Connecting with Confidence: Sense’s User-focused Onboarding Journey
Building a foundation of trust with consumers is important to everyone here at Sense. And we know that begins the moment they think about downloading the Sense app.
Read how our team created an onboarding experience that is both easy and secure for consumers connecting their new smart meter to the Sense app.
Customer onboarding is typically a person’s first deep experience with a company, and Sense is no exception to that rule. People have done their research, know they want to take control of their energy usage, reduce their consumption, and decrease their bills. And now, upon downloading the Sense app, their journey truly begins.
Sense has put intense thought, effort and research into making the onboarding journey easy and intuitive for the user. Connecting a smart meter to the Sense app requires multiple steps. Because of this, the Sense team set out to design a simple onboarding experience around the three principal steps: creating your account, linking to your utility, and connecting your meter.
Creating your account
Users create a Sense account that will be used to gain access to the Sense app going forward. Using standard design conventions, users can quickly set-up their account credentials and also explore detailed information about our privacy policy as well as the terms and conditions of service.
Linking to your utility
We make this process easy on the customer, including the ability to verify their account through their phone number so they don’t need to have their bill handy. We also want this process to feel secure, so consumers know how much we value their privacy and safety, so we’ve adopted industry standards like two-factor authentication.
Connecting your meter
The Sense onboarding journey is also a journey in a very literal sense. In order to pair the meter to the app, the user needs to move to the meter, wherever that may be, in or outside of their home. Everyone’s configuration is going to be different. Maybe it’s in the attic, the basement, outside, etc. Wherever it is, we want to make it simple for consumers to take this step of the journey.
Sense put a lot of thought into anticipating the questions users would have and designed help articles along their journey in the app to address them. Customers must enter their Wi-Fi password to complete the step at the meter. Sense wanted to avoid people walking all the way to their meter location and perhaps not having the password on hand. After all, not everyone has their password memorized.
While the user is on that screen, they can easily access help to find and test their Wi-Fi. The help article flow was a collaboration between our support team, who deeply understand customer issues and concerns, and the product and engineering team, who understand where in the process to make this information easily accessible to customers.
Nothing like Sense has ever existed on the market, so being able to tie it into an experience where the customer already feels comfortable goes a long way in early engagement. Together, our design and engineering teams worked meticulously to craft an inviting and familiar experience for new customers. The Sense team looked at smart home and financial management apps, and of course social media apps, as examples of familiar and intuitive customer journeys.
Our comparisons to social media sites like Instagram and Facebook can only go so far, though. After all, customers aren’t sharing funny memes and photos of their dogs. They are sharing their home usage data, and for a lot of people, that’s personal.
The customer journey addresses this with transparency, explaining in plain language what, exactly, they are sharing. Sense engineers build apps that they themselves would want to use, and that includes clear information on what is happening with their data.
Sense wants customers to enjoy the journey from the time they download the app until they are seeing the actual results of their work, like saving energy and money. Sense bakes security into every step of the journey, and delivers to customers an onboarding experience that will set them up for success.
Sense is on this journey with our users, and we’ve made the road we travel on together as clear and comfortable as possible. It takes a lot of work to make it look easy, but it’s work that we know will benefit all of us as more and more consumers use less energy, with every download taking us closer to a brighter future.