Energy Provider Essent Improves Website with HintTech and Scores a 7.4

02 December 2008 - Consumers in the online energy market are critical and shop from a variety of providers. For these companies, a client-friendly website is a must. When asked for feedback, energy provider Essent’s website, Essent.nl, was given a ‘7’ by visitors. The company thought it could do better. After an upgrade of the site, it scored even higher with a 7.4. HintTech acted as implementation partner.

It is known everywhere that visitors log off if the can’t directly find what they are looking for. “Each click is then one too many,” said Essent’s Manager of E-Development, Peter de Keijzer. Next to this, intuitive navigation is important and the trustworthiness of the site is crucial. “If it ever goes wrong once, for example, the website is temporarily unavailable, then a large number of visitors log off and simply don’t return,” De Keijzer said.

De Keijzer understands well how crucial the website is for Essent. That’s why he found it worthwhile to invest in improving it even though it had scored a 7 in an inquiry that Essent had launched itself for visitors. Two jobs were required: an upgrade to the content management system Tridion 5.1 to 5.2 and the implementation of a new navigation layout. HintTech was hired as implementation partner to resolve these issues.

The result of the upgrade, HintTech’s smart architecture and the new navigation layout are all directly measurable. The site has fewer problems and the content managers can more quickly publish pages allowing the website to be more easily kept up-to-date. The content managers are also happy with the easier process.

Blond Website

Visitors have also noticed the difference. Now, the users who surf to Essent.nl land directly in a consumer environment rather than at a homepage. With fewer clicks they can directly find the information they are searching for, the meter measure, for example, the closed environment “My Essent,” or customer service. In addition, thanks to the new design the site looks ‘blonder’: there are fewer colors, there is more white space, less text – in short – the look and feel is clearer overall.

Users claim the site is client-friendly, approachable, modern and well organized. The visitors therefore awarded Essent.nl a higher grade than before with a 7.4.

About Essent:

Essent was born out of a merger between the PNEM/Mega Group and the EDON Group. Essent delivers electricity, gas and warmth to home-based and business clients. Essent is active in the entire energy market: from the production of energy to the delivering of energy to end-users.

About HintTech

HintTech is a specialist in e-business technology (.Net, Java platform, Tridion) and IT projects. The company was started in 1997 and works with innovative and proven technologies and methods. HintTech provides qualitative custom solutions for their customers. For Tridion, Microsoft, Sun J2EE and IBM WebSphere, HintTech is an advisor as well as partner. HintTech counts Shell, Nuon, Fortis, ING and KLM as clients. It currently employs 113 people and has offices in Delft (Netherlands), San Francisco (US) and Novi Sad (Serbia).