How MoneySuperMarket used insights to drive change across an industry

Rapidly reaching insights with a high level of confidence

Since 2013, UserZoom has become an essential tool for MoneySuperMarket’s digital team.

Due to its variety of research methodologies, in addition to the range of outputs and flexibility to be used at any stage of the product life cycle, UserZoom has become the perfect tool for the agile team.

Overcoming regulatory challenges

MoneySuperMarket is accredited by Ofgem, the UK energy market regulator, as a price comparison site for energy products. As such, MoneySuperMarket strives to provide consumers with the best energy deals possible and a range of information from independent sources.

Louise Rowlands, Customer Research Manager at MoneySuperMarket, summarizes, “We were in a situation where both the customer proposition and the business proposition were being negatively affected.”

Using insights to make customer-centric decisions

MoneySuperMarket hypothesized they could help more people switch their energy by giving them only actionable options and took proposals to Ofgem. An agreement was reached that allowed MoneySuperMarket to undertake a live trial of different designs, with some showing the whole market and some not.

It planned to conduct this trial over several weeks through its multi-variate testing (MVT) solution. However, a required trial component was capturing user feedback as they interacted with different variants. That’s when the digital team turned to Louise, who proposed integrating UserZoom’s testing capability within each variant.

Louise created tests featuring survey questions and a click test for each variant with UserZoom’s easy-to-use study builder. Within a few weeks, hundreds of users completed exit surveys and tests for each variant. The feedback MoneySuperMarket got through UserZoom, combined with the insights from their studies, helped them to understand which variants performed better and why.

Louise added that the team “took our findings on how the variants performed to Ofgem, including the findings from UserZoom, and they loved it.” The results were so impressive that the Competitions & Markets Authority has since ruled in favor of comparison sites only showing deals customers can switch to. MoneySuperMarket’s hypothesis was correct, and the results of their trial helped change regulatory policy.

Driving change for both customers and an industry

UserZoom provided the MoneySuperMarket with a level of insight they’d never had before. There was also an immediate impact on customer outcomes; moving to the new design could help 11,000 additional MoneySuperMarket customers switch per year.

More broadly, this project has allowed MoneySuperMarket to challenge the market and the way the regulator thinks about experience and what is best for the customer. They have done this through best-in-class design, testing, and research, which combines informed qualitative and quantitative user research.