The telecommunications industry is highly competitive with new entrants, and high customer churn is a big concern. Digital e-commerce and self-service channels play a significant role in acquiring and retaining customers at a lower cost. If a customer is unable to purchase a service or upgrade their device, their likelihood of switching to a competitor becomes high – leading to a lost opportunity and lost revenue. Therefore, having a frictionless digital experience is crucial for Telcos’s success, and our client, a large Canadian telecom, was no exception.
Challenges
With the holidays fast approaching, our large telco client was looking to capitalize on boxing day to drive eCommerce sales. However, their current online retail capabilities were severely limited as they were at an early stage of digital maturity. They needed a partner and a solution that would allow them to quickly scale up their online channel in a short time frame, improve the customer experience, drive revenue, and optimize costs through thoughtful and intelligent eCommerce capabilities.
Approach
Requirement Gathering: The initial step was to gather requirements from the relevant stakeholders to determine how best to improve the purchase, and post-purchase customer journey by providing more functionality. They were essentially looking to reduce the load for customer care agents.
Next, we prioritized the requirements based on:
Personas & Market Research: To gain a better understanding of the key decision points for the users we created a Decision Tree:
Collaborating with a cross-functional team consisting of Designers, Business System Analysts, and Project Managers, we successfully mapped out the customers’ journey. We then analyzed and optimized that journey, streamlining the critical decisions required to go from login to sale, skipping all unnecessary steps along the way.
We then developed wire-flows for better visual storytelling and project alignment. This was a necessary step when setting out to determine what features were required.
Feature Exploration: Simplified Login: Login pages experience a significant traffic drop in the customer journey for telecoms. For existing users, faster login significantly improves customer experience so we introduced social login as an alternative of typing in username and password.
Connected Browse-Buy: To provide more transparency to the customer, we made their shopping cart a visible and persistent part of the bottom of their screens. This allowed customers to see the impact of plan selection and customization immediately. Progress bar was added to indicate progress and reduce cart abandonment due to perceived complexity.
Photo ID Validation: Previously, new users couldn’t have their identity verified online, significantly limiting the commerce potential of new customers. We introduced digital photo ID validation, saving our client significant time by eliminating the need to visit a store physically.
Bring Your Own Device (BYOD): Used to mitigate the expensive cost that was once associated with switching carriers, Bring Your Own Device, or BYOD, allows customers the freedom of number selection and SIM card activation, without the hassle of an instore visit or call to customer care agent. This also reduced the port-in costs for our client.
Self-serve Dashboard: Adding another layer of transparency to the customer experience and reducing the cost of care agents, the self-serve dashboard allowed customers to know their usage of time, text messages, and data, as well as the ability to monitor and manage multiple lines within a single group.
Success/Impact
It took 20 days to design a new user experience full of enriched features in both buy-flow and self-serve journeys. As a result:
- The integration with Contentful (CMS) enabled a simplified user flow with flexible customer entry points, significantly improving eCommerce functionality.
- Fast delivery helped the client not only catch up and capitalize on the holiday promotion but empowered their customer with the freedom to shop online. The implementation cost was offset by reusing major parts of the existing flow for certain use cases.
- A Progressive Web Application (PWA) and mobile-first approach provide the user flexibility on their choice of devices for plan/device selection and post-purchase activities.
- To put it briefly, our client received a cost-effective solution that was quickly turned around and has seen 10M+ accretive revenue generated to date.
