Digitising customer services and complex industry data for Xoserve

Xoserve is the central data service provider for Britain's gas market. It manages the data and systems that shippers, transporters and suppliers rely on to keep gas flowing and to settle the market accurately.

Britain's gas market is complex and depends heavily on Xoserve's work, so anything that changes how Xoserve operates has to happen without disruption.

Xoserve needed an agency to develop its online strategy and design and deliver a new website that was faster, more efficient and able to support new features for managing workflows.

The site had to be up and running in a very short timeframe, with no disruption and minimal downtime.

Beyond the website, many customer processes were still manual, time consuming and clunky, and customers wanted richer information at their fingertips.

We started with an opportunity review, working closely with Xoserve's key stakeholders to understand the business and map out its customers' biggest challenges and pain points.

Pre-workshop survey and internal workshops. Sessions with key department members pinned down exactly what the website needed to do and where internal processes could be simplified.

Stakeholder interviews. Conversations with key user groups showed how they used the site and what they needed from it, so we could simplify the end-user journey.

Heat mapping. We analysed which pages visitors used most and where they dropped off, and used this to refine our recommendations.

From this we developed a dedicated information architecture (IA) and UX strategy to make the site customer-centric, and tested the user journeys with lo-fi wireframes.

A new website. Hi-fi designs were built as working prototypes in Adobe XD, showing how the UX and UI worked across desktop and mobile. Xoserve could sign off the whole design in one go, saving valuable time. We then built the site in Umbraco, giving us full flexibility to deliver exactly what was designed: a responsive, accessible website that is simple for customers to use and easy for Xoserve to update. We provided training and support to bring everyone on board, and maintained the site after launch.

A communications audit. Xoserve then asked us to look at how the rest of the business communicated. Interviews with key stakeholders and business development managers showed that customers preferred digital channels and wanted information to flow more freely. We produced a tactical communications improvement plan to improve the customer comms strategy and boost Net Promoter Score (NPS).

Digitising change packs. Customer change requests were handled through a convoluted manual email process. We broke down the workflow between customers and the administration team, identified the most effective process for Xoserve's existing infrastructure and the right technology to support it. This saved Xoserve time consolidating data and cut the time customers spent completing questionnaires by hand.

Interactive UIG data. Xoserve was sharing raw Unidentified Gas (UIG) data with customers in hard-to-read spreadsheets. We proposed showing it as interactive graphs on the website instead. Working with Xoserve's IT and security teams, we created a secure process to send live data from internal systems to a server, then designed and built graphs that let users filter by date range and calculate averages.

The new website improved how Xoserve works, improving customer relationships and reducing site admin time. The follow-on digitisation work replaced manual processes with automated ones, cut admin for customer submissions and data requests, and made complex data easy to understand.

This support grew into a long-term partnership, including helping Xoserve shape its digital transformation strategy.

• More effective communication with customers
• Increased awareness of Xoserve services