Commune Media | Measurably Effective Digital Marketing™

Enbridge Gas Distribution website content optimization

Posted on Thursday, September 24th, 2009 at 12:52 PM by Pramesh Attwala  |  Comments (0)

Challenge

With 1.8 million customers, Enbridge Gas Distribution relies on its website to communicate essential information on natural gas rates, rebates and safety, as well as to promote sustainable energy consumption. Yet after years of growth, the website’s content had become hard to navigate and use—meaning more calls for help to customer service.

After participating in an industry-wide assessment of utility sites, Enbridge’s communications team strove to enhance customer satisfaction by further improving their site’s usability. Recognizing that their site could better serve and educate customers—and that their internal content development process could be streamlined and centrally coordinated—they engaged us to assist in assessing and improving a number of issues:

• The site’s approximately 400 pages were out of date, often duplicated and, in many cases, contained contradictory claims
• Because different departments within Enbridge controlled various sections of the site, the content’s lack of cohesion made for a choppy and often frustrating user experience
• The content, much of which had been written by industry experts without adherence to usability guidelines and web-writing best practices, lacked a consistent overall theme and voice
• Many of the site’s pages were poorly optimized for search—both through external search engines and within the site itself

Solution

To sharpen the focus of Enbridge’s site and to help the company’s communications team meet its goal of providing an optimal user experience for customers, we worked closely with key members from multiple departments within Enbridge to implement the following measures:

• After reviewing research on utility website best practices, we performed a detailed content analysis of Enbridge’s site, covering such areas as search engine optimization and web-specific readability
• Based on our findings, we created a content strategy that included targeted customer personas, research-based keywords, and a consistent tone for the site
• With the strategy in place, we guided each page through an editorial process that included writing, rewriting, revising according to stakeholder suggestions, obtaining legal approval, staging, proofing and publishing
• To organize and keep track of our improvements to the large quantity of interdepartmental pages, we created a collaborative environment for collecting internal stakeholder opinions and suggested wording

And to ensure the quality and consistency of eventual updates, we also conducted an on-site web-writing best-practices workshop to educate Enbridge team members who would be responsible for future content.

Results

Throughout our year-long engagement with Enbridge, we worked to improve the company’s vision of an engaging site optimized for usability and readability. This included through reducing the website’s page count, streamlining navigation, and ensuring that website content served customer needs and thereby reduced expensive calls to customer care. Evangelizing for customer-centered content, usability, design and functionality, we were subsequently engaged by Enbridge to create a strategy for a complete overhaul of its web communications. This strategy is slated for implementation by 2011.