Challenge

Constellation Energy Group, a subsidiary of Exelon, is a leading competitive energy company providing electricity, natural gas, renewable energy, and energy management products and services to consumers and business clients across the United States.

The company was a patchwork of operating companies and brands that needed a more consistent and unified face in the marketplace. Constellation Energy’s sales and marketing team wanted a consultancy with experience and capabilities in user research, usability testing, and a collaborative and user-centered experience approach to design. The goals were to:

• Study the company’s target audiences to make sure their products and services and marketing were rightly aligned.
• Help evaluate and redesign processes and tools to support a sales organization that was being reorganized to function in more customer-centric ways.

Approach

Experience by Design (EBD) kicked off the project with a series of informal work sessions with the project sponsor team and stakeholders to discuss available resources, timelines, and other topics relevant to the project including: the competitive energy industry, target audiences and markets, and Constellation’s products, services, and capabilities. We used the findings and takeaways from these meetings to:

• Build an inventory to identify and track the in-scope inputs, websites, and tools we needed to review, as well as list the team leaders and SMEs that we wanted to consult and work with.
• Create and socialize a plan and timelines for discovery, UX research, and information architecture work, as well as design and deliverables.

Once our plan was approved, we kicked off multiple streams of work. This included secondary UX research to understand the target audience, and meetings and work sessions with team leaders and SMEs to discuss Constellation’s sales processes, tools, and the company’s digital marketing ecosystem.

Using the learnings and inputs from these efforts, we created initial sketches of Constellation’s target audience and a diagram describing the customer engagement lifecycle. These helped us guide discussion, refine and validate our findings, and establish a foundation for further UX research.

Next, we created key journey flows and audience personas that identified assumptions about informational and functional needs, key triggers, pain points, and various characteristics of Constellation’s target audience segments to inform strategy and design direction and measures of success. These were used by Constellation’s internal marketing teams to inform and guide retail customer research.

We also performed a series of expert reviews on a subset of Constellation’s sales resources and tools, and drafted test plans and procedures for in-person and remote moderated usability testing with members of Constellation’s sales teams. To conduct the usability testing, we built a mobile usability test lab for onsite and remote usability tests in different Constellation sales offices and facilities around the country.

We reported progress and key takeaways to the project team at weekly meetings. We also presented more formal findings and recommendations to project sponsors and stakeholders at the completion of each study, or as needed.

Result

Constellation’s marketing and sales team received what they needed to inform and guide changes to their sales tools and operations, and a clearer understanding of their internal users and external target audiences to deliver:

• Marketing communications, services, and support experiences better aligned to the needs of their customers.
• Tools more suited to the needs of their sales force that improved productivity and performance.

List of Services

• UX Research Management and Design
• Collaborative Workshops
• One-on-one Interviews
• Contextual Inquiries
• Target Audience Profile + Personas
• Expert Usability Reviews + Usability Testing (Formative)