Prototyping every touchpoint for fast, customer-centric innovation

Learning what really matters for a clear and seamless customer experience

the Design Sprint team at work

Hezelaer Energy was looking for a clear way to show how their energy asset optimisations benefit their customers. They wanted to explain their operational choices without giving away their trade secrets. And they wanted to demonstrate their added value without overwhelming customers with data. We made it work by focusing on how customers experience Hezelaer's entire service.

a Dutch landscape with grass and trees, and a building with a windmill next to it

Hezelaer Energy leads the energy transition by optimising assets like batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines. Through smart energy trading, they maximise customers' energy portfolio value while building a sustainable future.

Earning our customer's trust

Hezelaer Energy wanted to demonstrate their added value without overwhelming customers. Their challenge revolved around big questions such as:

  • What data do customers need to understand our operational choices and financial results?
  • How can we help customers interpret the data we provide them with?
  • How can we earn and keep customers' trust—even when we have to give them some bad news?

a post-it that reads: Weet genoeg om vertrouwen te hebben in Hezelaer! :)"

Small investment, big insights

Together with Utilus, we ran two Design Sprints to validate the most important assumptions with real customers, in a short time period and with a small team. This enables rapid learning, and significantly limits the risk of building the wrong thing.

Two Design Sprint team members discuss an energy grid
"The Design Sprints taught us how to provide just enough information to present a complex topic in an understandable way and give the customer the confidence they're looking for."
Stefan Versluis, Product & IT Hezelaer Energy

Optimising energy assets and customer experiences

Our hunch for the two sprints with Hezelaer: a dashboard with data visualisations about energy optimisations may do the trick—but what if we zoom out to make a lasting impact on the entire customer experience? Honestly: we’ve never been this excited to prototype a personalised newsletter, a dashboard and… an invoice!

Every step of the way

Clarifying a step in a journey requires knowing where the journey began and where it’s heading. You can send your customers huge data sheets that justify everything that happened in the past month. But what's more important is what came before that. What are your customer's expectations, knowledge level, and amount of interest?

the Design Sprint team at work

The best of both worlds

We love working with our clients—not for them. In this project, Hezelaer brought the technical know-how, and the critical questions came from Utilus and us:

  • Why did your customers become a customer in the first place? 
  • What do they know about the market we're operating in? And how much do they actually want to know? 
  • What is their expected ROI on their sustainable energy assets? And how realistic are those expectations? 
  • How do they expect to be informed of financial results—and particularly of disappointing ones? 
  • How do they need to report on operational choices and financial results to their own stakeholders?

A detail of the Design Sprint room with some sketches on the windows, and a cactus

It's all clear

Hezelaer Energy was looking for a clear way to show how their energy asset optimisations benefit their customers. They were thinking about a data visualisation dashboard. We were thinking about the customer. Together, this is how we make customers feel reassured with Hezelaer—now and for years to come.

  • Ask the hard questions: We crunched all the numbers.
  • Take a holistic view: We zoomed out to the entire customer experience.
  • Learn fast: We prototyped three essential touchpoints in two weeks.
  • Mitigate risk: We validated ideas with customers and found out what really matters—before we started building.

Prefer to speak to someone?

Feel free to contact me!

David van Duinen, Commercial Director

06 46 24 31 49

david@hike.one

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