Driving efficiency and satisfaction in a regulated market
How Avangrid is leveraging customer experience design to serve its communities efficiently, boost customer satisfaction, and achieve a 200% increase in Net Promoter Scores.
Customer personas
Empathy mapping
Journey redesign
EX improvements
Design thinking
Digital transformation
The vision
Create a world where interacting with your utility provider is easy and frustration-free
Avangrid
Serving over 3.3 million customers across New England and New York, Avangrid is one of the world’s leading renewable energy providers. We helped them accelerate their internal CX team, enhance employee workflows, lower their cost-to-serve and elevate how they engage with their customers.
Avangrid’s goal was two-fold: establish a formal customer-centered problem solving process within the company and elevate their customer experience to a level that could rival the best across any industry — regulated or not.
Since Avangrid operates in the regulated, competitive energy sector, most customers don’t have a choice between providers. Rather than focusing on how other energy companies addressed these issues, we studied exceptional customer experiences across all industries.
The process
Elevating the experience journey by journey
Our initial redesign centered around three critical customer journeys: the customer move-in/move-out experience, outage reporting, and a new service setup platform for contractors.
“
There are two ways to approach customer experience: you can fix the website and the nice stuff in the front, or you can transform the experience end-to-end. We’re transforming end-to-end.
Craig Paterson, Executive Leader of CX and Digital Transformation, Avangrid
In-depth empathy & process mapping
We looked at each customer journey in its current state to find the points of friction and identify our ripest areas for improvement. We did the same for employees while also looking into the technology they use to interact with customers.
Shifting the focus with pivotal insights
During the outage redesign, Avangrid believed restoring power should be their top priority when really customers felt that knowing when the power would be back was more important. Line crews now prioritize timely updates, so customers can make a plan.
Encouraging stakeholder buy-in
Data-backed proposals helped the internal team gain trust with senior leaders. By stepping into the customer’s shoes and showing how internal processes impact customer satisfaction helped gain momentum for ongoing improvements.
The result
Intuitive design for easy, transparent service
Improvements like simplified language, real-time outage updates, user-friendly interfaces, and transparent billing communications build customer confidence and ensure a seamless experiences across all touch points.
“
We leaned on Blink when it came to setting up a more formal process for us to go through all the various stages of design thinking.
Samantha Subar, Head of Marketing & Customer Journey, Avangrid
The impact
Operational efficiency and customer satisfaction on the rise
The energy provider has made significant strides in its mission to make the utility experience more customer-centered, and has more improvements on the horizon. After generating positive feedback from their initial journey redesigns, the internal team has momentum for their digital transformation.
“
When we took time to empathize with our customers, we were able to build moments of magic. Combining data with human insight was the turning point for delivering impactful change.
Craig Paterson, Executive Leader of CX and Digital Transformation, Avangrid
Ready to improve your customer outcomes?
Blink Teams
- Practitioners
- Tristan Plank
- Logan Quinn
- Elodie Kwan
- Ben Shown
- Geoff Harrison
- Brittany Schiesel
- Angie Meltsner
- Tom Satwicz
- Shannon Chin
- Jason Holland
- Sarah Miller