How E.ON Next Uses Customer Feedback to Shape Product Features and Improve the Billing Experience

"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.” This makes it incredibly valuable to get our sponsors and leadership team aligned with our priorities."

Mo Nuur

Product Lead for CX & Digital

Launched new apps: "Billie" and "Smarty"

Reduced billing-related support calls by 5.5% and emails by 4.5%

Increased Customer Happiness Index by 48%

Challenge

Mo Nuur, Product Lead for CX & Digital at E.ON Next, joined the company to ensure the best possible customer experiences with its digital products, such as the online app, digital billing solutions, and smart meter systems.

But prioritizing product decisions that genuinely enhance the customer experience in an energy sector organization with millions of customers, comes with unique challenges:

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Challenge: ensuring product decisions are data-driven

A key part of Mo's mission is ensuring that product decisions are grounded in solid data. Without the right signals, the team would struggle to identify and prioritize the most pressing customer pain points that need to be addressed.

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"That's why 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," he adds.

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Getting stakeholder buy-in for product initiatives

Another challenge was securing stakeholder buy-in for key projects aimed at improving the overall customer experience. This required demonstrating how these product initiatives would positively impact their key performance metrics.

"We needed solid data 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," says Mo.

"We needed a tool to help us demonstrate how certain issues are driving churn, leading to negative app reviews, and lowering our Trustpilot scores," he adds.

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Time-consuming and unscalable manual analysis

The team recognized that analyzing thousands of customer interactions across the entire user journey would be a complex task. To ensure consistent, high-quality insights, they needed to automate this process at scale.

"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," Mo explains.

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Solution

E.ON Next implemented Chattermill to enable multiple teams across the organization to have consistent, actionable customer insights, enabling data-driven decision-making.

For Product teams, Chattermill plays a vital role in supporting the following areas:

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Identifying and prioritizing product issues

At E.ON Next, Product teams rely on Chattermill to pinpoint issues that have the biggest impact on customer experience. By identifying the most frequently mentioned pain points, they can effectively prioritize which improvements to address first.

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"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. 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%," he adds.

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Uncovering why key product metrics drop

With Chattermill, Product teams can now pinpoint the key issues that have the greatest negative impact on NPS and other product metrics.

For instance, they recently identified that customer concerns related to smart meters were significantly driving NPS scores down.

"Chattermill helped us discover that some 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,” says Mo.

These insights led E.ON Next to create a solution: Smarty, a complementary app embedded in their digital billing solutions.

"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."

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Launching new billing solutions

After identifying key customer pain points using Chattermill, Product teams at E.ON Next not only implemented necessary fixes but also developed new features and capabilities. These innovations have significantly enhanced the overall user experience.

One example is the creation of "Billie," a digital billing solution designed to improve the customer billing experience.

"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 'Billie,' a digital bill that simplifies billing and includes features like FAQs, billing tips, and the ability to submit meter readings," says Mo.

After introducing "Billie" to a select group of customers, the team observed a significant decrease in the number of customer inquiries related to billing issues.

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Results

Over time, the Product team at E.ON Next has implemented numerous enhancements and innovations inspired by authentic customer feedback. From addressing bugs and resolving product issues to launching new features, they have tackled challenges that directly impact key performance metrics.

These efforts have resulted in significant improvements, particularly in the Customer Happiness Index for the billing experience.

"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?" says Mo.

"However, insights from Chattermill helped us improve this experience. By developing tools like Billie and Smarty, and unifying the bills, we managed to increase the CHI for the online billing journey by 48%," he adds.

Overall, the product changes implemented by the E.ON Next team, driven by customer insights, have significantly improved their Net Promoter Score (NPS).

"These changes had also a significant impact on our NPS. In September 2023, we were at +9, and right now we're at +22, on track to significantly exceed our targets for this year," says Mo.