What We Faced
Challenge
A global energy company wanted to expand their low-carbon energy offerings for commercial and industrial, and residential customers as part of their commitment to the energy transition. After completing key acquisitions, the company decided to streamline operating costs by consolidating back-office technologies. The transition needed to be seamless for business teams and customers. Furthermore, the company wanted to implement enhancements to the customer sign-up and renewal process, pricing changes, and add more robust fraud prevention measures to safeguard customer accounts and personal information. The goal was to deliver a best-in-class customer experience that reflected the company’s values of trust and integrity. They quickly decided to engage key vendors for additional expertise and resources to execute their technology vision.
What We Did
Solution
MRE Consulting established a robust testing approach to be used across multiple projects, with defined test scenarios, expected outcomes, and test data. The team utilized Azure DevOps (ADO) for end-to-end traceability from requirements to deployment. All requirements were captured as Product Backlog Items (PBI’s), which went into development, Quality Assurance (QA), User Acceptance Testing (UAT), then deployment. Over 100’s of test cases were created to thoroughly assess positive and negative scenarios and confirm that the new features were working as expected. Identified defects were returned to the development phase and would go through the testing process again.
Testing the improvements to the online website sign-up process were particularly detailed as it involved the implementation of Equifax Digital Identity Trust for real-time verification of customer information to reduce fraud. We worked with Equifax to acquire 1000’s of pieces of data for testing, and tested different social security number combinations to confirm that enrollments were successfully blocked when fraudulent information was inputted. There were new API’s added, connecting the website to Salesforce and the billing system. Rigorous testing confirmed that the data captured from the website was accurately shared to Salesforce and the billing system so that new customers could successfully enroll with the utility provider.
What We Delivered
Results
Robust testing ensured that the customer experience would be seamless. With the competitive nature of the residential market, reducing any friction for the customers in the sign-up process was a crucial focus.
Our testing process included extensive testing of all the product features and then conducting demos of the actual solution with Sales and Marketing, Pricing, Customer Experience, and other stakeholders to foster buy-in of the overall customer journey. Since business users were familiar with new functionality or enhancements being built, it facilitated the process for user acceptance testing and business stakeholder sign-offs. This alignment was important to enable the team to seamlessly roll out many new features over many months in an agile approach with minimal impact to business operations and a positive response from customers.
At the same time the company was also able to streamline their back-office systems and processes to deliver an online sign-up process that was aligned to their vision. In particular, the fraud prevention measures, and new features added to the website helped minimize fraud-related incidents, improve customer satisfaction, and reduce the overall customer service burden.
“Most defects end up costing more than it would have cost to prevent them. Defects are expensive when they occur, both the direct costs of fixing the defects and the indirect costs because of damaged relationships, lost business, and lost development time.” — Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained
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