Making Con Edison's My Account Customer-Focused

Creating clear transactional support content.

Role: Associate Director, Content Strategy

Agency: POSSIBLE

Client: Consolidated Edison of New York, Inc.

Third-party Partners: Sachs Insights (research), O Power (personalized data insights)

The Challenge

Con Edison provides electric, gas, and steam service to 3.4 million customers in the New York metropolitan area. Customers rely on Con Edison’s service, but trying to manage accounts or pay their bills on the website was difficult:

• There was a two-day to two-week time lag between opening an account and being able to log in.

• When customers paid online, they didn’t receive a confirmation message or email and risked late payment fees.

• While customers could view past bills, they couldn't easily compare their energy use or costs over time.

Since customers couldn’t trust the website, they called customer service.

The Solution

Working with Sachs, we held multiple user research sessions to learn what customers needed from My Account. As the UX team built prototypes, customers used each and provided further feedback.

This allowed the team to define our goals.

Transactional Goals

1. Make it easy for customers to get things done -- pay their bill

2. Make it easy for customers to understand what to do and what they've succeeded in doing

   1. With clear error messages

   2. With confirmations for all forms

   3. By only including the steps needed to complete task of each form

3. Make customers trust the site; choose self-service on the transactional site

Testing Transactional Vocabulary

 We were also able to ask customers if they understood terms and program names used on My Account. They often didn't know about or easily understand their payment options.

The Structure of the New My Account

Unlike the old My Account experience, with an overwhelming amount of sub-pages, the new My Account would group related data together so users could see their information more easily.

For example, being able to pay their bill is the customers' primary goal. We made sure it was also the primary content, and they are able to see the amount and pay as soon as they log in.

New My account Content

Once we had a page structure down, I worked with our UX lead and Business Analyst to understand what content would be provided by a service call and how many states each transaction could have. I begin creating detailed copy decks, including:

• Labels

• Microcopy

• Help Messages

• Error Messages

As content was reviewed by our Con Edison product owner, and service call requirements changed, the copy deck was updated.

Pay My Bill Copy Deck

The Wireframe for Pay My Bill

Together with the copy deck, a wireframe was shared with the clients to help them see and identify copy sections.

Pay My Bill

By the time the page was live, we'd been through five iterations. This included changes like:

• Adding additional states of content — like a positive message when customers don't have a balance.

• Allowing customers to always access "Pay My Bill" even if they didn't have a balance due.

The results

The new account section launched on-time in July 2017.