Working with EDF Energy - 500 customers to test Howz!

On 28th September 2018 we launched our free trial for 500 EDF Energy customers.  The customers received an email inviting them to register their interest in the trial, and within the first 8 hours all 500 kits had been allocated.

In the 3 months leading up to this launch we have been working hard on our customer journey to make it as easy as possible for people to order, install, and use Howz.  We have a brand new box design, updated and simplified user instructions, and a brand new app interface.  It has been fascinating to hear the feedback from our testers and customers up to this point, and to understand where the challenges lie for this group.  Much of the smart home equipment is aimed at the early adopter market and so the instructions are quite technical in their nature.  We have worked with our design team at Creative10 to get the format right to take our customers through the entire process on a user guide, and videos on the website have also proved useful.  Our new website launched in June this year has proved to be very successful with customers accessing their information in a clean and simple format, and able to control their account, alert settings, and data sharing in one place.

To date 300 customers have received their kits with the final 200 due to go out next week.  We have been changing and amending our advice and support with each round of feedback received.  The trial participants have been very positive about the product and helped us address difficulties they faced to improve it for the next group.  We are working hard to build a relationship with this cohort to maximise the opportunity of such a large scale trial.  It is clear already that the personal touch makes a real difference and the ability to pick up the phone and talk to people is invaluable for this type of customer.  Our customer management system enables us to deal with the scale of this trial, and our automated responses for common issues saves us a huge amount of time making the phone calls manageable.  We see direct customer contact as a perk of this job, getting to hear from people using Howz first hand is a real privilege and reminds us why we are doing this.

We will be working with the EDF Energy team to evaluate this trial and develop our customer journey even further.