Reinventing the online customer experience

We re-platformed a utility company's outdated website to improve UX, compliance, and accessibility

At a Glance:

A regional gas company had an outdated 800-page website that left its customers under-served and raised accessibility issues that could have resulted in fines. Overcoming these issues required a re-platforming of the entire site, and that’s why they contacted us.

Customer Challenge

Our client’s outdated website infrastructure was hindering their ability to serve their customers and to comply with regulations in several ways:

• The site had a manual content workflow that required a technical expert even for simple content updates, which made the process slow and costly.
• The site had limited support for mobile access.
• Our client had no way of archiving changes to the site, which their state’s public utilities commission requires.
• Following an outage or other disruption, bringing the site back online was a slow, manual process that often resulted in the reappearance of old content, undermining customers’ confidence in the company.
• Customers with disabilities were under-served due to a lack of accessibility provisions. To avoid fines, our client had agreed to bring the website in line with WCAG 2.0 AA compliance standards.
• The Spanish version of the site was out of date due to the lack of a translation workflow, resulting in a poor experience for customers in the area’s large Spanish-speaking population.

Why They Chose Us

We had completed numerous successful projects for the client, including initiatives focused on user experience (UX), responsive microsite design, and accessibility. When it became clear that their main website needed a rebuild, they knew we were the right choice for the job.

Our Results

We re-platformed our client’s website onto Oracle WebCenter Sites, incorporating design and UX upgrades to create a hybrid responsive-adaptive experience. The new platform supports our client’s need to archive content to meet the utility commission’s requirements. We also implemented full disaster recovery capabilities, which allow our client to recover the site quickly after a disruption with the most recent content, providing customers with a better user experience and improving their confidence in the company.

Other improvements included:

• A new content workflow process that allows business users to add content to the site without having to go through IT
• A responsive platform that improves the experience for visitors using tablets and smartphones
• A site that meets WCAG 2.0 AA compliance standard requirements, removing our client’s liability for fines and improving the UX for customers with disabilities
• A dedicated workflow for translating all English content into Spanish, resulting in a 1-to-1 match of the English and Spanish sites and improving the customer experience for Spanish-speaking visitors

When the project was complete, we had migrated all 800-plus pages onto the new platform with a clean, modern design, plus responsive capabilities and accessibility features that offer a positive experience for all customers in our client’s service area.