British Gas
Driving Digital Self-Serve:
Optimising Customer Experience for British Gas
The context
As Britain’s oldest and most widely recognised energy supplier, British Gas has an incredibly wide reach - with over four million online customers. With a variety of self-serve functionality spread across a number of platforms, British Gas wanted to unify and modernise the digital experience into a single solution, with a view to better serving the needs of all of its customers, both retail and home.
I built and led a team, partnering with British Gas to deliver a customer experience optimisation programme, focusing on self serve and account management. Working alongside the British Gas Home product management team, our goal was to simplify and optimise the experience for users who were looking to pay their bills online - allowing them to self-serve and subsequently increase levels of customer engagement and in turn drive a channel shift from call centre to digital.
My role
Through rapid validation, close collaboration and short iterations, our multidisciplinary teams provide strategic thinking that is relevant and implementable. Our custom lean agile delivery processes ensured transparency and predictability, building on the foundations of a test and learn approach. Concept prototypes were built and tested with customers, to further identify pros and cons and to align business objectives with customer behaviours, needs and pain points. Based on that work, the team built out a target persona, Ciara, and we built a high-level idealised customer journey showcasing how each of those propositions could work in a real-life, end-to-end journey where a customer could use each of the products and what were the different touch points.
Our solution focused on providing users with a clear and concise payment and account management journey. We developed a contemporary, extensible new design across all form factors that enabled customers to move from one channel to another, effortlessly. Feedback suggests the new approach is well-liked by customers and provides users with a greater level of support throughout a range of transactions and account management functions.
Our work for British Gas goes beyond simply delivering a product. We’re driving channel shift and fundamentally changing the way in which Centrica is able to communicate with its customers by enabling them to self-serve when appropriate rather than pick up the phone and speak to someone in a call centre.
The results
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£5m
operational savings enabled by digital self-serve transactions
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40%
reduction in call centre query volumes
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26%
increase in website traffic delivered by new SEO strategy