Centralizing digital services with EDP Smart

EDP Brasil is a subsidiary of EDP (Energias de Portugal) and one of the largest electric utility companies in Brazil. The company started Brazilian operations in 1996 and has since expanded into a wide service portfolio: traditional hydropower, solar energy, home facilities, electric mobility, and more.

I led the design of EDP Smart, the company's first self-service digital platform for residential customers. The goal was to unify a growing service portfolio into a single hub. Customers needed a digital pathway to subscriptions, requests, and one-off purchases that had previously run entirely through human support.

EDP Brasil built its market penetration through executive sales and public-sector concessions in power supply. That model worked for the core electricity business but did not carry over to newer verticals like electric mobility, home facilities, and adjacent services.

Service activation carried its own friction. EDP customers can add subscriptions or one-off charges to their electricity bill, which removes payment friction. The request flow itself ran through customer support, which meant every activation was an email or phone interaction routed through a human agent.

Internal policy prevented us from interviewing EDP Brasil's customers directly. We worked with the closest available proxy: Customer Support. Since EDP's customer experience ran almost entirely through email and phone, Customer Support held the deepest view of what customers asked for, where they hit friction, and what escalated into the ticket queue.

We interviewed five Customer Support representatives. The top request surfaced immediately: customers wanted a digital platform that centralized every EDP service in one place. Behind that headline, three pain points framed the brief.

1. Dependency on human agents. Contacting support for routine actions delays resolution and generates frustration, especially for simple, repeat tasks.
2. No self-service path. The absence of a self-service option discourages users from exploring upsells and new services, which flattens acquisition opportunities.
3. Routine tasks are cumbersome. Without a digital platform, small actions like checking bill history or updating information become disproportionately costly.

We translated the pain points into three design criteria that anchored the solution:

• Standardized structure for products and services. Every service surface needs to feel like part of the same system, regardless of vertical.
• Clear navigation and clear selling points. Each product needs a coherent entry page that communicates what it does and why it matters.
• Unified checkout. A single checkout flow handles every service, including the existing option to add costs to the electricity bill.

The information architecture followed from those constraints. We designed a hub with a familiar structure that scales across verticals and keeps navigation intuitive on first contact, whether the customer is exploring Solar for the first time or managing an existing Facilities subscription.

EDP Smart shipped as a unified hub connecting every service EDP Brasil offers to residential customers. Each vertical gets a dedicated surface with consistent structure, and a central checkout threads them together.

Facilities

A subscription that covers electricians, plumbers, AC maintenance, and similar services 24/7 at no additional cost per visit.

Solar

A simulation-first flow that lets users estimate their savings before committing to converting their household to solar generation.

Electric Mobility

Chargers sold to residential customers for home installation, and to business owners for commercial sites.

Insurance

Coverage options across health, home, and power bill protection.

Services

One-time household maintenance requests available to customers without a Facilities subscription.

Custom Checkout

The checkout consolidates every service into a single industry-standard flow, with multiple payment options including the existing electricity-bill add-on. The logged area acts as the long-term anchor, centralizing subscriptions, service requests, orders, solar panel status, and account management in one place.

EDP Smart shipped as EDP Brasil's first self-service digital platform for residential customers. It moves service activation out of the ticket queue and into a hub customers can navigate independently.

Three months after launch, Customer Support reported a 30% reduction in ticket workload across the services migrated to the platform. The team expected that number to grow as more customers discovered the self-service flows and shifted routine interactions out of email and phone.

This project sat under two significant constraints from day one. We could not interview end users directly, and EDP Brasil had no prior digital platform to draw historical data from. Every decision had to be argued from proxy research and first principles rather than measured precedent.

Overcoming those constraints came down to design judgment and tight collaboration across the product team and Customer Support. The platform's early results suggest the proxy model held up, and the 30% workload reduction is the clearest external signal that the users we could not reach directly are finding their way through the design.

Most of my projects are protected under NDA. If any part of this case study sparks a question, I'm always happy to talk it through over coffee.