Why we’ve launched our new Group website

We’re thrilled to unveil our brand new Group website,
sms-plc.com, which was officially launched on Tuesday 26th July 2022 to our customers, employees, investors, and followers.

As a purpose-led organisation on a mission to deliver the future of smart energy, creating an online space that amply reflects our brand, culture, and the full scale of our business ambition has been a key strategic project for SMS over the past six months.

In this blog, we uncover the who, what and why of the project, and how our new website will not just provide our business with a key digital asset to propel our continued growth, but provide a reference point for customers, employees, and industry as we aim to create a low-carbon world together.

A changing website for the changing times

Firstly, the requirement for a new website which better represents our business had become particularly pressing given our recent rapid growth; growth that has come as a direct consequence of our evolving business model towards an increasingly diverse range of energy solutions. We now employ over 1,400 people across the UK and Ireland who collectively form our expertise across an array of integrated carbon reduction (CaRe) assets, including smart meters (and the critical data they provide), battery energy storage systems (BESS), and EV chargepoints.

Secondly, our growth of course has also naturally coincided with a drastic shift in the political and economic agenda during the last number of years. This is an agenda that has finally begun to seriously recognise the fundamental requirement to create a more sustainable society in the face of the threats posed to our planet by climate change.

Thirdly, our largest digital asset had to better reflect and fully integrate our refreshed brand, which began its rollout in 2021.

As an organisation that has been operating at the heart of the UK energy market for the past 25 years (serving the industrial, commercial, domestic, and public sectors) we’ve found ourselves in a unique position to lead from front in regard to the critical decarbonisation of our energy system.

Quite simply, we needed a new website to address these changing times and the challenges facing our customers – and society more widely – in the context of climate change, decarbonisation, and sustainability.

The brief

The updated sms-plc.com, therefore, would need to bring these developments together alongside our innovative services, thriving company culture, and recently refreshed brand to present a coherent, engaging, and dynamic picture of our organisation to our stakeholders.

Not only that, we wanted to create a website that would provide an outstanding user experience; something that would not just be easy to use and navigate for our various different target audiences, but tell an impactful story of our brand, core values, and solutions.

With a compelling brief in hand, we sought the assistance of our established creative and PR partners, Instinctif, to help us realise our objective of creating a digital asset that we could be proud of, and that our visitors could relate to and rely on.

The project

We began by hosting extensive internal workshops across all divisions of our business to form a global picture of our brand story and propositions. This would give our content and creative teams the license to go about formulating a fresh site structure, design, and copy that could bring the website fully to life.

A crucial part of the project identified from the outset was to reimagine the segmentation and structure of our service offerings in a way that made sense to our customers and other interested stakeholders. Given the range and variety of our solutions (and supporting business information and resources), we also needed a navigational tool that would help our different users seamlessly find what they were looking for.

We also wanted the website to bring our people and culture to the very forefront of our brand, not just emphasising the values we stand for, but providing full transparency on commitments towards improving our impact on the environment, and society at large, through a dedicated Sustainability section.

The result

Based on the above, we’ve followed through on our brief to launch a website that we are all very proud of. Aside from the fresh look and feel, some of the exciting new features of the site include:

• Updated About Us section, detailing who we are, what we do, and what we stand for
• Revamped Solutions pages and structure, which helps segment our diverse range of services
• An intuitive new Mega Menu (designed especially for our website) that allows you to navigate seamlessly between pages
• New Sustainability section which provides clear detail and updates on our ESG & Net Zero efforts
• Dedicated portal for Investors which integrates all our key corporate information in one area
• Easy-to-use Contact Us form which puts customers directly in touch with the most relevant SMS teams
• New sections on Our People, News & Insights, Accreditations, Case Studies & More

We hope you enjoy using some of these features and spend some time getting to better know our business by experiencing our new website first hand.