At RheinEnergie, the opportunity to significantly improve customer satisfaction and operational efficiency presented itself through the enhancement of our self-service capabilities. We identified a critical need to build a comprehensive digital help center that would empower both new and existing customers to resolve their issues independently, thereby reducing the reliance on traditional customer service channels.

This initiative aimed not only to enhance the overall customer experience but also to lower operational costs associated with customer service. By investing in extensive user research, including silent listenings, interviews, and user tests, we were able to gather valuable insights to inform the design and development of the support platform.

This project marked a significant step in transforming our customer service approach and delivering a more efficient, user-friendly solution for our customers.

How might we align stakeholders and generate innovative solutions through a collaborative design thinking workshop?

To kick off the project, we conducted a one-day design thinking workshop that brought together all stakeholders, product owners, and designers. The goal was to explore key user problems and optimize main use cases. We began by examining major benchmarks to inspire potential solutions. Following this, we analyzed user journeys and pain points for the three primary use cases, utilizing techniques like 'crazy eights' to generate ideas and identify challenges framed as 'how might we' questions. During the subsequent ideation session, these challenges guided us in sketching prototypes of our ideas. The workshop concluded with a discussion of these prototypes. Overall, this workshop was invaluable in aligning all participants and establishing a common understanding and vision for the project.

What's the projects scope and timeframe?

When colleagues describe me, they always mention my strong organizational skills. This preference for structure, order, and planning was crucial when we started the project. A major initial step  was to create a project roadmap with all stakeholders, providing a clear overview of the project's timeline, necessary tasks, and planned milestones. This roadmap was instrumental in helping stakeholders understand the complex effort required to build a help center from scratch and set accurate expectations from the outset.

What do we want to find out and what kind of research do we need to conduct?

To define the research scope and set clear expectations, the first step was to create a comprehensive UX research plan and align it with stakeholders. This plan outlined research objectives, corresponding methods, and logistical requirements for the studies. By using this research plan as our foundation, the help center team and I remained focused on the who, what, why, and when of our research efforts.

To gain a deeper understanding of user needs regarding customer service, we employed silent listenings and contextual inquiries. Silent listenings involved listening to live phone calls in customer service, allowing us to directly hear customers' concerns and collect common pain points for analysis. One major insight was that technical jargon used on the website and by customer service agents created significant hurdles for customers, causing confusion and uncertainty. By listening to customers' language and expressions, we compiled a set of user-centered terms to address use cases more clearly and helpfully.

In addition to silent listenings, we interviewed customer service agents and observed them in their work environment. This provided us with insights into frequently asked questions and common customer challenges. We discovered that the variety of topics and use cases customers contact agents about daily was much broader than anticipated. This underscored the need for the help center to address a wide range of support topics and be extremely well-structured to ensure all users could quickly find answers to their diverse questions.

Besides qualitative research, we also performed tracking and SEO analysis to identify relevant keywords and assess the performance of existing FAQs. This revealed key search terms used by customers and highlighted which FAQs were most and least effective, informing subsequent content adjustments.

To understand how competitors handle online self-support services and identify best practices, we conducted a market analysis for benchmarks. This analysis provided insights into how both direct competitors and companies from other industries structure and present their online help centers. We learned effective ways to organize content for different use cases, design start pages, and structure detailed information pages. Additionally, we observed how competitors utilize navigation features, searches, and contact forms.

We found that effective help centers use user-centric language and organize content into specific use cases. A prominent feature is a powerful search function with data-driven auto-fill, auto-suggest, and filter options, complemented by recommendations for frequently searched topics to streamline information retrieval. Topics are clearly grouped into FAQ clusters and utilize data-driven filter tags, with 'most read' as the default.

Transforming Research Data into Actionable Insights

‍We collected, analyzed, clustered, and prioritized data from both qualitative and quantitative research to generate actionable and easily understandable insights. Given the wide range of topics related to energy supply services, we addressed this complexity by creating tangible role profiles. Each profile included a use case, characteristics, quotes, motivations, tasks, pains, and needs, effectively managing the diversity of insights.

Defining Our Goals and Value Proposition

After the initial research phase, we convened a product vision workshop with all stakeholders to review insights and refine the help center’s product vision. We examined both business and user perspectives, mapping out business challenges and goals alongside user needs to craft a clear value proposition. The workshop also involved identifying potential risks, defining success metrics, and outlining next steps. In my role, I prepared, facilitated, and post-processed the workshop, while also representing the user perspective in the content discussions.

The UX concept for the help center features a start page with a prominent search bar and an overview of support topics displayed as clickable tiles. Users can either use the search bar to type their query or browse the tiles to find relevant topics. For those needing further assistance, a prominent teaser directs them to a contact page below the tiles.

The search function, positioned both on the start page and in the header for accessibility from any page, leverages data to offer tags and frequently searched terms, helping users quickly find answers. Search results are prioritized based on user data, with the most relevant FAQs displayed at the top.

Detail pages are designed to address common questions on specific topics, primarily through expandable FAQ modules that include text and graphics. If users still need help, they can contact customer service via a contact form, phone number, or email, with the contact page allowing users to specify their issue for a more efficient resolution.

To validate the developed concept, we planned user testing for both desktop and mobile devices, focusing on the start page, primary and secondary search functions, detail pages, and the contact page. We created detailed test flows for both platforms to guide the prototype development.

However, due to budget constraints and the pandemic restrictions, the user testing was cancelled. Instead, we validated the concept quantitatively by analyzing tracking data, examining user interactions, content views, and search keywords.