Making a regulated product easier to buy, and cheaper to serve

Context

SSE Airtricity is a regulated energy retailer with a strong contact centre and, at the time, an underused digital channel. Regulation shaped every step of the journey, from disclosure wording to cooling-off periods, so the product had to become easier to buy without becoming any less defensible. I owned the digital sales roadmap and a portfolio spanning self-serve portals used by millions of customers, online payments, rewards and loyalty, and the iOS and Android apps.

The problem

Digital brought in a small share of new customers. Sign-up took nine steps and most abandonment happened in the middle of it. The payment mix leaned towards card and cash, the most expensive methods to collect, and the organisation's view of why people abandoned came from anecdote rather than evidence.

What I did

• Instrumented the funnel so roadmap decisions rested on where people actually dropped off, not on who escalated most loudly.
• Made regulation part of the design: rebuilt sign-up on a new API-based mechanism and cut nine steps to three, staging each compliance disclosure at the point it mattered. Nothing was removed — it was sequenced properly.
• Set up a regular discovery cadence with customer-service teams, so what they heard on calls became structured roadmap input instead of escalations.
• Used the product to change the unit economics: made direct debit the default payment route, with clear incentive framing, so the offer shifted behaviour rather than just the interface.
• Iterated the mobile apps towards self-service, reducing contact-centre demand and improving NPS and app-store ratings.

Outcome

Online sales grew roughly sevenfold, the shift in payment mix cut cost-to-collect by about 70%, and mobile self-service rose by 45%. Complaint rates on the digital channel fell as the journey became clearer.

What I'd do differently

I'd instrument on day one. Several early experiments were hard to read because the analytics came later than they should have. The wider lessons I carry into any B2B or regulated product: trust is a product feature — the compliance path is fixed, but how customers experience it is a design choice; packaging is a product decision, since the biggest financial win came from what customers were steered to choose, not a new feature; and the front line needs a standing, visible channel into the roadmap.