Client Background

Client: Bristol Water

Industry: Utility

Products/ Services/ Core Business: Water supply & treatment, wastewater treatment & management, storm water service 

Geo: UK

Challenge

With increasing demands and the new measure of experience for Customers and Developers from OFWAT - The Water Services Regulation Authority in the UK, Bristol water recognised that their continued success is linked to superior customer and developer satisfaction.

As Digital is one of the main interaction points for their customers, Bristol Water were looking to completely overhaul their digital experience by launching on a new more modern and fit-for-purpose platform, improving user journeys and implementing a new redesign and site build delivering a more consistent experience in the new brand. 

As part of this Digital transformation they were looking to achieve several things:

• Build a new platform that has the ability to grow and evolve with the business
• Improve the end-user experience so that users can easily find the information they are looking for and complete tasks they came to the website to do
• Implement a better employee experience, reducing production times by 20% and increasing agility to respond to customer and regulatory requirements
• Develop an end-to-end service capability, digitising 100% of their application forms, allowing service agents to manage tickets throughout the process and customers to track their own progress

Solution

We worked collaboratively with Bristol Water using agile sprints, to build an integrated offering that placed the customer and employee at the center.  A new site information architecture was built to simply the user experience and this was supported through a new design and UX approach, all built on the chosen platform, which could cater to their end-to-end needs via a fully featured content management system (CMS) and service hub. We leveraged our human-centric approach to truly transform the customer experience through several capabilities, including:

• Service design workshops and in-depth user interviews with both employees and customers were used to gain key insights and identify pain and gain points which were then mapped out into core journeys for both 'front-stage' and 'back-stage' and synthesised to build out a new site information architecture, addressing many of the existing user journey issues and implementing quick wins. 
• Atomic design was at the very heart of how we approached this redesign. We used the bootstrap framework and atomic design principles to first design the basic elements and then build them out to fully functioning components, templates and ultimately pages using sketches then through to rapid prototyping allowing us to quickly iterate and review with the client.
• We built a fully functional light design system and some much-needed digital brand guidelines, page templates, and component libraries for the client which really helped bring their site experience right up to date, whilst also introducing the new branding and much-needed consistency.
• A fully integrated digital experience platform with their existing IT estate using APIs to provide automation and remove repeated manual effort
• Way of working -  The entire project was delivered using an agile approach by applying new-age engineering method, model, machinery, and mindset (4M), from research, into design/UX and into development and launch, delivering the website and new service capabilities in parallel in iterative increments delivering on time and on budget.

Business Impact

• Improved customer experience - Web led experience
• Improved employee experience - Operational efficiency due to workflow automation
• Consistent branding across websites.