Seattle City Light Payment Plan Service Evaluation

Partnering with Seattle City Light (SCL) to help customers pay their bills on time

My role: Coach, Mentor, Subject Matter Expert (SME), Facilitator

Timeline: 2 months

My Goal:

• Empower the Seattle City Light Customer Experience team with tools and methods to help them evaluate their payment plan programs for low-income city residents.

• Save the City money by scaling our customer journey mapping services so departments are less reliant on consultants

Goals:

• Evaluate the effectiveness of payment plan programs

• Understand how customers and frontline staff experience the payment plans

• Identify opportunities for improve customers’ program completion and avoid defaulting on payments.

Problem:

• As COVID-19 hit, customers' past due balances continued to rise, with SCL growing concerned their low-income payment plan programs would be overwhelmed and less people would finish the program successfully

• SCL had recently completed some light outreach to customer service and found that their 3 programs: Payment plans, Payment assistance, and Payment arrangements were confusing customers.

The Approach:

SCL needed a systematic way to understand their customer’s needs, evaluate their current state, and ideate solutions. As the lead for digital services design team, I kicked off the project facilitating brainstorming with my team to solicit ideas about different methods we believed would help achieve SCL’s goals. We believed conducting in-depth research with customers and internal customer service staff would yield a lot of valuable insights.

How we worked

We discussed with SCL who should lead the project and I strongly believed they should own it, and we would partner and coach them along the way. This way they would feel confident when we left about socializing results and keep the needed ongoing discussions to make lasting changes. Reluctantly, they agreed.

I led in-depth coaching sessions with SCL, and my designers prepared templates, study guides, and conducted interview prep.

My team took turns leading interviews with customers with SCL notetakers, then switching to SCL taking the lead interviewing with my team as notetakers.

I created a timeline with phases and activities, including milestones with input from SCL. I wanted to make sure everyone involved felt ownership and understanding of the project scope, roles, and deliverables we were all committing to.

decided to help them create a journey map to find the gaps in their current service.

At times, I coached the designers through parts of the process, and in turn, they coached Seattle City Light (SCL). I acted as a Design Research subject matter expert for advice on next steps, reviewing work, and to providing encouragement.

Coaching Plan

Roadmap Planning

• Created tasks and timeline

• Finding data to analyze

• Helped SCL brainstorm who to interview internally and how to recruit customers for interviews.

• Provided sample materials, including interview discussion guides and recruitment messaging.

• Helped them sell the value of conducting customer research to their stakeholders.

Weekly check-ins

• Review work and provide feedback

• Answer questions along the process

• Helped SCL team think about next steps and other methods to get them to their goals.

• As a team lead, I or one of my designers completed all the "firsts" and then SCL team took over: first interview, first research synthesis session, etc.

• Facilitating interviews

• Leading brainstorms / ideation sessions

Design Coaching Process

Data is at the core of any research to understand business problems. Just like any design project, the team guided them through thinking through quantitative and qualitative data sources.

Data from different systems showing how many people kept vs. broke their payment plans the first year.

Stakeholder and customer interviews

•  10 customers with a mix of renters/homeowners who had active or broken payment plans.

• Nine stakeholder sessions (One facilitator, one note taker, and silent observers)

  • Seattle Public Utilities Customer Contact Team

  • City Light Credit and Collections

  • City Light Business Customer Services

  • City Light Validation

  • Directors (Public Utilities and City Light)

Customer needs were grouped and themed on empathy maps

Interview notes were grouped and themed in different ways.

Empathy maps were used for customers and affinity diagramming was used for stakeholders.

Final customer Journey Map

Final customer journey map

How Seattle City Light is Using their Journey Map

After working with our team, City Light presented their findings to their sponsors, and facilitated their own “opportunity workshops” to come up with ideas to fill in their service gaps, inlcuding:

• Reducing their service plans from 3 to 1.

• Overhauling the way they message to customers so it’s friendlier, helpful, and consistent.

• Adding low-hanging fruit touchpoint like more reminders, encouragement, and confirmation of services.

Lessons learned

Though the SCL team was uncomfortable with our approach at first, and wanted our design team to lead the entire research project, they soon realized their participation really accelerated the knowledge and sharing from the customer interviews.

Though I wanted to participate more fully in stakeholder reviews and ideation sessions at times, I realized it was more important to have a good program outcome. My experience didn’t matter as much.

After this project ended, SCL hired a service designer to lead internal projects and improve upon the success of this pilot within the organization. Retention in the payment plan did increase as a result of reminders and improved messaging. At the time I left city service, improvements were still ongoing.