MY WORK /
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA EDISON
Overview
Company and mission
Southern California Edison (SCE) is one of the largest electric utilities in the United States, delivering reliable, clean, and affordable electricity to over 15 million people across a 50,000-square-mile service territory in Central, Coastal, and Southern California.
My role
As Strategy Director and Senior Content Strategist at Possible / Wunderman Thompson, I served as a lead for the SCE account. I partnered with design, UX, and client stakeholders to shape digital initiatives in a heavily regulated environment under sustained scrutiny due to wildfire risk.
My work spanned service design, content systems, lifecycle communications, and campaign strategy, with a focus on improving clarity, trust, and measurable performance.
Impact
During my time on the SCE account:
- Defined and proposed a centralized Help Center to support millions of customers during service disruptions
- Architected a unified content and automation strategy to streamline customer communications
- Established the strategic foundation for an automated marketing program that achieved email open rates as high as 63%
- Led strategy and creative direction for an EV rebate microsite that generated 175,000 applications within the first five months
- Directed digital components of a broader rebrand, contributing to a 17-point lift in brand favorability
- Led “CSAT Sprints”—rapid optimizations focused on improving high-value pages against defined KPIs
- Created weekly presentations (“Schauer Power Hour”) to improve agency team fluency in the energy industry
Help center
Mitigating disruption for millions
When SCE undertook a years-long effort to replatform its account and billing software, it had to find a way to manage expected service and website disruptions for its 5 million customer accounts.
I proposed a Help Center that could guide customers through the confusion as well as scale to become the new, primary self-service help destination for all future customer needs.
In addition to benefiting customers, I saw the experience as a tool to help coordinate SCE's siloed teams. In this new approach for the organization, different product and program teams would need to articulate and internally share the impacts of the replatform in clear, customer-facing language.
Defining the product
I conducted an audit of best-in-class help centers to define the product and identify opportunities to engage different learning and browsing styles.
Then, I outlined over a hundred different help topics that would need to be created—many of which would have to be tailored to specific audiences and change based on the current phase of the replatform.
A lasting success
A year later, the SCE Help Center launched and became a critical resource to customers during the replatform. Some features that were specific to the replatform have since been retired, but the experience now stands as a central repository for all help topics.
