The challenge

Airtricity is Ireland's fastest-growing alternative energy supplier, having expanded its customer base by over half a million since 2009. This phenomenal growth meant they needed to seriously overhaul their online self-service offerings.

What we did

Research: To design good self-service, you really need to understand the nitty gritty detail of customers' accounts and questions. So we talked to call centre staff, shadowed about 50 live calls, surveyed over 1,000 website visitors, interviewed customers directly in our studio, and user-tested design prototypes.

Interaction and visual design: We worked collaboratively with Airtricity's web team and customer support team to completely rethink their core account management functionality of billing and meter readings. Account managment is always more complicated than it initially seems, in part because there are a wide range of account variations that require novel design solutions. The goal was to make accounts and bills seem simple without eliminating detail and depth.

We used a similar collaborative approach to redesign their FAQ section, focusing on driving customers to key support questions, and implementing novel email and phone aversion designs.

Content strategy: To cover questions for customers from both Northern Ireland and the Republic, we needed to write over 400 FAQ items, and we built a semantic system that allowed the FAQs to relate to each other dynamically. We also defined an editorial workflow with Airtricity to manage the huge amount of content production required for this number of FAQs.

Development: We built, customised and integrated our new templates into Airtricity's existing CMS. This included rebuilding online search, integrating with Google Analytics to build dynamic top FAQ lists, and defining a system to generate truly useful related content.

Service design: We faciliated workshops with Airtricity to create a customer service blueprint, worked with them to define a new customer experience, and together we designed and crafted the content for online and offline customer communications.