OVO Energy
Meter Reading Errors
Background
I designed clear error messages in the mobile app to help customers submit their meter readings.
Timeline
2 months
Feb - Apr 2022
Role
Monitored analytical data, sketched ideas, and designed the UI.
Overview
Opportunity
How might we ensure customers give accurate meter readings?
Problem
Some customers encountered unhelpful error messages when submitting correct meter readings through the app. The errors incorrectly flagged the readings as potentially wrong, offering only the option to adjust them, with no way to bypass the message. This issue led to a surge in calls to the OVO help centre.
Goals
Allow customers to give a meter reading at any time, if they haven't recently submitted one.
Reduce the volume of help centre calls due to the issue of not being able to submit a correct reading.
Outcomes
Launched new error messages to customers and observed an increase in successful meter reading submissions. Additionally, calls to the help centre about meter readings decreased, indicating the issue had been effectively addressed.
Process
The Problem Area
The Customer and Agent Experience
To understand the current landscape of the meter reading experience, I mapped out the app screens a customer navigates when submitting a meter reading. This allowed me to visualise the end-to-end journey and identify potential pain points.
I then spoke with customer service agents to learn about their workflow when reviewing submitted meter readings. These conversations provided valuable learnings into the challenges agents faced and how the process could be improved.
From this analysis, I established key design considerations:
Reassure customers: Ensuring customers feel confident their meter reading has been successfully submitted and is under review by an OVO agent.
Efficiency for agents: Minimising inaccurate meter readings to prevent unnecessary support tickets in agents’ case management systems.
The Data Uncovers More
The analytics dashboard revealed different types of errors — at least six.
Talking with my software engineers, I uncovered an additional group of customers using multi-rate meters, which added complexity to the error scenarios.
Armed with this new insight, I designed a set of tailored error messages to address these varied issues.
Explored and Tested Ideas
Team sketching
Using the user flows for reference, I sketched ideas with engineers on the different scenarios and types of errors that can occur. From the sketching sessions, we considered:
How customers with a multi-rate meter can interact with the app to give multiple readings in one go.
The physical placement of error messages on the screen and when it was best to display them.
The team shared their sketches, we shared feedback, and the group chose ideas based on technical feasibility and more importantly what would make an efficient interaction for the customer.
Refining content
I was fortunate enough to have a content designer to support refining the microcopy with me.
I spun up a document, pasted over the text for each error message, and we worked closely to refine it according to the brand guidelines of the tone of voice.
From this point, the content took priority, so the high-fidelity designs would have to wait until we knew how long the text would be.
New designs ready for release
The outcome
My team pushed the new content live to customers. We saw an increase in customers submitting their meter readings successfully. I kept an eye on the call centre, and it looked like there were fewer calls on the meter read issues.
I saw a reduction of 981 people visiting the help centre in the app in the past month, which was a good enough indicator for my team to declare this design as successful.