You are Camille Rousseau, head of service design at Foyer Connecté, a Lille subscription that pairs a home-energy app with coaching to cut household bills. A cold snap has pushed thousands of bills above what the app promised, and the press has noticed. Before you redesign anything, you must say where the exchange with subscribers broke.
The situation
Monday, 9 March 2026. The overnight complaint log is long, and a newspaper headline this morning calls Foyer Connecté "the app that saves nothing". In four weeks you present a redesign plan to the board; the next cold snap, and the bill cycle behind it, is about sixty days away.
The business: 240,000 subscribers at €18 a month, about €51.8 million a year, at a 34% contribution margin before customer-operations costs. The promise is simple: follow the app's guidance and your bill falls. But the saving only appears when the household does its part: an honest occupancy schedule, saying when the home is in use, and acting on the coaching messages.
Monthly cancellations have jumped from 1.8% to 3.4%; held for a year, finance puts about 33,600 extra subscribers lost and €7.3 million of yearly revenue at risk. A diagnostic run after the backlash found that 62% of the households who complained never finished the basic set-up (occupancy schedule, savings goal), and that 28% call the coaching messages preachy or irrelevant. Separately, about 4,000 subscribers have found how to trigger the savings-guarantee credit, €22 a time, without changing anything: €88,000 this cycle, and climbing. Finance caps new spending at €2.0 million and will not accept a margin below 30%.