The EV Charger Journey

With the rise in popularity of electric vehicles in the West Coast, residents in a certain state have become increasingly interested in installing electric vehicle (EV) chargers in their homes.  

When installation involves upgrading a panel and/or infrastructure, customers initiate a process with LPComp called a "New Business Request (NBR)", and that is where our story begins.  Conic was asked to help LPComp improve how they handle NBRs, a process which was taking (in the worst cases) up to a whole year, and was garnering a lot of negative feedback from residents involved.

LPComp's Context
1-hour interview with LPComp exec
1-hour interview with EV SME

As we began the project, we wanted to get a sense for what went into the process of installing an EV charger in a residential area, as well as what LPComp considered their role in the process to be.  

We learned that for newly built houses, the EV charger installation process has the potential to happen relatively pain-free due to modern electrical panels and updated infrastructure.  However, many neighborhoods in the southern part of the state exist of houses that were built in the 1950s or earlier, making it highly likely that a panel upgrade and updates to their electrical infrastructure would be needed before a contractor can install an EV charger. 

LPComp's POV is that they had the most impact on the installation process when they are responsible for updating the transformer and approving process for a panel upgrade, so they expected to need to change the most about those processes. 

With our new context, it was time to see what resident's experienced during this process.

During this phase, we wanted to talk to residents that were in the process of installation and ones that finished the project, prioritizing those whose NBRs took 6+ months to complete. 

We put what we learned about the process from LPComp aside and started with a blank slate for the residents.  Our interviews all started out the same way with a broad request: “Can you walk us through your experience with installing your EV charger so far?”.  Customers would explain the steps they took as they remembered it, and after they finished we would ask follow up questions to make sure we had enough context for each step of their journey. We dove deep into their experience, starting with their inspiration for installing an EV charger all the way through getting their first few energy bills after successful installation.

These interviews highlighted that residents engage LPComp as early as the "interest" phase of their EV journey, and that the process of finding a contractor and understanding what steps are necessary throughout the process are big factors in the resident's overall experience.

To get the full picture, we added Contractors and LPComp customer service reps as secondary stakeholders to our map, and also determined we needed LPComp SMEs to help fill in some gaps of the internal processes.

The pieces of the puzzle really came together after talking with the new stakeholders.  We uncovered many potential bottlenecks when learning about how much the contractors and LPComp reps have to be in contact. One to highlight was that customer service reps are the first point of contact for this process, but they don't have any visibility into the progress of the NBR past the service request form they submit on behalf of the customers.  

After all of the interviews were completed, we synthesized all of the data into a journey map and established nine overarching steps in the process.  We decided that this map would need to dictate separately what customers, contractors, and LPComp reps do during each step, because at times they act alone, and other times their actions are directly impacted by others.

Throughout the journey, we identified nine “Moments of Truth”, which are specific points in the journey where the outcome can make or break the experience for the customer, specifically in terms of efficiency and trust.  In those moments, we highlight some “bright spots” that customers have experienced that made the process easy/fast or enjoyable, and broke down some “pain points” that customers shared that caused time delays, high cost, or even emotional damage.

We presented this to LPComp's executives and other necessary reps to help them see the whole process from a resident’s and contractor’s point of view.  It was also beneficial to be able to show them where internal processes may be breaking down and affecting employees, especially in the customer service sector.

Now that we knew the actual journey, it was time to start thinking about what the ideal journey would look like for residents.  We designed and facilitated generative and futuring workshops for LPComp reps to create ideas for brand-new processes/services to implement, as well as how to fix current processes.  

The most important and beneficial aspect of these workshops was that LPComp employees of all different levels and backgrounds were brought into one room. We carefully crafted an environment where high level managers were ideating with call center representatives on the same playing field. Everyone brought their own experiences and expertise to the table, and it was great getting people who work in different departments to interact and be able to work out kinks in real time.