Web Development

A self-service portal that cut call volume by a third

Northstar Digital rebuilt Northwind Energy’s customer portal, moving meter readings, invoices and tariff changes to self-service and reducing inbound calls by 34%.

Client: Northwind Energy
Industry: Energy and utilities
Discipline: Web Development
Year: 2026
Duration: 5 months

The challenge

Northwind’s customer area dated from 2013 and did three things badly: meter readings, invoice history and tariff changes. Everything else was a phone call. The support team handled 18,000 calls a month, and roughly half were requests customers could in principle have completed themselves.

The portal could not be extended. It ran on an unsupported framework, had no test coverage, and the two developers who understood it had left. Any change took six weeks and broke something else.

What we did

We ran a two-week discovery on the call logs, tagging six months of support tickets by intent. Four journeys accounted for 71% of avoidable calls, so those four became the scope and everything else was deferred.

The new portal is a TypeScript application against the existing billing system, with a small integration layer that normalises the two meter-reading formats the business had accumulated. We kept the billing system untouched: replacing it was a three-year programme nobody had budget for.

Accessibility was a hard requirement. Roughly 9% of the customer base is over 75, and the old interface failed keyboard navigation entirely.

The most useful decision was made in week two, and it was a subtraction. The original brief listed 31 features. Tagging the support tickets showed that four journeys carried nearly three quarters of the avoidable call volume, so we built those four properly instead of thirty-one adequately.

The second decision was to leave the billing system alone. It is old and nobody enjoys working with it, but it is correct, and correctness in billing is worth more than elegance. The integration layer in front of it is the only new thing that touches money, and it is the most heavily tested code in the project.

Results