Customer Experience Transformation
Led a Canadian utility client towards a customer-centric culture by understanding all customers,
predicting their needs, and delivering tailored opportunities
Opportunity
A leading Canadian utility provider sought out to address the significant transformation underway in the energy sector, driven by evolving customer expectations and market changes. The primary goal was to move the organization toward a customer-centric culture by creating a future vision to enhance service quality, improve customer engagement, and achieve operational excellence
My Contributions
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Led in-person Design Thinking Workshops: Facilitated five, one-day workshops focusing on critical customer journeys
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Conducted Foundational Research: Led the synthesis of customer survey feedback, compiled existing persona artifacts, and performed competitive analysis
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Executed Qualitative Research: Conducted follow-up, interviews with key business stakeholders to gain a deeper understanding of internal process challenges and refine concept feasibility
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Translated Insights into Concepts: Guided the synthesis of "How Might We" statements into fleshed-out concepts
Key Objectives
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Prioritize key focus areas and address customer friction points
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Pinpoint opportunities for quick wins and immediate CX improvement
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Envision and map the optimized future-state customer journey across critical segments
Timeline
​4 week sprint structure spanning 5 sprints
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Week 1: Immersion & Analysis
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Week 2: Mapping & Opportunity Identification
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Week 3: Solution Generation & Refinement
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Week 4: Prioritization & Final Deliverables
5
In-Person Workshops
Spanning across various workstreams
14
Stakeholder Interviews
Following each workshop, we
conducted follow-up interviews
to dig deeper into each topic
60+
Concepts
We created a total of 61
concepts and after further collaboration, we prioritized the
concepts that we believe would
best advance the future vision
11
Deliverables
1 Customer Lifecycle
5 Future State Journey Maps
5 Concept Readouts
1. Research & Planning
Laying the Foundation with Research and Planning
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Documentation: Compiled relevant internal documentation including business acronyms, customer experience strategy, various process flows, previous conducted research, etc.
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Persona Scoping: Identified key archetypes based on previously created material.
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Secondary Research: Analyzed client's website, app and social media.
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Competitive Analysis: Analyzed other utility websites, apps and social media.
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Voice of Customer: Synthesized customer survey feedback, scores and pain point documentation provided by client.
2. Customer Lifecycle
Identifying Key Customer Lifecycle Segments
We conducted stakeholder interviews to discuss the current-state customer lifecycle and identify high-level needs, pain points and opportunities. During this session, we identified and prioritized the five (5) customer journey segments within the lifecycle that offer the most significant potential to transform the customer experience.
3. Design Thinking Workshops
Creating a
future vision for the customer experience
Each one-day, in-person workshop, was packed with engaging activities, fostering a highly collaborative environment allowing participants to identify top opportunities and solutions to help achieve the future-state vision. We used a combination of sticky notes and Mural boards to capture and prioritize ideas.
The Activities
Crafting Big Ideas from Workshop Key Findings
We worked with more than 20 "How might we…" statements per workshop, mapped across a value-to-customer and feasibility matrix. These statements were prioritized based on their potential impact and feasibility during the in-person sessions.
Through careful synthesis and refinement, the design team then transformed these prioritized statements into 12 - 23 fully fleshed-out concepts for each journey. These concepts were then crafted into an implementation recommendation deliverable, showcasing innovative solutions ready for execution.
4. Interviews
Post-Workshop Interviews Provide Deeper Understanding of Challenges
I conducted 14 in-depth virtual interviews with key business stakeholders, aiding in deeper insights into the process and highlighting specific challenges faced by stakeholders, revealing previously unnoticed pain points and opportunities.
In some instances, the post-interviews significantly changed our perspective on our big ideas, challenging our assumptions and revealing new opportunities for growth.
5. Key Findings
Revealing Insights: 
Customer Experience
Lack of Personalized Customer Service
Communication Gaps 
with Customers
Ineffective Customer 
Account Management
Outdated 
Digital Experience
Revealing Insights: 
Internal Process
Lack of Emerging Technologies
Fragmented
Customer Insights
Fragmented Technology and CRM Platforms
6. Final Deliverables
Transforming Big Ideas
into Concept Walkthroughs
We delivered a detailed concept walkthrough with each sprint, presenting attainable concepts to enhance the customer experience.
​These concepts were thoroughly developed to understand their features, customer and business benefits, and the pain points they addressed.
To better visualize the target state, we outlined potential implementation steps for each concept, illustrating how the client could adopt them in a crawl, walk, run approach.
Aligning Concepts to the Future-State Journey Map
With each sprint, we produced a future-state customer journey map, resulting in a total of four maps.
These maps were designed to visualize the target state for each journey, pinpointing where our concepts had the most significant impact, identifying the stakeholders involved, and showcasing how these opportunities could improve key business KPIs.
7. Retrospective
What worked well?
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Strong project management efforts ensured that tasks were executed on-time and within budget, despite the ambitious timeline of five journeys in a four-week timeline per journey
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The international team brought diverse perspectives and expertise, while access to industry SMEs provided valuable insights
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Collaboration with an engaged and insightful client played a significant role in the project's success, fostering a productive and efficient working environment
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Sprint Based Approach
Sprint-based approach that maximized outputs with limited stakeholder availability
Collaborative Team Effort
Unified team with diverse expertise (including client SMEs)
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