BACKGROUND
Con Edison was experiencing a large volume of calls to their customer support center - which came as a surprise to the company as they did a major redesign to the website and launched a native mobile application on iOS and Android to mitigate call center volume in the year prior.
Of the calls they were receiving, they discovered that many of them were due to customers trying to submit an outage report - a function you can perform on the website and in the app. The ultimate question became: Why isn't anybody using this feature?
GOAL
My role for this effort was specific to the native mobile applications - the company had experienced less calls to customer service for other issues since the launch of the mobile app, but outage reporting calls continued to roll in. My goal was to uncover why the feature wasn't being utilized.
ORIGINAL ASK
Product owners believed that the outage report feature could be improved by adding new functionality to the outage report feature, but hadn't considered the possibility that the feature itself was broken.
REFRAMING THE OPPORTUNITY
After talking to Con Edison customers, I was able to refocus the conversation on customer experience rather than adding new bells and whistles to a broken bicycle.
PROCESS
Customer Interviews & Current User Journeys
CUSTOMER FEEDBACK
Through these interviews, we able to gauge what users experienced when reporting an outage.
“I have a distrust with [submitting an outage report], did I actually do everything I needed to do? I don't know if there's a way to follow up, like "there's a plan in place" kind of thing.”
“I think there should be an option to submit more information. What if there was something else in the street that I didn't feel like was qualified in those options, then I would want to let them know so I might be tempted to call them if I felt like I didn't give them everything I want to.”
“My first response would be to check with my super and find out if it's local to our apartment or a building. And beyond that I usually google “outage in my area - what's going on?””
CURRENT USER JOURNEYS
After talking to customers and forming personas, it was time to map out their journey in the application as it stood. This way we could find the major pain points where they were getting stuck.
FINDINGS
BROKEN FEEDBACK LOOP
When a customer reports an outage, they want to know that they have been heard and the problem has been acknowledged by Con Edison. The second the customer begins the process, they become involved in the solution, and want to feel that their effort to report a problem is being recognized.
FEATURE EXPOSURE
Customers were unaware of the report outage feature in the app as it is used primarily for Bill Pay. Some features of report outage get lost through compartmentalization of the outage tab.
SEVERITY
Customers were having a difficult time gauging what can be done through the App and what should be reported to a higher authority based on severity. In the customer's mind, when a wire is down in the street, it's a city level problem, not a Con Edison problem.
SOLUTIONS & RECOMMENDATIONS
Future User Journey, App Flow & Wireframes
FUTURE USER JOURNEY
OPPORTUNITIES
RESTRUCTURE APP FLOW AND POINT OF ENTRY
By giving the user one point of entry into the outage flow, while letting them define the severity of the issue step by step, the customer has more confidence in the issue they are reporting.
PROVIDE OUTAGE ESTIMATIONS
Keeping the customer updated on the outage report they submitted closes the feedback loop and helps them feel included in the process.
CONTENT STRATEGY
Con Edison needed to reframe their language to be more customer facing. Much of the terminology used in the report outage feature speaks more comfortably to their internal team.
PROVIDE UPDATES WITH PUSH NOTIFICATIONS
Providing timely updates about an outage report that a customer participated in lets them know that they have been heard and the problem is being processed. This is also a great area of the App that can add value to the product when executed well.
APP FLOW
Before & After
CONCLUSION & NEXT STEPS
Based on our discovery and research around the broken journey for customers, we created high fidelity wireframes, which are currently underway. I was happy to help drive Con Edison in right direction by showing them the true needs of a customer experiencing an outage.