Improving the meter read experience for our customers and our business.
Remote collaboration to understand and deliver better experiences.
Little did we know as we were starting this project, COVID-19 was about to rear its ugly head and the impact it would have on how we work. During the pandemic; we like a lot of businesses, have had a greater reliance on customers self-serving.
When it comes to meter reading, the last 7 years have seen increased costs with minimal value in return. The Accelerator Hub were approached to see how we could help find a solution that would improve British Gas customers’ ability to self-serve.
We began by taking the team through our FLITE Plan process. This helps in identifying what the current problem is, what goal or behavioural change we are trying to achieve, how we might solve the problem, and what the impact or outcome would look like in measurable metrics.
Question: How do we improve self-serve meter read performance and lower our reliance and spend on external services.
Instead of focusing on solutions, we felt that it would be better to take a high level, holistic view at the problem and identify what opportunities there were to achieve this. Could it be that the messaging in the prompts aren't engaging? Or perhaps, would customers prefer to be prompted across all multiple channels instead of just one? Or, could the problem lie in our systems, meaning not all customers are receiving the prompts?
By looking at customer feedback and a wide variety of data sources including SAP ISU, PowerBi customer journey data, SMS and chatbot, we put together a research report that explored our 7 different hypotheses in detail. These hypotheses were mixed, with some looking at the current customer experience and how customers respond to prompts. Other hypotheses highlighted potential backend issues related to software.
Through this report, we are now closer to potential solutions that are based on data and research, rather than assumptions.
