Customer experience
Toronto Hydro – Customer Self-Service Portal
The program established a unified self-service and assisted-service foundation, with personalized consumption insights and reporting to support ongoing improvement. Toronto Hydro's website was ranked third among Canadian utilities.
- Role
- Digital transformation and delivery lead
- Year
- 2021
- Capabilities
- Experience strategy · Digital product delivery · Operational enablement · Cross-functional leadership
Business context
Customers relied on the contact centre for common account tasks, while service representatives needed a consistent view across phone, email, mail, and digital interactions.
Indicator of value
The program established a unified self-service and assisted-service foundation, with personalized consumption insights and reporting to support ongoing improvement. Toronto Hydro's website was ranked third among Canadian utilities.
Executive summary
Toronto Hydro needed to make common account interactions easier for customers without designing digital self-service in isolation from the contact centre. The program combined a customer portal, personalized consumption information, an internal service console, and performance reporting into one delivery effort.
The customer and operational problem
Customers called the contact centre for routine needs such as viewing a balance, downloading a bill, reviewing payment history, or managing a move. Shifting those tasks online required more than a set of forms: the digital and assisted channels needed to work as a coherent service.
My role
I led end-to-end delivery and support, including timeline, scope, and budget. I coordinated product owners, business analysts, architects, developers, quality assurance, security operations, and performance specialists in a virtual cross-functional team.
Approach and strategic decisions
- Prioritized high-value account tasks that customers could complete without calling.
- Connected the portal to personalized consumption insights so the experience provided context, not only transactions.
- Designed an internal console alongside the customer experience so service representatives could support email, phone, and mail interactions.
- Established reporting to make service performance and improvement opportunities visible.
- Advised on the operating processes required to support the program after launch.
Solution
The Liferay-based portal enabled customers to view balances, download bills, review billing and payment history, and manage moves. An internal console supported customer relations representatives across channels, while reporting provided a foundation for monitoring the service.
Outcomes and indicators of value
The program created a shared digital and operational foundation for common customer transactions. Toronto Hydro's website was ranked third among Canadian utility websites. No additional performance metrics are disclosed here.
What the work reinforced
Self-service succeeds when the customer journey and the assisted-service operation are designed together. Moving a task online is only one part of the experience; staff tools, support processes, reporting, and ownership determine whether it can scale.