Case study: E.ON

Imagining and validating customer focused propositions at speed

Bright sparks

3.8 million customers choose E.ON for their energy, making them one of the leading providers in the UK. In an increasingly competitive and price-drive market, E.ON's aim is to use new technologies to make energy simpler, smarter and more sustainable. E.ON approached 383 looking for a partner to help develop and test new digital propositions, building on their core offering to give customers more reasons to stay than price alone.

Team effort

We followed our rapid prototyping framework to create, validate and test new propositions at speed. Our starting point was a series of ideation workshops, working with the E.ON team across marketing, retention, B2B, customer support and installation to ensure a broad view of potential solutions and break down internal silos. Alongside generating ideas, we worked with the E.ON team to build their internal skills and capabilities, helping them to adopt a product thinking approach.

Thinking caps

Over a three month period we generated a total of 35 high level proposition ideas with the E.ON team, looking at everything from integrating smart home devices with energy accounts to how flexible tariffs could allow customers with electric vehicles to make better use of solar and battery power. From all the concepts generated, we created a backlog of eight validated ideas to be added to the existing roadmap. Three were selected to be developed by 383, moving from initial concept to launched prototype in under five weeks.

Testing the theory

By tracking the use of these MVPs we were able to gather critical analytics data about how people used them. Combined with UX observations, this gave us a greater understanding not only of what we were seeing, but why. The lessons enabled us to feed back a series of design improvements to carry forwards to the next iteration and hand over early-doors platforms to internal teams.

383 combine vision and strategy with a practical lens and down to earth approach to getting things done. Working with them was great. We were able to quickly develop and iterate ideas, and they provided a set of tangible tools and processes that we could use long after our initial engagement.

Job Done

Meet E.ON See Recommends

This beta platform provided a series of interactive recommendations for customers, based on their recent energy consumption, to help identify quick wins around the home and relevant energy products. Working at speed enabled E.ON to quickly understand which of these interactive recommendations had the best chance of conversion, providing valuable insight to future campaigns and products.