For commodity retailers, differentiating yourself from competitors can be challenging. Gas South decided to clear things up.
Rising to the Top
Using customer experience to elevate brand identity in a highly regulated industry
The Ask
Gas South wanted to change how consumers shop for and purchase natural gas.
Gas South is a leader in the natural gas industry. Based in Atlanta, they provide services to more than 425,000 residential and commercial customers throughout the Southeast.
The Answer
We created a site that uses education and transparency to show customers the light.
- Brand Design Systems
- Competitive & Industry Research
- Customer Research & Journey Mapping
- Graphic Design
- IA & Experience Maps
- UI Visual Design
- UX Design & Prototyping
- UX Research & Testing
5%
increase in time on site
7%
increase in initial enrollments
12%
decrease in bounce rate
25%
increase in number of page visits per session
Natural resourcefulness
With offerings restricted by highly regulated standards, Gas South saw their online customer experience as a way to stand out. They asked for a site that would disrupt expectations – educating consumers about natural gas options and helping them get to know Gas South as an essential service provider. We created a digital experience that simplified the natural gas purchasing process and demonstrated their core values in ways that thoroughly won customers over.
Play Video
Good Rates. Good Service. Doing Good: Gas South’s homepage lays out the pillars of their competitive advantage: culture of honesty and transparency, high quality of service, and commitment to giving back.
Fueling efficiency
Gas South saw the potential for their site to set a new standard for customer experiences in their industry.
Our research showed consumers were confused about how to shop for natural gas. They didn’t understand therms, rates, and tiers, and were skeptical about enrollment options.
We used these insights to identify content gaps and create a more transparent, easy-to-navigate site. We enhanced UX features like search capabilities, chatbot, and interactive charts – including a sliding scale to explain monthly usage – to lead customers to answers, instead of more questions.
With the site’s seamless new content flow, Gas South enrollments immediately jumped 7%.
Pipeline pathways
Managing path-to-purchase flows for both residential and commercial customers while keeping the experience streamlined was our next challenge.
By focusing on each group’s most common use cases, including service rate research, online payments, and in-context support, we were able to create discrete, frictionless decision-making paths.
At the end of the project, we delivered a scalable design “toolbox,” which included mobile and desktop page templates and a grab-and-go component library, for Gas South to use as their site evolves.
Launch really understands our business and how we work. They paid attention to what we needed and crafted a team to extend with our own. They are so approachable and collaborative and brought in research and perspective on our digital customers that we didn’t have.