OVO is the UK’s leading independent energy technology company and supplier - they serve nearly one million customers with intelligent energy services.
Today OVO is not only an energy retail business: it is a group of innovative, dynamic companies, all striving to harness technological advances with great customer propositions to create more abundant renewable energy for everyone.
OVO Energy was planning to land in Spain. They were looking for a partner to help them adapt their product by researching the Spanish market and its user needs.
The goals of the project were finding out why and how customers change energy supplier, to understand the experience in retail energy from Spanish customers and how they want their signup process to be.
What makes a consumer choose a (new) energy service? Because OVO Energy should convince the Spanish consumers to make the switch from the users current provider to them. We want to give the solution for this by conducting research.
We split this up in three stages; in-depth interviews, participant surveys and a new round of in-depth interviews. We wanted to start with qualitative research, after which we could quantify it with surveys. Then a final round of interviews could validate our final hypotheses.
- Products and services users prefer
- Triggers them to action
- Users are willing to spend
- Users search
- Users get more information
- Users join
- Users search and solve questions
- Users take decisions
- Manage issues
- Users look for alternatives
- Decide to switch
Interviews give insights into what the user thinks about an interface or a process, and are mostly a qualitative research method. You gather relatively little data that focuses on how a user feels and thinks. They can point out what site content is memorable, what people feel is important on the site, and what ideas for improvement they may have.
For this project we conducted interviews in different stages. First to help us figure out our customer profile, and later to specifically research what makes a consumer choose an energy service.
Surveys are a set of questions that you send out to your users. They are effective to gather quantitative data, since they require much less time than interviews. It enables you to draw conclusions from a large set of data and facts.
The survey used for this study has been created with care, since it is challenging to get the answers you need through an online form. We sent the survey out to 1,000 participants, which enabled us to draw conclusions from facts instead of doing this from a more subjective qualitative study.
50% male
50% female
28-35 years old
36-45 years old
46-55 years old
Involved in decision making
Have energy contracts in their name
We delivered three elaborate reports with all our findings of each research stage. We were able to give OVO Energy an insight on the Spanish customers. This helped them with creating a plan on how to adjust their service for the Spanish market.
They have started applying our recommendations and research takeaways, but they are still testing their value proposition adapted for the Spanish market. They launched OVO Energy’s first landingpage in Spanish: https://www.ovoenergy.es/.
