Is Business Coaching For You?

Over the past six months I’ve been part of the business coaching A-team (self-proclaimed!) for the Digital Futures programme delivered by Generator – and what a six months it’s been! From high tech and machine learning to alpaca attire and email marketing, I’ve been working on the UX and customer experience planning of an amazing group of businesses with a focus on digital and user-centricity.

The best thing about my job? Watching my mentees progress within and between sessions and realising results that will genuinely help their business grow. Using a bit of detective work, I helped uncover issues that needed resolving, found golden opportunities and dug out obstacles requiring a good kicking!

Equiwatt

Equiwatt is headed up by CEO, Johnson Fernandes, a Newcastle University graduate and entrepreneur. A very exciting start-up based in Newcastle upon Tyne, it has found a gap in the energy market which allows consumers to save electricity and help take pressure from the grid at peak times. Consumers install a small piece of hardware (Powercapsule) into their homes to allow savings to be tracked and, in return, are rewarded with vouchers.

Finding obstacles, seeking out opportunities and prioritising support

Johnson’s colleague, Ravneet Kaur approached me soon after I joined the Generator team asking for support with two aspects of the business; user experience design and customer experience planning.

Following a deep-dive diagnostic into the business, Johnson and I prioritised where my support was to be most effectively used over the allocated time available. During our discussions we’d uncovered a specific section of the customer journey, including the end-user dashboard, which needed to be addressed. The overriding reason for prioritising this was based on the requirement to keep end users engaged in the product and, importantly, its benefits after installation of the Powercapsule into the home.

Johnson asked that I conduct an audit on the present end user dashboard and user engagement strategy during the latter half of the customer journey and report back to him with recommendations and improvements that could be made to both.

Equiwatt’s user journey is particularly complex and, interestingly, the end user and the customer are different; the former being householders and the latter, energy companies and the grid.

Our emphasis was on the householder – why? Because without buy-in from them there is no business. What Equiwatt needed was a strategy to keep users engaged, reward them for saving energy and turn them into advocates for the brand therefore feeding the user pipeline.

Without going in to too much detail – there being an element of commercial sensitivity here! – here’s an overview of what I provided in my report and during our meetings.

End user profiling

This was particularly interesting. The Equiwatt team had already identified more than one type of user and their motivations for wanting to save energy were quite different. Therefore it was quickly determined that the way they used the dashboard, moved through the customer journey and engagement with the brand would differ widely. The context and environment in which they would use the dashboard was also different depending on the user.

User Engagement

Depending on the user type, the way in which Equiwatt would need to engage with them post Powercapsule installation needed to be clearly defined so I identified several ways in which this might be done based on the benefit to that user. i.e. How will engaging with each user type benefit them?

CX Maturity

Using a table based on strategic value and CX maturity (attract-convert-motivate), I designed a proposed CX maturity model for Equiwatt which illustrated where the company was now and how they can make positive changes to reach a ‘leading’ level of CX maturity.

This is very much a high-level overview of how I worked with Johnson over the time we had allocated. Most importantly, he and the Equiwatt team now have a strategy that will help them as they look to introducing more technology into the business while keeping the needs of their end-users at the centre of everything they do. It has been a pleasure working with them, watch this space – they’re going places.