A rebrand with a startup mindset

Exetel began its corporate existence as a technology consulting company in the early 1990s and continued to provide a wide range of technical and management consulting services until December 2003 when it decided to become a service provider of data and telephone communications services. Now in it’s 10th year in 2013, Exetel knew it needed to innovate and re-brand. With the Australian telecommunications market competitive and ubiquitous consumer and commercial products and services, the need to stand apart with a unique voice was paramount.

My role

I joined Exetel in April of 2014 as the UX designer. Having a small team of 3 developers in Sydney and Sri Lanka we were brought together to review and redesign the e-commerce website, app and CRM platform. I was tasked with reviewing the current design and alongside the CMO, developers and product owners collaborate on the content, task flows, enhance the e-commerce and improve account self-servicing.

Project & Stakeholder management

Build and educate UX strategy value through facilitation in stakeholder workshops. Identify UX product road map and own end to end engagement through department channels, both in Sydney and in our satellite office in Sri Lanka.

Strategy

Developed service design vision for growth, testing and design implementation. Maintained product UX principles steering business, product and developer teams.

Research

Lead the research to uncover insights and translate concepts and work with rapid feedback to address customer motivations and behaviour. Partnering with my developer(s) to discuss iterations and solutions.

Experience and Visual Design

Through co-design workshops lead the service design task flows, co-collaborated on content strategy, designed new principles of interaction and e-commerce checkout. Maintained a transparent iterative testing both remote and contextual during the a/b test phases.

Research

The Exetel brand and site had been untouched since the initial design 10 years ago. As the growth of the company accelerates it was clear the site and the capabilities of the system it was built to manage as an e-commerce platform were just not scalable. We received about 20% of our 120,000+ national customer base, click through onto the internal account platform where customers can view the accounts. The need for more robust, comprehensive and self-sufficient platform and design needed to be built.

Customers were also experiencing on-boarding issues, simple navigation. Whilst call-service centres see 35% of their calls related to basic account troubleshooting, business and product information detracting from the cross-selling and business development opportunities.

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In the telecommunications market, we have dozens of competitors. It’s very hard to gain client loyalty.

BenCMO

Project timelines

Faced with the task of overhauling the site and a company culture that had not been previously exposed to benefits of customer centred design methodologies. It was through a couple of debates and open forums that we discussed the steps to migrate the site and the new design within 6 months.

It was chaos at best but with every journey there is the first step. I set about identifying what core issues would make the most impact for the business. Working with the marketing officer and product managers our timeline for delivery was constantly moving. The need for more resources to undertake was not possible and it seemed that the task was too great to push ahead. I was constantly in an uphill battle to bring to attention the need for good journey flows and e-commerce design from physical to online experiences.

We agreed that the focus would be parallel. MVP was the front end e-commerce responsive website, sales and customer service, online customer accounts platform.

Customer interviews

To understand how customers approach their CSP (Communications Service Provider) I accessed a core group of advocates and neutral customers through whirpool (a standard consumer blog) that raised concerns and issues through competitior products. Alot of customers vented their opinions some good but a majority unhappy with common failures of services, blackouts and customer service. This measure can be broken into 3 buckets of consumers from interviews conducted, that overall influence the success of CSP value and share.

Hypothesis

Since no customer interview had previously been undertaken it was timely that given the feedback from our product managers, sales managers and customers that certain critical factors needed to be addressed.

  • Customer service – lack of key sales and product help in timely manner
  • Product range – pricepoint factors and product service outages
  • E-commerce and information – website information architecture and lack of clarity
  • Self-service management – ‘My Exetel’ self-service accounts where time consuming with out of date information and lack of security.

Diving Deeper

Conducting contextual analysis and phase 2 interviews with a core user base of internal teams (Product managers, sales staff) also external customers both personal and commercial. Split between Groups A internal staff and B customers it was conducted for 30mins each and in a controlled environment where I observed general feedback as we walked through the site.

 
 
 
 
 
 
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I just need a snap shot of my account not tables upon tables of garbage information.

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I tend to struggle with the lack of support information that is required when we need to produce cross-selling opportunities. It’s normally buried deep in the site.

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I reckon half the information is too old to revisit. I checked the product information links and they’re still information in there that doesn’t reflect our current product range.

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The colour is depressing.

“

I was a telstra customer for a while but I switched because I thought you guys don’t bull#@! and you know exactly what everything costs. I don’t feel that way when I see your site or try to upgrade my plans. I get email on email of service information that’s just useless.

Our customers

We have to cater for two core groups our personal (home broadband, mobile, data packs and our business commercial users multiple ISP accounts, Phone)

Therefore their needs can be expressed as two different use cases. Our service processes from Sales to our Product Managers needed to work across the needs of both consumer groups. For our focus we identified below their pain points and needs which are also summarised in the testimonials when speaking to them about their experiences.

4 Pillars of UX Strategy

Goal of design

With the new brand focus on ‘Get things done’, the new user experience was to broaden the services and vastly improve how we treated customers from troubleshooting products as a service mantra to being honest of what we provided and in a fun way be unashamedly honest about our prices and that it wasn’t cost cutting on value but on price.

Brand re-design

Create a universal global experience style guide

 
 
 
 
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Simple information architecture

Allow for a self-service platform across all accounts , personal, business, agents and resellers

Interactive and comprehensive

Re-build a new website and CRM on future platforms (Laravel, Symfony)

e-commerce ease

Make the product information and website easy to understand and provide a seamless purchase path

User testing

Through the early concepts and the early phase interviews with our customers the first user testing was a walkthrough test to identify usability. WIth our new website we had completed our MVP features of front end e-commerce shop with the new progressive walkthrough, enhanced information architecture, My Exetel customer account portal dashboard design.

Insights, Recommendations & iterations

Making product purchase seamless.

The change to the purchasing journey for any range of our home and commercial products was successful completed in 15mins compared to the 25mins and additional customer service calls. We received praise for the overall simplicity and the use of a live cart summary to show customers exactly what their purchasing. Complete transparency.

Expect the unexpected. 

When we embarked on rolling out these features we had to educate not only our customers but our internal staff to. Through fortnightly reviews we would discuss what content, process, information was pushed live. We ran A/B tests on how successful on path of purchase was and quickly. We had a range of responses but given the mass changes that we pushed through we did not cater for an alarming volume of customers questioning the changes. Although we communicated through the channels via email, their accounts and promotions we underestimated the queries and issues for people.

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We had to be ruthless when simple issues arose when we took our customers through a simple test, like complete an order for a broadband product. Most of the team were enlightened by this simple simulation of a prototype that they had not experienced before.

What we launched

Exetel.com

My Exetel Account Dashboard

What we learnt

Keep to the plan on delivery.

We had to review the MVP all the time, otherwise we found the backlog of work continually adding up. It wasn’t a matter of seeing further issues from new design implementation and dismissing these. The development team and I were keen to keep building on the features that would prove most impactful. The other problems we kept a user story and rolled that into the backlog.

Old systems required new technology.

With new technology comes new code and it took longer than expected as soon as the development team found problems with integrating other support systems into the site new code and testing cycle was reviewed. With a small team the resources would not sustain the timelines and delays were a natural occurrence.