Aquarion Creates a Frictionless Customer Experience by Consolidating 65% of Regional Web Content
Industry:
Energy & UtilitiesProducts:
SitefinityChallenge
Aquarion's website was becoming technologically obsolete and lacked mobile device support for its on-the-go customers.
Solution
Sitefinity CMS makes managing content so easy that anyone can do it without help from IT.
Result
With a 65% consolidation of regional content, the new site was easier to manage and optimize.
Challenge
Aquarion Water Company may be a water supply utility, but it’s ultimately in the business of reliability.
Obviously, this extends to service delivery—Aquarion customers rely on consistent and predictable access to water in their everyday lives. But it’s also true for the customer experience. Whether they are researching service disruptions or paying a bill, they expect a streamlined experience that enables them to find what they need quickly so they can get back to their lives.
Aquarion’s website offered this type of experience when it was first designed in the early 2000s, but by 2020, it was showing signs of age. The website simply didn’t live up to modern expectations. It was becoming technologically obsolete and lacked mobile device support for its on-the-go customers.
On top of that, the platform powering the digital experience was a homegrown solution built using Visual Basic. It was challenging to use, which made it impossible to manage the content on the website without involving IT in some capacity.
Solution
Aquarion wanted to modernize its digital experience in response to how today’s customers interacted with service companies. To do help bring this vision to life, the utility enlisted the help of digital agency Chateaux.
The first step was finding a platform that delivered powerful digital experience capabilities that could support Aquarion’s ambition. However, the platform still had to be approachable and intuitive—Aquarion’s communications team was small and relied on stakeholders from other teams to manage their respective parts of the site.
After evaluating several different options, they ultimately decided on Progress® Sitefinity®. Sitefinity’s easy-to-use interface, in combination with custom widgets and drag-and-drop page creation, offered the autonomy that Aquarion’s marketing team was looking for.
“Sitefinity was the perfect middle ground,” explained Jeff Glagowski, Manager of Digital Communications, Aquarion. “It has powerful features with a user-friendly interface, which makes it easy for a person with minimal training to just log in and edit content.”
The ability to create custom workflows and assign user roles also helped Aquarion streamline operations.
“It’s like bowling bumpers for admins,” said Glagowski. “The custom modules enable people from different teams to do their work without tripping over each other. Plus, it gives people peace of mind that they won’t accidentally take down the site while they’re trying to quickly issue service alerts.”
Result
Working with Chateaux, Aquarion was able to create a much cleaner digital experience by merging content that once lived across region-specific site experiences for Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Hampshire. With Sitefinity, they were able to deliver a wide array of customer-requested features in a cohesive, simple-to-navigate package for customers of all regions.
“The old site had so much content that was duplicated for each state. After consolidating 65% of this content, it’s so much easier for customers to find the information they need quickly,” said Emily Denaro, Marketing & Operations Specialist, Chateaux.
As an added benefit, by simplifying the user journey, Aquarion was also better able to see where customers were getting tripped up. That helped drive further improvements to the experience.
Behind the scenes, Sitefinity’s ease of use helped clear out internal backlogs and bottlenecks. With a small communications team of just three people, giving different stakeholders at the company the autonomy to edit content and create pages as needed was a huge benefit.
Building the utility of the future starts by building upon the right technological foundation today. With Sitefinity, Aquarion can stay ahead of the curve and continue to deliver reliable digital experiences that provide everything its customers need.
About Aquarion
Aquarion Water Company of Connecticut, a subsidiary of Eversource, is the public water supply company for approximately 220,000 customer accounts or more than 700,000 people in 57 cities and towns in Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Hampshire.
About Chateaux
For more than 30 years, Chateaux has been developing self-service, analytical thinkers and transforming organizational operations. We provide technology-enabled business solutions that help clients drive strategic and operational impact.