Helping SSEN deliver vital digital services to 4.1M UK homes

Background

Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks (SSEN), part of FTSE-50 energy leader SSE, delivers electricity to over 4.1 million homes and businesses across northern Scotland and central southern England.

SSEN partnered with Mando Group to enhance their digital presence, update their website, and develop tools that reduce operational costs while giving customers more self-service options. They also aimed to replace an outdated digital platform and launch a new site reflecting recent customer feedback.

From day one, SSEN set out to remain the top performer in digital customer experience among energy providers. This meant reimagining customer journeys for simplicity, improving mobile optimisation for seamless on-the-go use, and boosting self-serve features so customers can solve more themselves and spend less time on the phone.

Business Drivers

At the outset, we worked closely with SSEN Distribution to define the core business drivers shaping our discovery process.

Key business objectives included:

• Boosting operational efficiency - achieving more with fewer resources to free up capacity for innovation
• Elevating technical standards - delivering a digital experience that meets industry-leading benchmarks
• Increasing customer engagement - making the website more interactive and compelling for SSEN customers
• Expanding self-serve options - enabling more customers to solve requests and issues independently
• Enhancing technical performance - ensuring the website runs smoothly and delivers a best-in-class experience
• Raising customer satisfaction - making every interaction with the website enjoyable and effective
• Harnessing customer insights - using website data to become more customer-centric
• Building awareness - helping customers understand the benefits of Priority Services
• Driving conversions - increasing active participation in the PSR program
• Promoting sustainability - growing awareness of Low Carbon and Net Zero initiatives
• Ensuring accessibility - providing an inclusive digital service that works for everyone, whatever their needs

Solution

As part of Mando Group’s delivery approach, we evaluated and selected a platform that aligned with SSEN’s business goals and security needs: Optimizely DXP.

Cliff Hill, Senior Vice President, UK&I at Optimizely, said:

“SSEN needed a modern replacement for their legacy CMS—something that gave their Content Delivery team more control, flexibility, and an improved user experience. Optimizely delivered all that, allowing SSEN to provide a superior experience for their customers.”

Optimizely was chosen for its robust security and ability to mitigate risks like power failures, physical intrusions, and network outages. The Mando Group solution uses Microsoft’s .NET Framework, laying a future-proof foundation for SSEN’s digital presence.

By leveraging the .NET Framework, we integrated SSEN’s third-party APIs and CRM systems. Our Core-Components framework empowers editors to easily create visual content in the CMS with a variety of page layouts.

We also developed bespoke components, letting editors create dynamic pages, custom forms, calculators, supplier tools, and distributor information. A comprehensive triaging tool now guides visitors to the right content, while a new network graph and data tool displays real-time network statuses—from Orkney to the Isle of Wight. Full CMS flexibility puts content, labels, and compliance controls in the hands of SSEN’s team.

Key considerations included:

• Adhering to leading security and privacy standards: ISO 27001, Privacy Shield, GDPR, Secure Development Lifecycle, Azure compliance, DDoS mitigation, Origin Shield protection
• Leveraging Azure’s global datacentres for resilience and scalability
• Enabling easy content management for rapid publishing
• Azure Active Directory for advanced security policies, user groups, and access control
• Custom content editor workflows, helping SSEN efficiently manage and deliver content

Outcome

To help SSEN deliver the UK’s best digital experience in electricity distribution, we designed and launched a new website built on a market-leading digital experience platform.

The site directly responds to customer feedback, with overhauled journeys that make finding information fast and intuitive. It’s fully optimised for mobile, ensuring customers can get what they need, wherever they are.

We enhanced self-serve features to ease pressure on call centres, letting customers solve more themselves. For vulnerable customers, we made registering for the Priority Services Register simple and accessible with intuitive forms.

The platform is engineered to stay resilient during peak times - especially storm season - auto-scaling to keep the site available when customers need it most. Seamless API integration behind the scenes lets us focus on delivering a flexible, self-serve experience on the front end.