London Hydro

The Client

A local distribution company that services the City of London, Ontario, Canada, London Hydro delivers a safe and reliable electricity supply to more than 162,140 customers from the residential, institutional, commercial and industrial sectors, spanning 420 square kilometers of service territory. 

The Situation

The company’s primary goal for its new digital experience was to educate customers and help them understand their energy needs and options. To meet this goal, London Hydro needed a comprehensive content management system that would allow the organization to showcase educational resources and drive customers to self-service features. London Hydro also needed to ensure their customers could easily find the outage map page and report service outages. London Hydro needed to integrate its corporate website and digital self-service portal into a unified communication hub that could deliver effective and timely communications and digital interaction points to all audiences.

The Challenge

To more effectively educate customers and help them access key site features and complete transactions, London Hydro needed to upgrade its site’s functionality, reimagining its content architecture and site navigation. But its previous site was inefficient and inflexible, requiring developer intervention for content, layout and structural changes and creating unnecessary delays. In addition, the lack of intuitive, repeatable interactions and information pathways created challenges for users and led to more calls to customer service. With many text-heavy pages that metrics showed users virtually ignored, the new site needed to reduce reliance on text-based content and deliver an engaging visual experience to customers.

The Solution

Initially, the London Hydro team saw the new corporate website as a knowledge center to teach users about self-service features and assistance programs. However, after tapping digital partner Northern Commerce to lead site development, UX research revealed that the majority of London Hydro’s current site traffic used the website as a stepping stone to access the online portal, virtually ignoring the site’s educational content. In fact, research showed that most users jumped directly to the portal to complete tasks such as paying a bill or checking their power usage data. 

With these insights in mind, the teams pivoted their overall strategy and development to include user-friendly navigation and site architecture, putting information about self-service features and assistance programs upfront. In just under a month, Northern launched London Hydro’s main website as a minimum viable product (MVP) site, allowing for ongoing development improvements based on user research and feedback from customers. 

Using a multisite setup leveraging Acquia Cloud Platform, London Hydro has dramatically improved the customer experience while giving their internal teams extensive flexibility to quickly and easily create new partner websites. In fact, they recently created a new partner website, Festival Hydro, cloned from the main London Hydro website. With Festival Hydro, the London Hydro team is selling a hosted web solution for smaller utility companies, giving those companies the opportunity to quickly build their own new sites by cloning London Hydro’s site and changing the theme and content. 

The Results

London Hydro’s new site is a fully responsive, WCAG 2.0 AA compliant solution that quickly and easily delivers content and services to users. Customers can sign into the self-service portal from any page on the site. A communication hub combines the corporate website with a digital self-service portal and delivers frequent, effective, timely and multi-directional communications and digital interaction points to all audiences. In addition, the new site features an integrated Google-powered map of hydro outages to help keep customers aware of up-to-the-minute data. 

The new site has exceeded expectations, realizing increased site traffic and jumps in self-service feature usage. Site users are visiting the site more often and interacting with more features. Specifically, the site has seen:

• A 7.5% increase in MyLondonHydro registrations over the previous year
• A 30.16% increase in outage notification registrations over the previous year
• An 8% increase in Aeroplan registrations over the previous year 

Additionally, the new site recently won Top Honours and the Customer Service Excellence Award at the Electricity Distributors Association Excellence Awards.