Service Design . Product Design
Moving Premises Journey Design
How I led SSE's first end-to-end digital transformation of Change of Tenancy — taking a process dominated by phone and email to a self-serve digital platform across multiple distinct customer journeys.
Duration
Sep – Dec 2024
Team
Dersign, Products, Ops, IT
Role
Project Lead
87%
Customers diverted to digital
74%
Landing page CTR uplift
-52%
Form abandonment
7 min
Completion time (was 20 min)
12 days
SLA (was 44 working days)
- 01 BRIEF
The starting point
SSE's first in-house design team had a clear mandate: shift customer volume away from phone and email and into digital self-service. Change of Tenancy (COT) was the obvious starting point — consistently a top driver of inbound contact, yet no dedicated online channel existed for it.
I initiated this project. That meant identifying the opportunity from data, building the business case with stakeholders, and leading the design from discovery through to a live launch.
Discovery
Data audit, VOC analysis, channel benchmarking
Definition
As-is journey mapping, PI planning, scope decisions
Design
To-Be journey design, prototyping, testing
Launch
Live release, email channel retired, daily tracking
- 02 DIAGNOSIS
What the data told us
Before proposing anything, I needed to understand exactly where the friction was and how large the opportunity was. CX insights and customers feedback gave us the full picture.
Channel Split
73%
of all COT requests arrived by email. A further 10% by phone. Less than 17% used any digital route — despite "moving premises" being a top-five search term on the SSE website.
Manual Processing
80%+
of COT cases required manual back-office handling. No standardised process meant SLAs were routinely exceeded by up to two months.
Addressable volume
60%
of email and phone COT cases were straightforward moving premises notifications — the exact use case most suited to self-serve. The demand was there. The channel wasn't.
Search demand signal
Top3
"Moving premises" ranked consistently in the top three search terms on the SSE website — customers were already looking for a digital option that existed poorly.
Voice of Customer data confirmed the operational failure. Customers were reaching out through any channel they could find because the process gave them no visibility and no confirmation.
"We had no idea whether our request had been received, let alone processed. It felt like submitting into a black hole."
VOC — TPI customer, phone submission
"When is the right time to tell you I'm moving? I didn't receive a welcome letter — I had no idea I even needed to notify you."
VOC — Business customer, email submission
The root cause was structural: two compounding failures. Customers had limited self-serve route, so all volume defaulted to email and phone. And once in the back office, inconsistent procedures with no defined SLA meant cases stalled unpredictably. Solving one without the other wouldn't shift the numbers.
3
Playback and prioritisation
I played back two complete journey maps — move-in and move-out — covering customer touchpoints, back-office activities, technology dependencies, and strategic recommendations. With digital product, operations, and IT aligned, we agreed a delivery sequence: single-site first (highest volume, lowest complexity), TPI second, bulk third.
The journey mapping including Frontend end (phases, stage, goal, story board, channel, marketing comms, turn around time, sentiment chart) Backend process (department, employee action, systems) Strategy layer( insights, opportunities and solutions)
- 03 Discovery
Building shared understanding
With the data as our foundation, I facilitated a series of workshops to map the problem end-to-end and pressure-test assumptions with the people closest to the process.
1
Kickoff — as-is journey mapping
I led a cross-functional session with product owners, operations leads, and IT stakeholders. Using quantitative data to anchor the room, we co-created journey maps for both move-in and move-out — making end-to-end pain visible, including backstage processes and system dependencies, for the first time across the organisation.
2
PI planning — brainstorming solutions
At the Programme Increment planning session, I presented the discovery findings and facilitated an ideation sprint with a broader stakeholder group. Solutions clustered naturally around four distinct submission (single & bulk move in / single & bulk move out) types covering SME, MBS and TPI customers which defined the scope of what we'd build.
- 04 SOLUTION
Two entry point serve three types of customers
Discovery confirmed that one generic form couldn't serve all customer types equally. The redesign introduced a shared landing page that routes different type of customers into move in and move out submission journeys — each designed around the specific friction points and workflow of that segment.
Restructuring the landing page alone drove the 74% uplift in click-through rate before any customer reached a form. Stripping it to essential information and creating a clear, distinct entry point per customer type removed the single biggest barrier: customers not knowing which path applied to them.
Portal Journey
Progress indicator at every step
VOC data showed customers abandoned mid-journey because they couldn't tell how long it would take. A four-step progress bar at the top of every screen sets expectation upfront. Customers know where they are, how many steps remain, and what they've already completed.
Final Step
Review screen before submission
Customers used to resubmit multiple times through different channels because they weren't sure if the information they'd given was correct. A review screen before final confirmation lets customers check and edit every field — eliminating the ambiguity that caused duplicate submissions and back-office rework.
Bulk Submission
One page submission for more than 3 sites
Research showed that MBS and TPI customers often manage multiple clients submitting Change of Tenancy requests simultaneously. For portfolios of 4–10 sites, we consolidated all submission details into a single page to reduce the number of steps and keeping everything visible without switching between screens.
- 05 PERFORMANCE
What changed after launch
The redesign went live in September 2024. The email channel for COT submissions was closed in October — six weeks after launch — when digital volume was stable enough to retire the manual fallback. Performance has been tracked daily since.
87% diversion rate
87% of COT requests now come through the digital channel — up from less than 17% before launch. The target was 80%. We exceeded it within the first full month.
200 to 1,000+ digital submissions per month
Since launch, monthly digital submissions have grown from under 200 to over 1,000 — a 5x increase driven by both direct customers and TPI agents moving onto the new channel.
REFLECTION
The clearest lesson from this project: scoping before designing saves time, not adds it. Workshops quickly surfaced that we were solving for three distinct customer types with different workflows, data needs, and trust requirements. Designing a single-form solution and retrofitting the others would have created technical debt and a worse experience for TPI and bulk users. Taking the time to map the full landscape upfront made delivery faster and more coherent across the board.