(RE)IMAGINING THE HUMAN JOURNEY FOR TELECOM CUSTOMERS

User Experience Research | Strategy | Team Leadership | Service Design / Workshop Design & Facilitation

Organization: Think Company

Client: Telecom Client
What: Fiber Internet, TV Stream
Role: Sr. Design Lead
Goal: Evaluate client’s fiber migration journey to identify opportunities to optimize the customer experience and increase satisfaction
Stakeholders Involved: Executive, VP, Subject Matter Experts

OVERVIEW

While at Think Company, I led a team of designers and researchers to help a telecom client, address critical areas in their user journey that negatively impacted customer experience and contributed to high churn rates and subscriber drop-off.

THE CONSTRAINT: KNOWLEDGE

Our primary contact, who recently joined the organization as the customer experience leader, was struggling to get teams to effectively prioritize customer needs when designing product vision and roadmaps. Recognizing this as a knowledge gap, we began by educating the team on creating and interpreting customer journeys with empathy.

PART 1: UNIFIED UNDERSTANDING

CREATING A SHARED LANGUAGE:

We designed a full-day workshop intended educate the product teams on fundamentals of journey mapping, considerations, and how to collaborate in creating their own journey maps. We then worked with them to develop a current state journey map and blueprint based on internal perceptions of pain points and deficiencies.

We began by educating the team on journey mapping essentials, including its components and its importance for team understanding, identifying gaps, and visualizing the overall experience.

The first half of our session was designed to demonstrate that even simple journeys have complexities that you can’t predict without human perspective.

With a better sense of empathy, we had teams role play key customer types and map the journey based on their understanding of the current state and assumed pain points.

CHECKING PERCEPTIONS:

Having gained an internal perspective of the current customer journey, we conducted follow-up research analyzing customer service data, heuristic evaluation, product expert workshops, customer interviews, and comparative evaluations to develop a full view of the customer’s experience in the fiber migration journey.

The customer-informed journey revealed critical shortcomings in the migration experience, along with pain points that result in “frustration loops” that customers often struggle to get out of.

PART 2: REFRAMING THE CONVERSATION

TELLING THE CUSTOMER’S STORY:

Based on insights from customer interviews and supporting research, we sought to shift the team's focus from purely business motives to a more human perspective. This transition helped the team understand how shortcomings in their customer service operations impacted customer psyche and the overall perceived value of the brand.

Highlighting the emotional journey customers go through was a powerful way to add weight to our team’s analysis and suggestions during the phase 1 readout of our research, and current-state findings.

IDENTIFYING OUR VALUES:

Early in the project, I collaborated with our main stakeholder to create an experience vision using the Impact Outlook Toolkit, aligning the company's mission with core ethical values and essential actions to foster strong customer relationships and organizational success.

In a subsequent workshop designed by my team’s principal researcher, we aimed to build on the previous stakeholder session by leveraging insights from our customer research to co-design core principles that the client team would commit to, supporting a human-centered product design roadmap and experience.

PART 3: STANDING ON BUSINESS

ACTING ON THE VALUES AND PRIORITIZING NEXT STEPS:

Our team successfully concluded the project by collaborating with the client to identify pain points and opportunities. We developed a future-state vision prioritized by key principles, customer experience impact, and team development feasibility. Using a "Now, New, Later" model, we delivered a comprehensive roadmap to guide the client in future development and enhance the user experience throughout the buying phases and the entire user journey.

In our final activity, we guided the client to explore journey mapping by shifting their focus from the typical buying journey phases (Learn, Buy, Get, etc. aka LBGUPS) to discretionary sub-phases, highlighting important nuances for customers during their purchase journey.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

  • The value of the Impact Outlook Toolkit was useful in providing our design leader stakeholder a clear sense of their own purpose which was absolutely critical in unifying the larger team and encouraging collaboration throughout the project.

  • Co-designing throughout the process ensured high buy-in and a shared sense of purpose among the team.

  • Creating an environment of psychological safety was crucial for effective collaboration and teamwork.

  • Strategic design leaders played a critical role in unifying the team and encouraging collaboration.

  • The overall success of the project is directly attributed to the collaborative efforts of our design team and the telecom company's staff.