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Case Study: eBilling energises Scottish & Southern Energy’s online customer service

Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE) is one of the largest energy companies in the UK. It supplies electricity and gas to over 6 million customers with three regional brands covering England, Scotland, and Wales. SSE's Southern Electric brand supplies gas and electricity to customers throughout England.

When SSE decided to re-launch their website to include eBilling, they contacted SciVisum to ensure that no unforeseen problems might spoil the user experience, particularly as regular users would be buying their gas and electricity online for the first time.

Scheduled for a December 2004 launch, the new site would allow customers to view their bills, submit a meter reading, make payments and tell SSE about address changes and the like.

In particular, the web designers at SSE wanted to see if the new system would provide reasonable response times even at peak loads. To do so, they asked SciVisum to identify any possible weaknesses before the site went public, and to pinpoint any breakpoints within the infrastructure. SciVisum were to establish load profiles that would show SSE the performance under various loads. Tests were designed to spot the technical issues such as memory leaks, locking or race conditions that might frustrate or confuse a user - and to provide the business level 'user journey' metrics to support the commercial team's decision making.

SciVisum used an in-house developed test engine, SV-Load, to create virtual users and then to follow the 'user journeys' as they click from page to page. A user journey is a path taken by a website visitor to complete a given task or to make a purchase - for example on a travel agency site, the user might select a particular destination from the home page, the most convenient airport and time of flight, then a hotel, day-trips to places of interest and finally book and pay for the holiday via the site's shopping basket.

SSE wanted to test five different journeys: viewing a bill, submitting a meter reading, making a payment, editing an account-friendly name, and to notify SSE that they are moving house.

The tests took place in November 2004 and after some initial tweaks by SSE, testing confirmed that the new site would indeed cope adequately with the visitor levels anticipated by the commercial team - in fact tests showed it could handle twice the expected peak traffic.

Minor issues easily overcome
The SciVisum tests determined the traffic levels at which an individual user's experience might become unacceptable. As is so often the case, the main problem during high usage isn't so much a slow-down but there can be a climb in error rates often by 10% or more. But these issues were easily resolved by SSE once they were highlighted, these included:

-Login times were slow on occasion due to a login fault
-There was a concurrent user problem when passing information to a third-party site for credit card checks. Some users received error messages
-Emails to confirm the transaction were not being enabled
-The system was intended to generate internal emails to tell other departments that the user was moving house
-There was a problem registering users with double-barrelled names

SSE launched the new Southern Electric site in December 2004.
The new site also allows anyone, not merely customers, to buy discounted appliances including cooking, refrigeration, home laundry and heating products. There's also a special section on energy efficiency and a green energy scheme whereby customers can opt to buy energy from renewable resources.

The response from customers has been phenomenal. In the last seven months since introducing eBilling, over fifty five thousand regular gas/electricity customers have started to use the service to check their bills, submit meter readings and make payments online, a figure that is growing by approximately 2,500 customers per week.

SSE's eBilling Project Manager, says
"We've had a lot of positive feedback to the launch of eBilling from customers, it has been incredibly successful with hundreds of users signing up every day. Testing formed an integral part of this service introduction and we were particularly impressed with SciVisum's immediate comprehension of our requirements along with their ability to test our user journey routes and produce metrics that were relevant to both the commercial and technical teams."

"We carefully evaluated a field of potential suppliers, and were pleased having selected SciVisum to find their monitoring service to be a speedy, professionally delivered and cost effective solution. They also provided added value as a result of their previous testing experience with similar companies, helping us to implement major improvements very rapidly."

As a result of the successful introduction of this new web based eBilling service for domestic customers across all of the SSE brands, the remainder of SSE's externally hosted services were promptly replaced onto their 'in house' platform a few months later.