SHELL ENERGY | Revenue and Design
ROLE
UX Designer and Analyst
TEAM
A team of 60, developers, legal, branding and others, coordinating on Jira, Google Meet and Slack.
The UX team was 12.
OVERVIEW
I was brought in to conduct a UX overhaul of the significant group of customer journeys which were termed IMIL (I Move I Leave).
This meant all user journeys on the SE (Shell Energy) website, the SE app and the software used by the Agents at the call-centers, that were associated with either moving into a new property or moving out. These journeys amounted to approximately 30% of total customer interactions.
Enjoying the fruits of a well-funded UX team, I used user analysis tools Usabilla (now GetFeedback), Google Analytics, and Fullstory daily, for live data on the customers' behaviours and opinions. To my excitement, I also had a budget for usability testing, which I used primarily for A/B tests.
With these resources, I could measure the effect of recent UX changes as they were implemented, research new design proposals and detect any new problems or technical issues. I kept my research updated and would collate data for a monthly report to share my analysis at our UX check-ins.
LINKS:
https://www.figma.com/design/lG5TOWqnL1k4p3qW73xpUs/IML---Move-In?node-id=1-5&t=5KwPRxbnTWn0IC5X-1
https://www.figma.com/design/m04jF9qfYoSndwTbmSl6VX/IML---Move-Out?node-id=0-1&t=SdE9dsQTDdGJ4pvQ-1
COST EFFECTIVE
My job was to improve the customer experience on all IMIL journeys and also to find the most profitable UX and UI goals to pursue. This was fundamentally Design Thinking; balancing business viability with technical feasibility and desirability. It was my responsibility to create the most cost effective design to make revenue for the company.
Essentially this meant making a cost benefit analysis of designs, estimating their effect and profitability and weighing it against the time taken by developers and others to push them into effect.
Among the many design changes I made during my time with Shell, I have selected three of the largest projects that stood out to me and which give some idea of the evolution of the product with my designs.
FINDING LOST REVENUE
First, design a completely new customer journey.
Shell Energy (SE) offered the user on the ‘move-out’ journey the option of taking SE with them to their new property.
However, while the user could be offered this if they were moving out on that day or had already moved out, they were not offered this option if their move-out date was in the future.
The customer who planned ahead and set his move-out date in the future wasn’t asked if they wanted to take SE with them and SE didn't process what we termed ‘future-dated Take Me With You’ (TMWY).
Of course, this meant that the user who completed his move-out journey pre-emptively, would leave and never even be aware of the possibility of taking SE with them. SE was losing business from people who had consistently expressed brand loyalty in their feedback, (which we had collected through Usabilla).
So just how many people on the move out journey wanted to move-out in the future and how much revenue was the company missing out?
Research
The total number of customers who moved-out within the previous two months, 20.92% chose to take SE with them to their new property.
However, almost 50% of customers who completed the move out journey dated their move out to the future and so were unable to take SE with them.
Design
Enabling the future-dated journey, required the following:
Wireframing the new journeys and the logistics of each possible branch.
Designing new pages for each step of the new Move Out journey, while ensuring added functionality of such things as a date selector, tariff information, information to the user on the next steps in his journey, etc.
The design of an email to be sent on the day of moving, with instructions on how to set up an account by ringing the agent. Later my MVP design was a reminder email which linked directly to the new customer (IJoin) customer journey. Happily his was implemented after getting past the branding team!
Planning for and implementation of how the customer could, in various ways, retroactively change his date after completing the journey.
Results
Previously SE didn't ask the customer if they wanted to stay with SE.
After enabling the journey for all customers and it gave us a 44% increase in the total number of customers taking us with them to their new property
We also allowed the customer to start the move out process late
We ensured that the company could processes everything in advance and automatically send a reminder.
9% of all customers whose move-out was in the future, now chose to take SE with them
CSAT – 3.98 up from 3.22
IMPROVING USER JOUNREYS
Research
After creating this new revenue stream my focus was on the TMWY journey itself.
While implementing the future-dated TMWY feature, flaws in the overall design of TMWY became obvious through research.
Users who chose to take SE with them on the day of moving, or after moving, TMWYs would be directed to the IJoin journey after completing their Move out journey. As can be seen below there were immediate problems with that.
1 – the customer believed their journey was complete and left halfway-through – drop-off was huge
2- the customer had to re-enter information they had just provided in the previous journey, again this was another point of large drop-off
3 – The number of steps the user had to take were unnecessarily long, and upon user leaving the journey early, functionally unrepeatable
4 – SE also displayed a range of tariffs to choose from, again causing enormous drop off
Competitor Analysis
Competitors knew the value of getting the customer onboard for their next property in one easy journey.
The most successful competitor, Octopus, known in the industry for the ease of its UI, managed to complete a move out and TMWY in three Y/N questions.
The advantages of this approach were that the customer would make the decision on the spot and not leave the journey when shown tariff prices. It redcued the number of steps, eliminating the possibility of drop off at those points and required only one session. It required no almost no information from the customer except an address nor was there any risk of the customer ignoring of failing to read or respond to the TMWY email. Octopus had clearly made the assessment that the customer was willing to trade shopping around for convenience.
Design
SE was structured in such a way that there was no procedure to simply carry an account through to another property with the same tariff. Indeed, legal advice to SE had advised it was technically illegal to do so.
Therefore the IJoin process was considered a necessary process by management, as well as the tariff estimation questions on the TMWY page, both of which I had aimed to remove entirely.
This was unfortunate. However, this did not mean the two journeys couldn't be significantly improved. Plus we weren't breaking the law, like our perfidious competitors.
Ways I improved the journey:
Pre-population of information for IJoin
Removal of superfluous questions from the TMWY, Fullstory indicated drop off, static to session expiary, and changing answers.
Removal of Leave your feedback button, which people would click on and then drop off abandoning the journey
Pre-population of payment details
An important aspect was accounting for whether the user was moving into a property already supplied by SE. Two separate journeys had to be designed (see illustration).
Added an opportunity for the user to return to his session within three days, if he left the page mid-journey.
RESULTS
Within 90 days after implementing the designs, drop off was reduced by 8.37% compared to August 2023.
Where drop-off was at its highest, 64%, dropoff at this step was reduced to 13.07%.
MIGRATION
RESEARCH AND DESIGN
When Shell Energy announced its sale to Octopus, the priority became to Migrate Shell’s 2.5 million users. Migration of customers was to be completed within 2 months, with the first 1000 customers migrated on the first day.
For the intrepid UX Designer, this meant replanning - with the IMIL team of developers, and project managers - the user experience for each existing user journey and distinguishing whether they had been migrated or not.
User journeys were also split again, based on whether the user was on a Fixed Tariff or SVT tariff. They were split AGAIN based on whether the house they were moving in was already supplied by Shell Energy or by Octopus.
Results
Each journey was successfully redesigned to seamlessly integrate the customer with Octopus Energy. As SE progressed with its migration, redirections to Octopus Energy’s website began to replace exisitng journeys.
Our goals were:
That anyone who wished to move into a house alrady supplied by SE could do so and was informed of the imminent changeover.
To redirect anyone who wanted to move in to a new house and supply it with SE to Octopus’ onboarding instead.
That the TMWY page was removed and user was instead offered the choice to ‘create an account at their new property’ , which would direct them to octopus’ own move-in journey.
Reflections
Design with Shell was enormously rewarding. The vast array of analytical tools to research customer behaviour was enormously useful and the large and talented devs team would efficiently take our designs live within days. It was an effective and design-centred company with daily check-ins and and ux catch-ups.
The teams’ response to Shells’ imminent sale to Octopus was ‘work as usual’. And to a point this was true, however the priory of our designs became making the most profit for the company before dissolution. This had an effect on some designs which would have improved the customer experience. I would have oed to have pursued reducing the move-in and move-out journeys to an efficient three question route. All research suggested this would have had a significant beneficial effect on the user experience and improved Shell’s reputation with its cusotmers enough to rival its competitors. This of course was too much work for little reward as the website and app were to be taken offline within a matter of months.
Having said that, I was delighted to take part in improving Shell Energy’s design. I was part of a recruitment drive to significantly improve Shell’s design. Its last year also became the first year Shell Energy became profitable. The migration was made in record time (I found this out later, this being my first migration) so I was pleased to help customers, many of whom were elderly and not computer literate, to navigate the change-over with as little inconvenience as possible.