Bringing Mercury and Trustpower together
How do you combine the best of two well-known brands' existing capabilities and create a new best-in-class experience for serving, retaining, and selling to existing and new customers? All within one year!
Client
Mercury
Visit
Industry
Utilities
Type of work
- Digital transformation
- Mobile apps
- Websites
What we did
- User insight
- Accessibility
- Testing and assurance
- Design
- Staff and team augmentation
- Technology and development
- Information architecture
- Strategy
Technologies
- Native iOS
- Native Android
37%
Increased visitors
98%
Increase Rewards signups
4b
Steps tracked
217k
New app downloads
441k
In-app payments
#1
On App Stores
The challenge
Mercury acquired the Trustpower retail business in May 2022. The decision was made to combine the two brands—Trustpower and Mercury—under the Mercury brand and provide their combined customer base of over 500,000 with a new unified digital “Mercury.”
Catch has been Mercury’s digital design partner since 2016. We were part of the original team of passionate people and partners who delivered one of New Zealand’s most successful large corporate rebrands in recent years, bringing ‘Energy Made Wonderful’ to life in their digital channels. This partnership flourished with the team at Catch also designing, building and supporting Mercury’s award-winning Mobile App.
Fast-forward to mid-2022, and Mercury was again looking for a digital design partner who could work to tight deadlines, bring evidence-based insight, and take a relationship-driven approach.
Savonne Wadsworth, Stream Lead-Digital Engagement at Mercury, said, “We were looking for an agency we could trust to join our team and hit the ground running, take ownership of outcomes, and be accountable for meeting timelines and results. We needed them to be responsive, lean, agile, talented, collaborative, transparent, and, most importantly, good at communication. They needed to have a desire to understand our business and objectives, with a complete focus on quality outcomes, and fit with our way of working and culture. The team at Catch were the obvious choice. They know the category and our business; they are world-class strategists, designers and engineers, and most importantly, they are good people who care about us, our goals and our people.”
The challenge was to combine the best of both brands' existing capabilities and create a new best-in-class experience for serving, retaining, and selling to existing and new customers. A new public website, self-service portal and mobile app.
While Mercury and Trustpower are energy retailers, they have different product offerings, customer journeys, tech stacks, and customer bases.
However, they had a unified set of goals:
A data-driven, personalised, mobile-aware approach delivering a frictionless omnichannel digital experience
Increases in conversion rates and online sales
Consolidated and Improved customer experience through better design
Increased customer uptake and reduced cost to serve through improved customer self-service usability
Reduced churn through great CX and UX
An accessible digital experience that met vulnerable customers' needs.
The team at Catch needed to research, design, test and assist in building a brand new omnichannel experience (web, portal and mobile app) for Mercury in ten months.
We worked with a cross-section of Mercury’s people, including brand managers, product managers and owners, customer experience practitioners, and development teams. We followed an agile software development methodology with multiple squads across their platforms. Mercury needed customer experience-focused design feeding into these teams ahead of their development cycles to keep the work flowing and to hit the target dates.
"The team at Catch were the obvious choice. They know the category and our business; they are world-class strategists, designers and engineers, and most importantly, they are good people who care about us, our goals and our people."
Savonne Wadsworth
Stream Lead-Digital Engagement at Mercury
The solution
We took a human-centred, evidence-driven approach. Top Task research, in-person interviews, business objectives, and functional requirements laid a runway for the work ahead.
As part of this work, our team was tasked with rethinking the IA for the public website and customer portal. This involved designing a new IA that encapsulated the combined product offerings of both companies and taking a human-centred approach to self-service.
A brand new, accessible, mobile-first design system was created—a foundational brand system, which fed into two separate web and app design systems. Figma allowed for collaborative rapid prototyping and design, user testing and iterations, and a rolling hand-off to a team of 100+ engineers.
A fresh suite of icons and illustrations was designed from scratch, as well as completely new “Join” flows, as these would now incorporate Trustpower’s traditional bundling and offers approach, not to mention a mobile offering, something new to Mercury.
An entirely new “My Account” now provides greater utility, self-service, and a more accessible, mobile-first experience.
The mobile app was redesigned, creating a unified user experience across Mercury’s digital channels. We retained the world-leading loyalty program, where customers can track their steps and earn points, and designed a much richer self-service experience, allowing for power, broadband, and mobile usage management, billing, and personalisation.
The results
The digital transformation was launched in June 2023, less than a year after the project started. This was a massive achievement in coordination, planning, and outcome-focused delivery. The digital channels were part of a much wider Retail Integration Programme that included back-end systems, processes, people, culture, and most importantly, their customers.
Since the launch, Mercury’s website traffic has increased by 37%, 133,000 people have signed up for Mercury Rewards (a 98% increase), and over 30,000 Free Power Days have been booked. The brand-new signup journey and user experience have received a highly positive customer sentiment. They allow customers to select and manage a wide range of products and services across multiple properties, all within one personal contact identity profile.
Over 217,000 new app downloads, 441,000 in-app payments, and 4 billion steps have also been counted. The app is the #1 power retailer in both app stores' “Free Utility Apps” category.
“We’re incredibly proud of our people and grateful to our partners like Catch, who put in a huge amount of mahi to achieve this milestone just 13 months after we acquired the Trustpower retail business. We now have a world-class platform for delivering greater customer value in terms of choice, enhanced customer experience and the delivery of new and innovative solutions. We could not have done this without the dedicated and talented team at Catch Design.” — Savonne Wadsworth
"We now have a world-class platform for delivering greater customer value in terms of choice, enhanced customer experience and the delivery of new and innovative solutions. We could not have done this without the dedicated and talented team at Catch Design."
Savonne Wadsworth
Stream Lead-Digital Engagement at Mercury
