We spoke with Mo Nuur, Product Lead for CX & Digital, who manages the E.ON Next website and app. A strategic leader with 15 years of experience in the industry, Mo joined the company to build high-performing digital product strategies that drive both customer and commercial success.
The E.ON Next Product Team uses Chattermill to understand customer experiences with their digital products, like the online app and digital billing. Insights from Chattermill help them improve features and address common pain points for thousands of customers.
Key Results
- Launched innovative features like "Billy" and "Smarty" apps based on direct customer feedback
- Reduced billing-related support calls by 5.5% and emails by 4.5%
- Increased online billing Customer Happiness Index by 48%
Challenge
Q: Tell me about your big goals at the moment. What are you currently focusing on?
Mo: At the very heart of our goals, and what I'd call our North Star metric, is ensuring customer experience excellence. We have six key customer journeys - covering everything from a customer receiving a bill to paying it or contacting us about it.
Our goal is to ensure that, by the end of these journeys, customers are not only satisfied and have their needs met but also become promoters of our brand because their experience throughout the journey was exceptional.
Q: What are the key metrics you monitor on a day-to-day basis?
Mo: One of the key metrics we track daily is the Customer Happiness Index (CHI). This measures how happy - or unhappy - customers feel at the end of their journey. Another critical metric is NPS. For example, at the end of a customer journey, we ask customers how likely they are to recommend E.ON Next. We aim to consistently fall within the promoter score range because we want to grow as a brand through word of mouth.
Achieving that requires being obsessed with customer experience, and data is essential for that. We also monitor territory-specific KPIs, such as identifying specific touchpoints within the journey where people drop off. This helps us focus on the areas that need the most attention within the broader journey.
Q: How do you collect and analyze data, and what are the key touchpoints for gathering it?
Mo: Data is absolutely critical to how we function within a Product Team. To sum it up, our customer experience model is built on three pillars: rapid discovery, rapid validation, and rapid delivery. Within the rapid discovery pillar, data plays the most important role - it's absolutely key.
We collect customer feedback from various sources, including Trustpilot, app stores, social media, and email. The volume of feedback we receive is significant - it's in the hundreds of thousands - and it continues to grow year after year as our digital base expands.
Q: Why did E.ON Next decide to use a tool like Chattermill to analyze NPS and customer feedback?
Mo: Without Chattermill, analyzing feedback becomes an incredibly manual effort. Good luck trying to sift through and make sense of hundreds of thousands of feedback entries manually - whether it's understanding what customers are saying, determining their sentiment, or linking that feedback to business KPIs. It's slow and inefficient, often relying on spreadsheets.
These days, customers expect their problems to be solved instantly. You need to be able to react quickly, and that means having data at your fingertips.
Solution
Q: How does your team use Chattermill on a day-to-day basis? Are there specific reports or dashboards you rely on?
Mo: Every Monday, we have a CX roundtable meeting with the whole Product and CX team. We focus on identifying the key themes that emerged in the previous week. We look for common threads that may have contributed to customer dissatisfaction.
For example, a recent instance involved a spike in detractor comments from customers who had upgraded to iOS 18. They were experiencing issues with the app after the update, and Chattermill helped us identify this trend. This insight allowed us to react quickly and address the issue before it escalated further, thanks to the insights we gathered from Chattermill.
Q: Have you seen any results since fixing the issue with the iOS 18 update?
Mo: It was a quick fix - just a small tweak that took us about half a day. Since then, the number of related comments has dropped by at least 90%. This has been a great improvement, and we were able to resolve the issue quickly thanks to the insights we gathered through Chattermill.
Q: Any particular favorite features of Chattermill that you're using on a day-to-day basis?
Sentiment analysis is one that I really value. With millions of feedback comments over the last few years, being able to quickly analyze whether feedback is positive or negative is incredibly valuable. I also love the ability to search by keywords, like typing in "app" and filtering by positive or negative comments from the past week or month. Most of my time is spent looking at negative feedback, and that sentiment analysis really helps. Additionally, the ability to filter by customer type has been crucial for targeting specific issues more accurately.
Q: How do you share those insights from Chattermill with the rest of the organization?
Mo: We share Chattermill insights through its intuitive interface, allowing us to directly share dashboards with stakeholders instead of creating PowerPoint presentations. Most stakeholders use it regularly because it's easy to navigate. By regularly viewing these insights, we can better understand customers' frustrations, motivations, and needs. We even have Chattermill dashboards displayed in several of our offices across the country for easy access.
Results
Q: How do you use the insights from Chattermill? What decisions are impacted by those insights?
Mo: There are two main ways we use Chattermill. Apart from providing us with rapid insights into data, the first is securing buy-in from sponsors and senior stakeholders. Chattermill enables us to go to our leadership team and say, "We want to prioritize this feature next because we have the data to show that it's a significant pain point for customers.
It helps us demonstrate how certain issues are driving churn, leading to negative app reviews, and lowering our Trustpilot scores. This makes it incredibly valuable for getting our sponsors and leadership team aligned with our priorities.
Secondly, it helps us as Product Managers make informed decisions when building our roadmaps and developing prioritization strategies.
Q: Can you tell me more about how you leverage Chattermill for prioritization during the roadmap phase?
Mo: Sure! I'll give you a tangible example. At the start of this year, we assessed our key customer journeys using a traffic light system: red for journeys needing significant focus due to serious issues, yellow for those with room for improvement, and green for the ones performing well.
One key journey in the red zone was digital billing. Chattermill revealed that customers with non-functioning smart meters were more dissatisfied. Based on this insight, we launched a campaign to reach these customers, offering guidance on how to get their smart meter repaired while providing a more accurate bill.
But as we dug deeper, Chattermill revealed another issue: customers were struggling to understand how to read their smart meters. This feedback came through as multiple comments saying, "I don't know how to read my smart meter." These customers were among our biggest detractors when it came to NPS.
This insight led us to create a solution: Smarty, a companion app embedded in the digital bill. Smarty guides customers step-by-step on how to read their smart meters. After introducing Smarty, we saw a 114% increase in successful meter readings from disconnected smart meters compared to the control group that didn't use it.
Q: Can you give examples of any other insights from Chattermill that surprised you or had a big impact?
Q: One insight that confirmed a strong assumption was around billing comprehension, especially for customers on variable direct debits. Many didn’t understand why their bills increased, even though they were quoted a certain price when they joined. This led us to create 'Billy,' a digital bill that simplifies billing and includes features like FAQs, billing tips, and the ability to submit meter readings. We tested Billy with 52,000 customers, and the results were impressive: billing calls dropped by 5.5%, email support decreased by 4.5%, and customer satisfaction on the billing journey rose by 48% compared to the control group.
Another key insight was that customers who didn’t understand their bill often thought there was an error, but they were actually unaware that their smart meter had disconnected. This caused their bills to be estimated. With Chattermill’s insights, we added an 'estimated bill' flag to Billy, making it clear to customers when their bill was estimated and allowing them to submit a meter reading for an accurate bill within 24 hours.
Q: Did those product innovations improve your north-star metrics?
Mo: We measure Customer Happiness Index (CHI) across various customer journeys, and one notorious area we focus on is the online billing experience. Let's be honest - no customer is excited about looking at and paying their bill. It’s not the most thrilling journey, right?
However, insights from Chattermill helped us improve this experience. By developing tools like Billy and Smarty, and unifying the bills, we managed to increase the CHI for the online billing journey by 48%.
These changes had also a significant impact on our NPS. In September 2023, we were at +13, and right now we're at +22, on track to significantly exceed our targets for this year.
Q: What would be the impact on the Product Team if you didn't have a solution like Chattermill for analyzing feedback?
Mo: The impact? Wow, I don't even want to imagine being in that scenario. Without a tool like Chattermill, we'd probably need to build a whole team of 10 or 20 people just to sit there copying and pasting what customers are saying - whether it's on the app, Trustpilot, or social media - into spreadsheets.
They'd then need to analyze it manually, add their perspective on sentiment, and play it back to the team. That's a lot of manual work, and we all know manual processes are prone to error. Honestly, I don't think we'd even be able to manage without a tool like Chattermill.
See how you can leverage customer insights to enhance the user journey, inform the product roadmap, and improve your north-star metrics - book a demo.
