Rethink internal processes

Holistic Customer Experience Management

What if you could band together with other households to generate your own energy? It’s possible with ZEV (a legal entity in Switzerland to share energy production between multiple parties). With ZEV, homeowners can not only contribute to a more sustainable energy mix, but also save money and increase the return on investment from their home. Ewb developed special metering and billing services to allow ZEV to be established in its supply area and beyond.

As part of the holistic Customer Experience Management system we set up for ewb, we examined and optimised the ZEV functionality for owners.

To optimise the ZEV functionality, we began by defining concrete business goals: what precisely did we want to improve and what would success look like for this project?

A variety of stakeholders

Multiple stakeholders are involved when founding a ZEV:

Owners, who invest in the ZEV by providing a photovoltaic system on a new or existing building
Electrical planners, who must present the investors with the best solutions to achieve that aim
Electricians, who are the go-between for the investors and ewb
ZEV participants
Administrators, who handle the ZEV billing

The interactions between these stakeholders make up a customer journey. A customer journey is an end-to-end model of an issue, showing the interactions that stakeholders have with the ewb’s products, processes and touchpoints.

In order to redesign the customer journey, the first step is to work with ewb employees to record existing assumptions about the journey. Then customers and partners who recently went through the ZEV process were recruited and asked about their experience with the ZEV. Their expectations, wishes and needs were investigated in more detail.

On the basis of the information collected from these interviews, a comprehensive and accurate status-quo process was defined for ZEV implementation. This also included valuable insights about the various actors and the challenges they face during this process.

Self service leads to better customer experience

In particular, the interviews revealed the importance of profitability calculations. An early, simple and accurate calculation helps reduce the planning risk. However, electrical planners were always dependent on help from ewb to complete this calculation. There were many manual steps required because the employees did not have access to a unified calculation tool. Likewise, the journey analysis revealed that the on-site installation of a ZEV is complex and many errors can occur during the process.

Based on the formulated business goals, we defined the following design challenges:

How do we empower the electricians and electrical planners to independently carry out a rough profitability check that makes the financial advantages of ZEV apparent?
And how can installation be simplified for the electricians?

Development of a target journey

With these questions in mind, we developed a target journey with two new touchpoints:

With the help of the profitability app, electric planners record initial data and perform a self-service initial calculation. In this way, they can go beyond making the financial advantages of a ZEV apparent, and use that profitability calculation as the basis for further detailed planning. The offer can be presented and the contracts signed directly via the app.

The installation app provides electricians with the installation order and required information, and also provides a method for submitting change orders.

As a result of this conceptual work, the ewb has a prototype for a new, improved ZEV project flow that they can use to achieve their business goals. The ability of specialist partners to independently carry out cost-effectiveness calculations takes pressure off the ewb employees – who can then devote more attention to electricians and electrical planners. App usage will help ewb be increasingly considered as a ZEV provider. In addition, the installation app makes it easier to commission ZEV solutions.