Digital Transformation for National Grid Electricity Distribution
- Established an extensive digital partnership with National Grid Electricity Distribution, the UK's largest electricity distribution network (DNO), enhancing their services for 8 million customers through digital platforms.
- Developed a comprehensive digital strategy, delivering 19 websites, essential software applications and mobile apps.
- Adopted a holistic approach, starting from service design to supporting the critical infrastructure ensuring uninterrupted power supply to millions of homes.
The Ambition
National Grid Electricity Distribution (formerly Western Power Distribution) plays a critical role in supplying power to over eight million homes and businesses across the UK.
Given the significant reliance on its services by such a vast customer base, there is a corresponding expectation for timely and accurate information updates. Recognising this need, National Grid Electricity Distribution turned to digital solutions to ensure round-the-clock accessibility to essential information.
This ongoing partnership, now spanning over 8 years, has involved thoroughly examining the client's customer demographics, service usage patterns, and the accompanying information requirements. Additionally, we undertook the task of empathising with users, envisioning various scenarios they might encounter, such as power outages or service maintenance. By doing so, we aimed to tailor digital experiences to support the overall customer journey seamlessly.
What we do
Our digital partnership focuses on driving a comprehensive digital strategy and implementing workstreams that support every aspect of National Grid’s digital infrastructure. This encompasses designing and developing key components such as their primary consumer website, power outage tracker, self-service applications for customers, data visualisation tools, mobile applications and more.
Our collaborative efforts have led to National Grid's digital services being recognised as industry-leading, thanks to our shared dedication to delivering superior digital experiences for customers and stakeholders alike.
Considering both online and offline touchpoints
At the core of all our digital initiatives for National Grid Electricity Distribution is service design, a critical aspect that ensures the creation of seamless experiences for customers. This involves crafting each touchpoint, whether online or offline, to cater to the specific needs of every user.
Effective service design simplifies the process of accessing information or services, ensuring users can effortlessly find what they need at any given moment. Throughout the development of websites and applications in our digital transformation programme, we prioritise empathy, striving to understand and address the user's perspective and interactions with the resources.
Providing reassurance through the power cuts application
The National Grid Power Cuts application is one of the most highly used platforms in their digital estate. It plays a crucial role in assisting a diverse range of customers, particularly during high-stress situations such as power outages triggered by storm events.
Designed with a mobile-first approach, the application prioritises delivering essential information promptly to users. It harnesses real-time data sourced from National Grid's extensive network, ensuring customers receive accurate updates. By simply entering their postcode, users can swiftly ascertain the cause of their power outage and the expected restoration time and access additional resources, including emergency contact information.
Connecting users to the grid
A key service we support is National Grid’s Connections site, which supports users to connect to the grid network or request changes. As part of our long-term digital transformation, we launched a dedicated Connections website, and have worked with National Grid on building custom digital applications that provide instant approval decisions to users. This has also included designing and building a customer portal so people can track their applications and send messages to the NGED team about any queries.
Our Connections work has continued to evolve, providing quoting and estimating tools, as well as a dedicated information hub for resources and documents.
A robust infrastructure to support large amounts of traffic
As a crucial component of the national infrastructure, National Grid Electricity Distribution demands a highly resilient and scalable digital infrastructure to ensure uninterrupted service provision to customers and stakeholders, even during periods of peak demand.
During storm events, user traffic can surge from a few hundred to over 10,000 simultaneous users. To meet this challenge head-on, our DevOps team collaborates closely with National Grid and our partners. Together, we proactively engineer and maintain a robust, high-performance infrastructure capable of reliably scaling to accommodate massive spikes in traffic while remaining fully resilient against disruptions.
Our evolving partnership
Approaching this work as a strategic digital programme means that our collaboration with National Grid continues to develop across different areas of their business and responds to emerging ideas. From delivering a Flexibility Market Platform to support the UK’s transition to a flexible low-carbon electricity system, to supporting the adoption of electric vehicles and heat pumps, to building AI-powered customer support, our partnership continues to evolve and innovate.
What they say
“Enigma have been part of our digital journey for eight years. Over that time they have helped us build and develop the web products that our customers rely on every day, from reporting a power cut to registering for our Priority Services Register. What stands out is that they genuinely care about getting it right. They bring fresh thinking, they stay on top of where digital is heading, and they deliver. That combination is harder to find than it sounds, and it is why we keep coming back.”
Emma Vincent, National Grid Electricity Distribution
Results
Partnered on a strategic digital programme for over 8 years
Millions of website visitors annually
Supporting multiple initiatives responding to the Net Zero agenda
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