Reframing an energy provider’s approach to vulnerability
Improving support provided to customers by holistically understanding their journey of financial stress.
Impact:
Delivered a series of key insights that reframed our client's understanding of how customers experience vulnerability.
Identified three overarching opportunity areas to reshape our client’s approach to vulnerability.
Facilitated collaboration with internal teams and community partners, while demonstrating the value of a human-centred approach.
Timeframe: 7 weeks
Services provided:
Research:
Qualitative ethnographic research
Deliverables
Series of insights about vulnerability: Eight insights that encompassed the circumstances that lead to vulnerability and the experience of engaging with support.
Opportunity areas to frame solutions: Three overarching opportunity areas to drive the development of solutions in the next phase of work.
Conceptual journey: A visual illustration of how each insight maps into a customer’s journey towards support.
Context:
Our client, a leading energy retailer, serving over 1.1 million customers across Australia, was facing challenges as rising energy costs and increased cost-of-living pressures led to more customers falling into arrears on their accounts. Despite having support services available, there was limited engagement from customers in need of assistance.
The existing customer hardship program was designed to support those experiencing financial vulnerability but was often too reactive, intervening only after customers were already in significant distress. This late intervention led to poorer outcomes for both the customers and the business. Our client needed a new, proactive approach. They wanted to move beyond compliance-driven measures to offer meaningful support earlier in the customer journey.
WAVE was engaged to reimagine their approach to early intervention and support, by helping our client better understand the lived experiences of their customers.
Approach:
Our client already understood ‘who’ was experiencing financial hardship, but they did not know ‘how’ they arrived there and ‘why’ they may or may not have engaged with support. To increase understanding, we needed to provide a holistic view of customers dealing with financial hardship, how they managed bills and the way they navigate complex support systems. By conducting in-depth interviews with customers at various stages of financial vulnerability - from those who were approaching financial stress, to those who had actively engaged with support - we were able to understand more about the different pathways towards and through vulnerability.
We learned that people experiencing financial stress and engaging with support, would likely be accessing additional services beyond their energy provider. In order to better understand this ecosystem, we held a forum of community service providers who support those experiencing severe and entrenched vulnerability, to surface the trends and behaviours they typically observe. This provided rich insights into the frontline of service delivery, validating what we were hearing from customers. Additionally, we engaged our client’s staff to validate our findings and gain an internal perspective on customer support.
To gain buy-in and stimulate fresh thinking, we needed to communicate our insights in a novel and compelling way. We mapped insights from our research with customers, partners and internal staff sessions into a conceptual journey that outlined the stages of vulnerability, from early signs of financial stress to actively seeking and accepting support. This journey highlighted key pain points and opportunities for early intervention. We facilitated collaborative workshops with our client to present these insights and explore and expand on the opportunities identified. These focused on:
Early intervention – Engaging customers before they reach a crisis point.
Simplifying support access – Reducing barriers and making support systems more user-friendly.
Building trust – Creating stronger, more empathetic relationships between the energy retailer and customers.
Outcome:
Our work equipped our client with a new, reframed understanding of vulnerability, shifting their thinking from ‘vulnerable customers’, due to their characteristics, to the understanding that any customer can ‘experience vulnerability’ due to their circumstances. The supporting insights, conceptual journey and opportunity areas provided a foundation for them to reimagine how they identify and engage with customers, moving from a reactive, to a proactive support model, and enabling intervention before customers reach a point of crisis.
We positioned our client to take ownership of this emerging understanding by collaborating with internal teams and community partners to ensure alignment and buy-in. While the focus of this work was improving the customer hardship program, these new insights challenged entrenched assumptions across the business, piquing the interest of a number of senior leaders. The project informed the future design and testing phases, helping the client develop solutions that were more responsive to the needs of their customers.
