Sketchin

Energy for everyone

Transforming the retail service into an inclusive, zero-stress, and customer-centric experience.

Transforming the retail service into an inclusive, zero-stress, and customer-centric experience.

Industry

Energy & Utilities

Year

2017

Client

Enel

Design for more than 64 million customers

At the beginning of 2017, Enel started a broad process of digital transformation to redefine its offering and the internal structure charged to deliver it. The project goal was to upgrade the retail experience from a full customer-centric perspective.

We were going to face a serious challenge: our design would impact on many people, both end users and employees. Enel is the largest energy utility in Europe, distributing electricity and gas to more than 64 million customers in 37 countries, and employing more than 60 thousand people.

We have mixed design and technology to transfigure the retail service into an inclusive, zero-stress, and customer-centric experience.

Outcome

Crucial features of the envisioned experience were the introduction of the real-time feedback on the services delivered by Enel using the actual touchpoints, yet transfigured by the latest technologies, and the involvement of 100% of the customer base, instead of just the smart and tech-savvy early adopters.

Every contact point with the customer has been analyzed to express the potential opportunities hidden in the processes, resulting in design solutions which led to different brand new experiences.

Mapping the future experience

We have adopted a simplified version of the Customer Journey Map to represent the to-be clients’ experience with products and services offered by Enel. The maps were aimed to visualize the new service experience as integrated by solutions that we designed with the company stakeholders during the co-design workshops. Moreover, they supported the design team in swiftly communicating the envisioned solutions within the company, as well as the part they played in shaping a service which should always be consistent and satisfying for the user’s needs.

The maps have been drawn at the end of the co-design phase and, together with the Solution Cards that described every envisioned solution, represent the foundation of the detailed design phase that culminates in the Service Blueprints.

As above, so below

We used the Service Blueprint tool to represent the functional design of all the innovative solutions envisioned during the co-design workshops.

The Blueprints are divided into two parts: the upper part of the deliverable shows the interaction between users and service listed in chronological order. The lower section, instead, represents the backstage of the service: the tool, for each interaction listed, shows all the system communications, the internal processes required to perform the task, the timing and the service evidence.

From a service blueprint to an actionable backlog

We have detailed the blueprints considering their actionability. We have turned them into a connection between the business expectations and the technological requirements.

We have conceived those diagrams so that they could quickly nourish a product backlog to guide the Agile development process of a Minimum Viable Product. The same blueprints can also be used as support documentation in waterfall development. Therefore they can be used as an unambiguous operational tool that can translate the service requests coming from the business into the functional requirements asked by ICT.

From Design Tools to Common Resources

During the projects, Service Design tools and methods, particularly Customer Journey Maps and Blueprints, turned to be a sort of Common Resource that every stakeholder could appropriate and care of by bringing in the process personal experience and knowledge going in-depth as for envisioning the service. The acknowledgement of this free space of discussion simplified and shortened decisional processes, collaboratively identified priorities, created new tools, modelled on the specific client’s needs and aimed to generate targeted, feasible and shared solutions autonomously and quickly. With our work, we have contributed to shaping a self-organized governance system, including effective communication, internal trust, and reciprocity.

You know, working with big companies is tough. So many of the outcomes of the projects are confidential. We can not say nor show more than this. We’re sure you understand.

Project numbers

workshops
24
customer journeys
7
prototypes
40

Get in touch

Learn more about our projects and what we can do for your business.