Gold Winner DriveXDesign
Project Overview
As part of a larger digital transformation at AGL, we set out to create a groundbreaking new mobile app experience. We began by examining how our customers interacted with our brand in the present day and then imagining what this relationship might look like in the future. We wanted to take advantage of native hardware, leverage powerful customer data, and envision the pivotal role our mobile app could have in customers’ lives throughout the years of exciting technological advancement ahead.
It took a nimble team of designers, writers, researchers and one full-time experience lead five months to completely redesign the AGL mobile experience from top to bottom. Once implemented, we saw saw our number of monthly users grow from 120,000 to over 450,000. We believe the reinvigorated AGL app has set a new benchmark for the industry and laid the foundation for a new kind of customer experience
Project Brief
With lofty goals to change the future, AGL found itself at an impasse; its current digital platforms weren’t fully capable of handling the services they offered customers in the present day, let alone those in the years to come. On top of that, customer digital adoption was low; many services required additional call centre support, resulting in long customer wait times, high cost to business, and an overall sense that a mobile app was a “nice to have” rather than a foundational aspect of a rapidly-growing and forward-looking business.
Our mission: design an entirely new way for customers to interact with their energy services. And while we were at it, find a way to elegantly integrate the rapidly growing suite of AGL services (solar batteries, high-speed broadband and mobile SIM plans, with many more to come).
Project Innovation/Need
The key to our success would be customer behaviour and encouraging higher engagement with the app by revitalising key service features.
Case in point: our self-serve meter read feature. When we commenced the redesign project, ~80% of our customers had non-digital meters, meaning a two-to-three month wait for them to find out their final bill amount, and all-too-frequent bill shock. The only workaround was sending a manual meter reading to AGL, a cumbersome and confusing process for many (not to mention expensive on the business side, with AGL teams often required to interpret the data).
Our app redesign completely overhauled the meter read experience: we educated customers on the benefits of sending a meter read and drastically simplified the submission process. As a result, the submission error rate dropped by 80%, and user engagement with the feature more than quadrupled within a few months. On any given day, the AGL app now seamlessly captures more than 35,000 meter reads from our customers.
Design Challenge
The previous version of the AGL mobile app was built in an old, cross-platform codebase, plagued with bad user experiences. It also threatened to buckle and break under the addition of multi-product retail services like broadband and mobile. It would require a complete reimagining and a top-to-bottom redesign to increase digital adoption and future-proof the platform for another decade of rapid expansion into the multi-product retailer space.
Many of our challenges were the same as those we faced when building the app the first time around: grappling with the SAP data for millions of customers; catering to an enormous breadth of user experience, from the single-service punter to the heavily-invested solar installer; and, as ever, finding an intuitive way to visualise and demystify vast of amounts of usage and billing data into a seamless, interactive handheld experience.
The project would cater to both iOS and Android users, and would have to tackle an underlying customer concern head-on: namely, a lack of trust in the industry at large. For years, customers have felt unsure exactly they were paying for, and doubted whether they have any real control over their household utility costs.
With that in mind, our design goals were clear: usability, transparency, and empowerment. These were the core tenets we kept front of mind as we set about reimagining the AGL app.
User Experience
The AGL app redesign project incorporated numerous rounds of refinement and user testing for multiple scenarios over a five-month period. In the end, our design and delivery team presented both iOS and Android users with a completely revamped and streamlined native experience, freely available to our 4.2 million customers across Australia.
The payment feature was distilled into a seamless three-tap experience, and now processes 150,000 successful mobile payments per month. Multi-channel integration of messaging and an always-on Virtual Assistant have slashed customer support wait times and drastically improved sentiment. An industry-first feature for Tesla / LG battery customers offers real-time solar battery usage and generation data. And the native integration of payment support programs has assisted more than 10,000 customers facing hardship during the Covid-19 pandemic and beyond.
And last but not least, the new AGL app is supported with inbuilt accessibility features for any user.
Since launch, we’ve seen a massive growth in digital adoption, averaging 462,000 active users per month – and our App Store average rating has increased from 2.1 to 4.7 (and continues to grow with the release of every new, innovative feature).
