Optimizing Digital Bill Payment Experience

During my time with Conic Group, we worked with a large power company on the West Coast that wanted to understand the current user experience with Payment Assistance options across different channels (i.e., live agent, IVR, website, mobile app) in order to identify current pain points.

My Conic team led an 6-week sprint to create a Customer Journey Map that showcases what a typical experience is for a customer exploring payment assistance options, enrolling in subsidy programs, and maintaining their status with those programs. We also performed a UX heuristic evaluation of the website and mobile app to highlight problem areas that aligned with the customer experience, and provided recommendations for improving usability, information architecture, and accessibility.

For the confidentiality of this project, the company involved will be referred to as LPComp (large power company), and aspects of the deliverables shown will be redacted.

The story begins...

LPComp

High volume of calls, negative feedback about website and app, people struggling to pay bills yet small number applying for Income Qualified Payment programs and payment assistance programs

How might LPComp optimize their digital pathways to become the option of choice for self-serve customers?

According to a 2021 study by the Pew Research Center, 15% of American adults are “smartphone-only” internet users, meaning, they own a smartphone but have no home broadband service (and, therefore, likely to not be using a computer at home).

Highest percentages of smartphone-only internet users across different criteria:

By Age: 28% for adults aged 18 - 29.
By Race: 25% for Hispanic adults.
By Income: 27% for adults who make $30,000 or less per year.
By Education: 23% for adults with a high school or lower education attainment level.

In other words, people who are trying to apply for Income Qualified Programs (IQPs) are more likely than people who are not applying for these programs to…

Be accessing your channels only from their smartphone.
Not speak English as their primary language.
Have a high school or lower education attainment level.

How might the website be designed to make it easy for smartphone-only users to self-serve?

Listening Phase

During this phase, we dove into customer feedback data and sorted through thousands of responses to find ones that related directly to experience with bill payment, signing up for payment and assistance programs, and relevant experiences with using the digital touchpoints. To manage time and budget, we looked at data on the extremes of the spectrum of satisfaction.

To fill in the gaps in our knowledge of the behind the scenes processes, we interviewed SMEs, CAPs Advisors, and customer service representatives from LPComp to get a full picture of the services provided and their experience of what customers have said they have struggled with the most.

We generated a summary spreadsheet of barriers to self-service that customers mentioned, along with the affected web pages associated with each barrier.

“I am upset because I was not notified when my CARE expired! Just looked-up my account because my recent bill is so extraordinarily high, and noticed that my "rate" did not specify CARE as I thought it would. I did not know that I had to re-apply every two years.” - Customer

“I’d say 50% of customers calling about payment assistance have not tried self-serve first. They are either too panicked about being at risk for disconnection, or they are older and do not want to deal with the website or the app. These people want to set up payment arrangements or enroll in assistance programs over the phone.” - Energy Advisor

Framing Phase

Throughout the journey, we identified several barriers that prevented customers from succeeding at self-service digitally, physically, and mentally.

After all of the data analysis and interviews were completed, we synthesized the customer experience into a journey map and established six overarching steps in the process. It was important to highlight the cyclical nature between steps, since many customers end up finding roadblocks that cause them to start over again, or they reach the end of the journey unintentionally and have to go back to the middle. We wanted to highlight not only specific explores positive and negative experience that can be had by customers, and highlights important barriers that effect

Below are examples of barrier highlights with screenshots of the user experience and user flows.

Conclusion

We ended our project with LPComp very optimistic about their leadership's plan for prototyping and implementing these processes!

As we concluded our involvement with this project, LPComp, we encouraged them to send updates about the project to the interviewees to let them know (generally) how their feedback and thoughts would impact future improvements to the process.

We look forward to seeing the new LPComp digital experience updates!

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