Objectives
01Re-establish a baseline understanding of the systems and processes behind the end-to-end outage experience.
02Validate the internal pain points that create downstream pain points for customers.
03Ideate ways to manage or eliminate those pain points and improve internal collaboration.
04Recommit cross-functional teams to their roles in improving the outage experience.
Approach & activities
Partnering with the Customer Experience team, I and another experience designer interviewed internal stakeholders across the outage-communication process. Those insights, alongside existing process documentation and customer research, shaped a full-day interactive working session with a cross-functional team representing key areas responsible for outage resolution and communication.
I designed the working session around our key project objectives, creating three separate but connected activities:
01Reviewing customer sentiment about the outage notification experience to help ground us in the perspective and needs of residential electric customers.
02Mapping out the current process for three common outage scenarios and identifying key pain points for all user types in each of their outage experiences.
03Creating ideas for product and experience improvements that would address pain points in one or more of the common scenarios.
1 day
Cross-functional workshop
Inside the working session
Twenty-six people from Customer Experience, Customer Care, Communications, Technology, and Operations spent a full day in the XCELab. My job was to structure the day so a room of leaders who rarely work in the same place could build one shared picture of the process, agree on where it hurts most, and leave with commitments rather than a list of ideas.
Three common outage scenarios were prioritized to bring into the session, based on their impact on customers and internal teams. They became the structure the whole day moved through.
Extended Outage
A prolonged power outage requiring sustained cross-team coordination before, during, and after restoration.
ERT Inaccurate Information
A known Estimated Restoration Time exists, but inaccurate information is communicated to customers.
ERT Suspended Notifications
A known ERT exists, but all notifications have been suspended by Xcel Energy — leaving customers with no updates or information.
Building empathy
We opened on the customer, not the org chart. A Customer Insight partner walked the room through outage-notification sentiment, ERT accuracy, and satisfaction by channel — 75% satisfaction with combined email and text notifications YTD, meaning 1 in 4 customers was not satisfied. That number framed every decision the group made for the rest of the day.
Process review
I split the room into three scenario teams — Extended Outage, ERT Suspended Notifications, ERT Inaccurate Information — each with a facilitator and a deliberate mix of expert knowledge and outside perspective. I facilitated the ERT Suspended Notifications team. Teams built the current-state blueprint for their scenario on large poster templates, then rotated through all three so every scenario was pressure-tested by people who don't live in it.
Pain points
Back at their own posters, teams marked every point where the process degraded the experience of a customer or an internal actor. Then each attendee got 15 dot votes to spend across the scenarios, turning three dense maps into a heatmap that told each team exactly where to aim.
Ideation
Each team converted its top five pain points into How Might We prompts and generated ideas against them, so ideation stayed anchored to validated problems instead of drifting toward favorite solutions.
Concept development
Teams shopped their idea boards, combining three to five complementary ideas into a single concept and sequencing it as an experience. Each team built three concepts, one against each required outcome: delight the customer, increase process efficiency, improve the employee experience. Every concept was written up as a napkin pitch.
Action planning
The room sorted all seven concepts into Now, Next, and Future, then built a people–process–technology plan for the near-term ones: what has to happen in the next five weeks, what has to happen in the next five months, whose buy-in is required, and what trade-offs standing the concept up would demand. Named owners came out of the room, not a follow-up email.
Where the room landed
The prioritized pain points differed by scenario, but they converged on the same theme: no single team could see or control the whole notification chain.
Extended Outage
Inconsistent processes, system capacity, and a notification system that couldn't be turned off by state.
ERT Suspended Notifications
Length of the suspension, lack of timely ERT updates, and overly complex notification logic.
ERT Inaccurate Information
Integration complexity, no good moment to assign an ERT, and load failures during very large outages.
Deliverables
Three service blueprints
Working from what the teams built and validated in the session, I produced a final designed blueprint for each of the three prioritized scenarios.
Each one maps the experience of customers and each internal stakeholder group — Call Center, Field Crew, Dispatch, Control Center, Communications, and Support Processes — across the before, during, and after phases of an outage. Key activities are connected to show where actions are sequential or interdependent across teams, and a dedicated Support Processes lane surfaces the outage-management software touchpoints that would feed future requirements definition.
Key benefits
01These blueprints became an updated source of truth for what the experience actually looks like for customers and all internal teams. Previously, there was no clear, connected picture of what each team does during an outage, how that work connects across teams, or the timing between those activities. There was also no solid understanding of how internal activities related to the customer experience and how customer touchpoints were affected by efforts within the organization.
02The blueprints (and especially the identified pain points) served as launching points for ideating product and experience improvements that could help address gaps in the customer experience and disconnects or challenges among teams within Xcel Energy.
A second view layered in the pain points that cross-functional working groups identified as having the largest negative impact on their ability to do their work effectively and, by extension, on the quality of the customer experience. These were the primary opportunity areas for ideation during our working session, and they serve as a reminder of the focus areas for improvement moving forward.
Napkin-pitch overviews
Though the engagement was scoped around current-state validation, we captured initial overviews of the concepts generated during ideation — each with a title, description, intended audience, and perceived value for the customer and Xcel Energy — as an input to future work.
