Power to your users, with the power of our Crowd
If the push for renewable solutions, climate change, and the current energy crisis weren’t enough, changing customer expectations and digitalization have become two of the biggest disruptions facing the energy and utilities industry.
Providing an exceptional and connected experience is vital – but only 20% of utilities currently provide a seamless customer experience!1 For those wanting to stay competitive and gain loyal customers, getting them right is essential.
New Horizons: The Importance of CX in the Digital Transformation of Energy & Utilities
Being change-ready and customer-centric
Innovative technologies appearing every day, customers expecting personalized attention, never-ending regulatory changes, and the need to digitalize, decarbonize, and decentralize are disrupting the energy and utilities industry.
These challenges are further compounded by the need to quickly get products to market and develop customer-centric solutions that deliver a flexible, reliable, secure, and overall positive and empathetic user experience – at every touchpoint they have with your business. To meet these increasingly complex challenges, providers, and their solutions, must be customer-centric, agile, and highly change-ready.
Show moreBeyond total digital transformation and meeting regulations that encourage transitioning to renewable energy, it’s the customer that is proving to be arguably the most disruptive element. They expect the same digital experience they receive from other industries, especially retail, and often will settle for nothing less. Support 24/7/365. Seamless and frictionless interactions with your services – on demand. The ability to shift and change plans from any device. Everything has to provide a positive, effortless experience that develops trust.
But what devices do they use? What version is their operating system? Does your smart meter work in any house at any location? How well does your mobile app perform on all these multiple devices? Does everything connect as it should, regardless of where they’re used? How well does it all connect to your legacy systems?
Every digital solution must provide a wonderful experience, be secure, and create value for your customers. It’s the best way to build trust and gain ongoing loyalty both today and well into the future.
Show lessPower your solutions with crowdtesting
Creating digital solutions that your customers will love requires real people to test them. This is the true power of crowdtesting. Unbiased feedback from actual people who directly resemble your customers.
With access to one of the biggest and most active global community of testers, we can test your products wherever they’ll be used, and with millions of different devices on hand, on the exact devices and operating systems they’re designed for. Apps, chatbots, smart energy devices, smart meters, energy industry software, everything can be conveniently, easily, and thoroughly tested in real-world conditions.
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From e-mobility app testing, EV charging testing, Usability and UX Testing to Customer Journey Testing, we can test your solution at every stage of its development and use, while helping you to fully optimize both your solution and the customer experience.
Today, highly personalized, streamlined, and user-friendly utility customer experiences are mandatory. It doesn’t matter if they’re looking for information, wanting to change their plans, or talking with your AI-driven customer service, the experience must meet their expectations at all times and be something they implicitly trust. Wherever they are and at any time. Expectations are constantly changing and becoming more demanding.
This is why it’s essential that your business, and your digital solutions and processes, are agile and able to meet any change and challenge. Testing only in a lab, on a limited range of devices, and against only a few unique situations, ensures issues can be missed. And opportunities.
With actual people doing your testing in virtually any location, closely fitting your customers’ profiles, and using the devices they use, crowdtesting delivers fast, real, unbiased, and measurable results.
Show lessHow we’re helping to energize digital solutions
Power to all: An online portal to usability
Our client, a large German energy provider, had developed an online portal for customers to review their plans, change details, order hardware, and receive support via an online chatbot. As new features were developed, they would be inserted into a prototype of the portal to check everything worked as intended before updates to the existing portal went live.
Everything had to work seamlessly and be appealing, from its user-friendliness, information architecture, and even its zeitgeist (that its look and feel is of its time). Crowdtesters then tested the portal from login, ordering a wall box, evaluating their chatbot, invoicing, and the overall usability and user experience.
To ensure immediate and honest reactions, remote interviews were used to see how they interacted with the portal in real time. The initial testing looked at the portal’s overall usability and the user experience, including navigation, colors, and information. When issues were found, testers rated the problem as moderate, irritating, or severe.
Additional testing focused on the portal’s chatbot where testers manually entered their electricity meter reading into the portal and used the chatbot to send the reading.
Finally, a new team of testers went through a simulated process of ordering a wallbox for their home (they wouldn’t actually receive such a device). Placed into three groups – those interested in e-mobility, the average motorist, and people who own an e-car and a wallbox – each group underwent four use cases and answered 20+ open and rating-focused questions.
With such comprehensive and in-depth testing of the portal’s updates, we were able to help them optimize each new feature.
Surf and ride: Optimizing the customer journey
When you’re out and about in your e-car, the last thing you need to worry about is where’s the next charging station. Our client wanted to create a baseline for where they could measure future improvements, and this meant testing to see how the app performed when looking for charging stations, during the charging process, and when registering for a tariff.
This meant finding thirty crowdtesters who not only lived in a mix of densely and sparsely populated areas but who had a hybrid plug-in or fully electric car. They also had to have a healthy mix of Android and iOS versions (overall, each tester had a unique version). Eight use cases were then developed to focus on each relevant section, including finding a station, receiving information about tariffs, being charged for the charge, and getting support via the app.
On average, feedback was positive around the user interface and the information provided and our comprehensive testing ensured any issues were quickly identified and fixed well before the product hit the road.
With real-world feedback and recommendations from the testers, we could also show exactly where the product had to be optimized while providing a range of improvement suggestions.
Day and night: Putting the customer in charge
Our client developed an app to help their customers coordinate the charging from their solar panels to their home and electric car. Updates were then made within a prototype so they could be thoroughly tested before release.
To see if it worked correctly in real-world conditions, we sourced seven crowdtesters for one-hour-long remote interviews to look over the prototype app. Each tester then used the app to simulate the activation of their solar charging, to cancel the service, and provide feedback.
Everything started with registering the ‘PV Anlage’ (PV System), which required the creation of a simulated subscription plan (to charge, change settings, and set up preferences). They were then asked to discuss/identify areas that were clear or unclear, whether information was sufficient, and graphics okay. They then connected the app to their charger and identified any issues or obstacles when doing so before connecting their cars to the simulated system and activating the charging process. All steps were discussed, and any problems identified. Finally, the testers went through the process of canceling the service. Was the option easy to find? Were there any issues while doing so?
Overall, the app rated highly with the testers and based on comprehensive feedback, our client was able to further optimize their solution before releasing the real version.
Use the power of people to build flexible, trusted products that provide an experience your customers love!
Create empowering solutions with crowdtesters
Today’s energy and utilities customers have elevated expectations when it comes to their digital devices and want them to help streamline their plans, intelligently minimize energy and water usage, provide instant support, assist with EV charging, and much more.
Already familiar with digital solutions from other industries, they expect their devices to work perfectly on any device and operating system, wherever they are, whenever they want to use it. All while providing a positive and personalized experience. Getting these elements right can build trust and ongoing loyalty.
This is where our highly flexible and fully customizable crowdtesting services, including Customer Journey Testing and Usability Testing, can help you create fully optimized, dependable, and secure digital solutions – regardless of where and when they’re used!
Real people, tangible results
With the help of our crowdtesting services and project managers’ knowledge, we can help you better understand what your customers experience when using your digital solutions so you can create an unforgettable customer journey.
You can then streamline your testing efforts and optimize your time-to-market and development flexibility – all while maximizing your existing resources.
No matter where you are, our remote testing has you covered. Real users with real devices that match your customers. All via our platform, the Nest.
Build digital solutions that people will love
- Global community of over 1,000,000 users & 1,500,000 devices
- Cost-effectively optimize your product’s design, functionality, and performance
- Ensure that your digital solution works with a wide variety of technologies and hardware
- Hand-picked crowdtesters that match your customers
