The story of Enel Energia’s new Customer Area

In October 2019, Enel Energia launched its new Customer Area, easy, intuitive, and designed to offer users a comprehensive overview of their relationship with the company and all the useful information to manage their supplies. That launch was the culmination of a journey that began more than a year earlier, once again guided by the Open Power values—listening to customers’ needs and involving them directly to achieve a concrete result: a new Customer Area, simple and accessible to all.

Leading the team of fifteen people who worked on the project for a year was Stefano Diotallevi, with ten years at Enel Energia and now Product Owner for digital services. After graduating in management engineering from the University of Tor Vergata in Rome and gaining significant experience in other large companies, Diotallevi joined Enel to initially work in the Credit area within Customer Service. “The four years I spent there allowed me to develop a deep understanding of customer relationship dynamics,” Diotallevi explains. “Many of the contact points with them happen precisely during the billing and bill payment phase; there I learned to understand their needs.”

For five years, Diotallevi has worked in the Digital Marketing team, which focuses on improving the user experience of the reserved area of the website. During this time, Stefano was able to observe the evolution of online users’ needs—an experience that proved fundamental for the development of the new Customer Area. “The digital world has radically changed in just a few years; standards and expectations have skyrocketed. Today, responses must be immediate and in real time; people want to see that the actions they take through the website or app have an instant effect. There is a strong need for clarity and autonomy.” From this perspective, Diotallevi worked in a multiplatform Agile room, constantly interacting both with all the company departments involved and with external users.

The first part of the work was listening and testing. “To improve the website, we needed to listen to customers, see them, understand what they think. We had not only colleagues but also customers navigate the website inside the Spazio Enel. We gave them tasks, such as checking the latest bill or activating the Web Bill, and noted both their final and real-time comments while they performed the tasks.” This initial volume of data formed the basis to tailor the user experience to expectations. The goals were to improve services, performance, speed, and platform intuitiveness. “A website today must be understandable enough to be self-explanatory; people must be able to navigate it and perform every operation without needing to read any instruction manual or information notice.”

Proximity to people, both in the digital experience and through physical points on the territory, is at the core of Enel Energia’s values: only by listening can one understand what they really need. For this reason, many changes in the new Customer Area came from users’ observations. “Today, information is summarized and immediately accessible, thanks to an overview of all one’s supplies that allows easy visualization of the main information about the utilities.” These changes have enabled a smoother, hassle-free experience for customers. The team dedicated special focus to accessibility for visually impaired and blind people. An entire accessibility team, led by colleague Giuseppe Carbone, worked exclusively to improve this aspect. “Improving the experience for visually impaired and blind people was our main goal. Inclusivity is a fundamental value for Enel Energia; it means a lot to us to have succeeded in improving this aspect as well.”