9 million people are missing out on support with their energy supply

How we’re making the Priority Services Register more accessible to the people who need it

People can get extra support from energy networks and suppliers if they find it difficult to manage their energy supply. For example, those with poor eyesight can sign up for braille bills. People with mobility issues can get their meter moved so it’s easier to reach.

11 million households in the UK can get help if they sign up for the Priority Services Register — the free service provided by suppliers and network operators to people who need it. But only 2 million do it. That’s 9 million people missing out on free support they’re entitled to because they don’t make it through the registration process — often for the same reason they need help in the first place.

To reach these people, we want to create a registration process that’s universal, accessible and maintained by Citizens Advice.

Registering for extra support with your energy supply is complicated

The priority services register is designed to support vulnerable people. But the current registration process is complicated and it’s hard to access.

Currently, each energy network and supplier has their own registration form. They’re all designed differently and are usually buried on corporate websites.

That said, the forms do have one thing in common — the way they describe vulnerabilities:

People have to select vulnerabilities from this long list on each registration form that energy networks and suppliers currently use. From our experience helping people with PIP and DLA issues, we know that people don’t often think of themselves vulnerable.

This form is supposed to help vulnerable people tell energy networks and suppliers what kind of support they need. In practice it’s confusing and unclear, and for some people it’s overwhelming.

Starting with assumptions

Before starting a project like this, it’s important to make our assumptions clear. This defines the scope of the work, and means we can be confident we don’t start off in the wrong direction.

Our team got together to kick off the project by writing some post-its:

We each have assumptions based on our individual experiences and knowledge of our users. For example, we started out assuming that:

  • many people won’t know who supplies their energy
  • a significant number of eligible people don’t have or use email
  • we’ll reach older audiences through local Citizens Advice offices, not Google

To be sure our assumptions were correct, we came up with ‘validation signals’ — these are figures that back up our claims. We’d only use our assumptions to inform the tool if, for example:

  • 70% of people we survey know who supplies their energy
  • 60% of people who visit Citizens Advice with energy issues have email addresses
  • half of people who visit Citizens Advice with energy issues are eligible to draw a pension

If we found evidence to support these assumptions, we’d know that we’re starting in the right direction. We’d also continue to challenge new assumptions throughout the process.

Fortunately, we already have a lot of data on the people we help and the problems they face. For example, we worked with the team behind Casebook to find out how many people have email addresses, and how old they are.

Turning hypotheses into user needs

Next, we looked at our audience. Following the same process we apply to content, we used existing evidence to develop ‘user needs’. These are statements that define what people need from the service, and ultimately define the product we build.

At this stage, what we knew about our audience was still relatively limited — we hadn’t validated all our assumptions yet. As a result, we started with high-level user needs that encompassed what we did know:

As someone who’s eligible for extra support from my energy network, I need an easy way to apply for priority services so I can get the extra help I need.

Solving this problem isn’t straightforward — among other things, we need cooperation from the different energy networks and a secure way to transfer people’s data.

Before we began work to build a full solution on the Citizens Advice website, we thought about the simplest solution we could start with. Something we could build quickly that still solves our problem, and helps us learn more about people who use the tool. We call this the ‘minimum viable product’.

How we designed a solution

Our advice content on priority services already ranks highly on Google, so we decided to start with this. To take advantage of the high traffic these pages get, we built a simple tool that points people to the right application form.

Did we solve the problem?

We started monitoring the tool using Mouseflow — this anonymously records how people interact with the tool. Watching the recordings back helps us figure out if anyone is getting stuck.

We left Mouseflow to monitor the tool for 2 weeks — this gave us time to collect and observe plenty of ways people used it.

This helped us find out about a number of problems with our first attempt at solving the problem.

  • People need to know their energy network to use the tool, and our solution takes people away from our site and expects them to return
  • Each network has a different registration process — this makes the process inconsistent
  • People start on our site but end on another, which can be confusing

Most people didn’t check their network, and jumped straight to the drop-down menu.

We thought this might be because we didn’t clearly direct people where to go. We updated the content to make the steps people should follow clearer.

After making these changes, we tested the tool again for another week. Watching back these recordings, we saw more people checking their postcodes and finding the right form.

Building this initial solution taught us a lot about what people need when signing up to the priority services register. We got to know more about the different registration forms and started to gather data about which energy networks our people are with.

What’s next

To register for priority services, people need to follow 3 steps:

  1. Work out if they’re eligible
  2. Find their energy network
  3. Fill in their application form

Our minimum viable product helps people register — the most important thing we wanted to do. But people can only complete step 1 on the Citizens Advice website — they have to go to different sites for steps 2 and 3.

This is disjointed — we want to offer a complete solution to people, with all 3 steps on the Citizens Advice website. The more frequently we send people to different websites, the less likely they are to complete the journey.

In the coming weeks, we’ll develop and test a working prototype of the full solution, and we’ll tell you what happens on We are Citizens Advice.

We help people find a way forward. We're here for everyone.

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Owen Priestley

Owen Priestley

Senior content designer at Citizens Advice. Interested in UX, content strategy and staying woke. Views my own — owenpriestley.co.uk

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