Meridian Energy Limited is New Zealand’s largest energy company. In fact, it’s one of New Zealand’s largest companies full stop. The company has a lot of customers and a large number of stakeholders. It’s a big ship, so turning quickly isn’t an option. In fact, any adjustment in trajectory needs to be carefully considered. We have been working alongside Meridian and its subsidiaries for several years, ensuring their websites are clear on purpose and helping to reduce risks associated with change.

Meridian has just launched a new website. Central to the new website are plans that customers can choose from when signing up to have their power provided by Meridian. These plans and how they are presented have a material impact on Meridian’s bottom line. As such, we dived deep into how the plans worked, and how they could be explained to potential customers.

Our approach was to talk to real customers about their lives and the role electricity plays. We then prototyped dozens of different ways that Meridian could explain power pricing. The prototypes were then tested with real people. Further refinements were made. A set of options were also tested online with hundreds of people to ensure that our findings from a small group held true with a much larger group of random individuals. The draft plans were refined again before they were committed to visual design and code. The secret was to create specific experiences built into the acquisition flow, based on our audience research, that built preference for Meridian and nudged individuals towards signing up.

There are many important parts to Meridian’s website, but acquiring new customers is central to the business (and the business case for redesigning and rebuilding the website). This area needed the most focus. The process of independently exploring, testing and refining the offers before passing them over to the web agency reduced both risks and costs. It ensured that Meridian didn’t rush into designing and building something that might have looked good, but didn’t deliver meaningful business outcomes.

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Technology partner:

Springload