Senior Experience Designer - OVO Energy

OVO exists to power human progress with clean and affordable energy for everyone.We’re seeking an experienced designer to join the team tasked with delivering a modern contact centre experience for both our customers and our care teams.

Our award-winning customer service contact centre is a key touch point in our drive to become the UK’s most trusted energy supplier. We want to offer more ways for people to speak with us — including phone, email, chat, social media, and messaging platforms. And we’re excited by the potential to predictively route customers to the best team to handle their enquiry, and to connect people to the same agents each time they contact us.

We’ve begun work on the architecture and technology to enable all this, but we need to create an experience vision to inform and guide our work. The role will include designing chatbot scripts and voice menus for calls, figuring out how to cater for multiple brands, and exploring how we can serve our many different product areas from home energy to electric vehicles to smart home technology. We want to offer the best possible service to our customers, as well as efficient and effective tools for our agents to help them do their best work. It’s the first time a user experience person will work in this area, so it’s a great opportunity to influence how we work and take on increasing responsibility.

You’ll be pragmatic and comfortable with ambiguity as we continue to uncover what work needs to be done, and make decisions about how to best serve our customers. It’s an exciting programme: we’re replacing legacy technology, upgrading the internal tools our agents use all day, and need to be ready to scale to millions more future customers. 

You’ll partner closely with our product manager to help the team connect with our customer care teams, define the future experience vision and business metrics, and design tools and journeys for our agents. You’ll coordinate a discovery, establish ongoing research, lead service and interaction design, and help the team always ask “are we building the right thing?”.

The role is based in Bristol, and you’ll collaborate with people across the UK. Learn more about working in the OVO family of companies at careers.ovo.com and Glassdoor. We were delighted to win our 3rd Top Employers award, uSwitch's Supplier of the Year, and Company of the Decade.

Representative teams are the best teams. Only when we reflect everyone, can we build services for everyone.
We’re keen to meet people with varied backgrounds: the more inclusive we are the better our work will be. We understand some people may not apply to jobs unless they tick every box. And we know 'normal' office hours don't work for everyone, so we're open to discussing flexible working requests. If you're excited about joining us and think you have much of what we're looking for, even if you're not 100% sure… we'd love to hear from you.

Your objectives

• reveal the needs of our customer care teams so we can build new tools and workflows  for them to offer our customers the best possible help and support
• help your team validate or dismiss the assumptions they’ve had to make so far
• design with, not for, our customers and customer service agents
• introduce regular experimentation and ways to quickly get feedback on ideas
• show your team how a lean and iterative design approach helps them experiment quickly

Whether you’re reviewing usability studies, or running a co-design workshop… you’ll have to go beyond problem solving: we’re after a problem finder.

What you’ll be doing

First three months

• immerse yourself in the energy industry and our market landscape – be curious!
• meet our customers, contact centre staff, and the technology teams delivering this work to understand their needs and frustrations
• conduct discovery activities to help shape our work, and map existing customer journeys
• plan and lead workshops to bring people together and build shared understanding
• get to know your new team, and connect with our wider research and design community

Within six months

• introduce ways for your team to regularly interact with their users and get fast feedback
• partner with your product manager and use research insights to influence our roadmap
• help your team implement A/B testing infrastructure and exposure hours
• coach colleagues interested in UX as potential future members of the team
• involve everyone in a culture of collaborative research, design, and testing

This could be a great stretch role if you’re seeking more responsibility — it’s an opportunity to have a very real impact on a service millions of our customers use regularly.

Our process...

• apply online with some work samples; we assess everyone using this role description
• we’ll invite you to a call with a UX lead to get to know you
• next, you’ll have a remote video interview to explore your experience
• then we’ll ask you to facilitate a remote activity with people from the hiring team
• we’ll have any final conversations, before giving feedback and hopefully an offer  🙌

You’ll love working with us if you...

• have a passion for understanding real people’s real problems, and an ability to coach the people you work with not to jump to solutions too quickly
• have a critical thinking process and enjoy studying problems to puzzle out the challenges
• recognise assumptions (including your own) and seek ways to try and invalidate them
• have a diverse and evolving toolbox of methods and techniques for visualising problems, user journeys, and interactions, as well as for developing and testing solutions
• are empathetic with colleagues as well as customers, especially when you’re communicating research findings, explaining the rationale behind a design, or questioning ways of working
• know your strengths, and recognise there’s always more to learn from others
• embrace agility and iteration, and celebrate learning and change

You’ll join our OVO-wide community of 60+ researchers and designers. We help teams see through the eyes of real people—understanding their context, motivations, and needs—so we can improve things for everyone.

We use whatever methods and media best suit the challenge, and inform strategic choices about where improvements could have the greatest impact. We love design workshops, exciting colleagues about service design, improving our accessibility, and putting participants first in our research; check out all our blogs. We fall in love with the problem, not our solutions.

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OVO’s here to challenge the status quo: to do what’s right, find a better way, and build something great. We embrace simplicity, transparency, and treating people and planet fairly. We understand that attracting and keeping the best talent is key to our forward-thinking future, so our people will always share in our success. Our benefits are nice too.

We want to build teams which represent a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills, and we hire on the basis of merit and potential. So get in touch, ask lots of questions.