In the Netherlands more and more groups of volunteers are formed who collectively establish sustainable energy producing initiatives. The customer needs of these so-called sustainable energy collectives are unlike any other customer groups of distribution network operator Stedin.
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In the Netherlands more and more groups of volunteers are formed who collectively establish sustainable energy producing initiatives. The customer needs of these so-called sustainable energy collectives are unlike any other customer groups of distribution network operator Stedin. Their applications for grid connections often require case-specific service. There is no uniform way in dealing with this customer group and this leads to dissatisfaction, rework in the process and long process times. Furthermore, no ownership among Stedin employees has been found to take responsibility for servicing this customer group. The design brief has therefore been formulated as follows: Design a single point of contact for SECs that recognizes and communicates the customer journey that SECs live through when applying for a grid connection and logs all contact between Stedin and the SEC. First, ownership of where to embed this service in the organization was found during a co-creation session with different employees of Stedin and SEC members. Secondly, together with these employees, the service journey of these SECs was co-created using six different story boards. The story boards functioned as a boundary object to be able to talk and make decisions about the service with Stedin employees from different disciplines and to be able to communicate this service to the outside. Thirdly, a digital prototype was designed to show how to embed the story boards in the Stedin website and communicate the service to SECs. When validating the service with SECs, the story boards were found to be a successful way to communicate about the service. The service was found to be sufficing the need of a single point of contact for SECs. For implementation, the service has to be validated with SECs, new to the service, and agreed upon by higher management. To keep the service up-to-date, the newly appointed service desk should organize (bi)annual co-creation workshops together with SECs to check whether the service desk can be adapted to the changing needs of sustainable energy collectives.