AMEREN ELECTRIC SERVICES COMPANY

Ameren was just beginning to create their first internal UX practice and I was brought on to define what that would look like and what process would work for them.  While creating this, I was first tasked with solving a problem for the customer service reps.  The legacy system they were using required several popup screens to navigate, input and retrieve customer information, creating long call times and frustrated users.  Their previous attempt at "UX" was asking them directly what would make things better.  The answer was to put all of the information from all of the popups on one screen.  Their monitors didn't have enough vertical space, so they turned them sideways to gain more visual space to place all of the information.  They thought they had "listened to the user", but this couldn't be further from the truth.  They were now suffering from information overload and still unable to quickly and efficiently find the information they needed, when they needed it.

After conducting several field studies, observing them working and casually interviewing them, I found what clusters of information went together and when they should be accessed.  One of the biggest hurdles was the address lookup, so the team and I, with user feedback, were able to iterate on a solution.  Initial testing showed improved recognition and task completion. 

The second part to this puzzle was providing self service to the customers so they wouldn't need to call customer service.  Internally, our product managers were hyper focused on fraud and basically created a tool to stop fraudsters instead of the overwhelming number of customers who simply needed service but may have an issue to resolve.  The biggest hurdle was simply convincing the product team to stop treating our customers like criminals and provide information that would mitigate user error. We conducted user testing, gathering a baseline for the current happy path without our internal blockers. We confirmed that without them, the users were generally satisfied, with certain points of confusion that required better communication.  Risk and compliance agreed to our changes, and instead of completely restricting user access to information, we allowed the user to know of delinquent accounts and self correct to gain service.  We also provided simple messaging to more clearly inform the users of what happened and what would happen next.  We saw a reduction in billing and account calls, reducing the cost incurred by calls to customer service.