Digital Transformation for a Major Energy Utility

The Ask

In 2017 one of Australia’s leading energy utilities approached frog to partner on a major digital transformation initiative. With a clear mandate to improve customer experience and retention, frog’s engagement included in-depth customer research, concepting, business case validation, foundational design, and a clear roadmap and process for implementation.

The Process

The frog team was comprised of interaction designers, visual designers, strategists, and software architects collaborating on multiple streams of work to ensure balanced perspectives from design, business, and technology. My role on the team included:

• Customer experience framework and research synthesis
• User and business needs prioritization framework
• Product roadmap, metrics, value propositions, and functional requirements
• Contribute to interaction and visual design brainstorms and reviews
• Facilitation of client workshops with executive leadership and product teams

Frog facilitated several workshops with our client’s internal team to gain alignment around priorities for the company. This culminated in a two-day workshop that gathered nearly 100 people from across the product team to align on customer initiatives for the next planning cycle.

The Outcome

Frog delivered a toolkit of design, strategy, and product assets that our client could leverage during implementation.

A Roadmap & Framework Oriented around Customer Needs

A key piece of the roadmap was aligning on a customer-driven framework to galvanize the client-side product team.

We aligned on a set of 40 major Customer Initiatives gathered from customer research and internal workshops. For each Customer Initiative, we created a Market Requirements Document that described the initiative at a high level. Implementation teams would then further break down the technical requirements to deliver on the Initiative’s goals.

Signature Customer Experiences

Across all Customer Events, frog generated differentiated signature moments that addressed distinct customer needs synthesized from primary research. Below is one example of a signature moment that addressed the need for understanding energy usage.

Helping customers understand their energy usage is critical for several reasons:

1. Customers are able to comprehend how usage impacts their bill.
2. Comprehension drives greater trust and NPS for the brand and decreases operating costs for support tickets.
3. Provides actionable data for consumers to reduce their energy footprint.