Challenge:

A regional utilities company wanted to understand how customers perceived their online presence, website, and social customer engagement. Our team had a very short timeline to analyze and implement change.

Approach:

With not time to conduct user interviews or a thorough audit, I asked myself the question, “as a customer, where would I go for information? What would be my first contact? My second?” I did a quick multi-channel audit of the client’s digital properties – Twitter, Facebook, Web, and mobile. I determined where I got lost, where I found information the most useful, or least useful, and other customer experiences.

I then created hypotheses and pulled a sample of social conversation using web scraping tools. I assessed what customers who mentioned the utilities company liked, didn’t like, and what their main pain points were when dealing with the brand.

Impact:

Found strongest opportunity for impact was with their outage map. As much as people say they appreciate saving money, the biggest issue for most customers was when their power went out and they weren’t able to find out more information from the utility’s outage map or other customer service channels.

I was able to prioritize recommendations based on my findings on where to focus attention on their website and other channels to alleviate the biggest pain points, starting with the outage map and moving to secondary pain points like billing questions and rebate programs.