Martin Alcock
All work

HomeServe: boiler quoting

Why were boiler quotes going wrong, and not turning into sales?

HomeServe already knew its surveys were unreliable and its quotes weren't converting. I booked a boiler quote at my own house to see why, then designed and built the front end of the app that came out of it.

Organisation
HomeServe
My role
Discovery, service design and front-end development, at Razor
Type of work
Modernisation
Capabilities
Discovery, Service design, Product design, Front-end development
Sectors
Home services

The problem

HomeServe came to us with two problems it had already spotted. Surveys were coming back incomplete or wrong, so an engineer would turn up to fit a boiler and find something that stopped the job. That wastes a day and leaves the customer unhappy. Separately, too few quotes were turning into sales.

I started with the senior people who ran the service, to understand how quoting was meant to work and where they thought it was breaking.

How it unfolded

  1. Talk to the people who run it

    Discovery with senior stakeholders on the quoting process and the problems they could already see.

  2. Become the customer

    I booked a boiler quote at my own house, so I could see the service from the sofa.

  3. Design the app

    A guided survey for the surveyor, and a choice of boilers for the customer.

  4. Build the front end

    I designed and built the app's front end myself, including the final screen where the customer chooses their boiler.

One boiler, or a choice?

  • Considered

    Prescribe one model

    How the service worked at the time. Simple, but the customer can't see why, and has nothing to say yes to except the price.

  • Chosen

    Show every boiler that suits the house

    Use the survey answers to work out which boilers fit, and let the customer pick.

Decision

We gave the customer the choice. The final screen shows the range of boilers that suit the house, and the customer picks the one they want.

Guardrails for the surveyor

The same app turned installation specifications and rules into a guided survey. Surveyors had to ask and record what the installation needed: things like the length and bends of the gas pipe route, or where the flue would exit and what clearances it had. The aim was simple. The engineer shouldn't arrive on the day and find out the survey was wrong.

50%

uplift in sales conversionBasis Reported outcome. I attribute it to the customer-choice screen. The baseline, timeframe and measurement method aren't recorded, and it wasn't a controlled test.

What I'd still want to know

How the 50% was measured, and whether the guided survey cut the number of installations that couldn't be finished. As far as I know, nobody measured the second one.