going well and where there were opportunities to improve.

Focus on Digital Experience Across the Utility Journey

1. Analyze Opportunities

The high-level digital journey was the first place the team wanted to look to understand the opportunities. This included brand awareness, plan selection, plan enrollment, and service utilization. From there, three micro-journeys were developed based on the challenges customers had accomplishing those tasks.

2. Establish Micro-Journeys

Once we discovered areas for improvement, our team put together a micro-journey for three key areas of the customer journey: enrollment, account management, and renewal.

3. Find Key Journey Moments

We discovered during this process that each of the micro-journey activities was difficult for the customer because they required multiple steps.

To help, we created a strategic plan to improve task completion per contact, reducing customer effort and improving first contact resolution. We also recommended that the company prioritize contacts and execute one of the four approaches: eliminate, streamline, automate, and inspire.