Introduction
A piece of work that had been driven from an architecture and tech perspective to begin with came to the design team to design around a tech solution. However, on first inspection the solution around the problem was not an improvement for the user, and if anything making the experience even more difficult. This project at that point was for myself to investigate the end to end experience and approach to fix the ‘leaky buckets’ of the journey.
Problem statement
A large amount of users who call NOW TV to order combo (broadband), when coming to the website accidentally create a second account rather than ‘linking’ their accounts.
How might we make this journey easier for our customers as well as reduce the amount of duplicate accounts?
Existing journey
I ran a workshop with the tech teams to go through the existing journey. Preparation involved running analytic reports as well as capturing the various parts of the journey. This provided a way of seeing the journey from a user perspective as well as have quantitative data around the actual issues users have.
The journey itself was not just the website, but also emails and the interaction with the call centre.
Business proposed journey
Going through the business journey I mapped out where the gaps still were, as well as the pain points that would be generated if this solution was built. It was at this point we could compare the current journey and the proposed journey to understand if it actually was an improvement and help achieve the goal of creating duplicate accounts.
Design studio workshop
Once we had gotten the business on the side of ‘design thinking’ I then ran a Design Studio workshop which consisted of a Bad ideas party and a Crazy 8 sketching session. This really helped to cross pollinate and think of the user between the product owner, developers and designers.
What we don’t want
What we want
Opportunity – Leaky buckets
After running the Design studio workshop I took the ideas and then ran through the journey. This then allowed me to start to look at the approach of fixing ‘leaky buckets’. Why spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on a solution when there are plenty of ways to improve the experience without major dev effort?
Going through the various steps in the journey I could identify the pain points from the data and look at solutions around these.
The biggest ‘win’ for this project was chasing the call centre team and getting a copy of the transcript that is spoken to the customer. On investigation, it was obvious that this area could be amended very easily, and by the customer service agent spending a bit more time and effort with a customer would mean that the customer would then not create a duplicate account by mistake.
1. Call centre script
2. Email
3. Linking page 1 – create now TV account
4. Linking page 2 – link accounts
Solution
The main areas that were tackled in the end were changes to the call centres. The changes were made, and also enforced through other means of internal communication as well as managers being held accountable through performance reviews.
This saved the business from spending around £175,000 on a technical solution, which turned out to not help the users pain points, to fixing leaky buckets through the user journey.
Communication to the Contact Centres:
- Line under the article asking for advisors to confirm they have read and understood this and keep track of this.
- Send it to all TLs asking them to confirm it’s been briefed
- Post it on Chatter Page to Cardiff (and Derry)
- Make sure it gets flagged in the morning call
- Performance Managers follow ups
Other NOW TV projects
Antony J White 