LOCAL TELCO
SMB Customer Insights & Onboarding Journey
CX | Research | Personas | Journey Mapping
Using customer insight to support a local challenger brand Telco in their journey to being more customer-centred and approach ongoing improvements driven by real customer need for a traditionally underserved segment, Small-to-Medium Business Owners.
Across 2 consecutive projects, I helped this client better understand SMB’s, developing insights and resources that outlined the ideal future onboarding experience. This included key themes and targeted research insights, personas, high-level end-to-end journey map and detailed onboarding journey blueprint identifying changes required to achieve the desired experience.
I conducted a series of interviews across the 2 phases of work with customers to understand in their own words what the current experience was like and get a clear picture of what was working well, what’s important to them, and what the ideal future experience looked like.
Having built a stellar reputation in the residential space, this client had identified that they wanted to understand how this experience was translating for Small to Medium Business owners or ‘SMBs’.
This project came about as part of a strategic focus on this customer segment, particularly their onboarding experience, which is a critical moment that is highly disruptive by nature.
I was engaged as part of a team of 3 to conduct research with the client’s SMB customers over two separate pieces of work, developing a set of resources that shed light on the unique needs of customers and the current and desired future experience, bringing these insights to life through personas and journey maps to defining what’s important and where and how improvements could be made.
MY ROLE
Conduct in-depth research with SMBs to understand and communicate what they are looking for from a telco and provide actionable recommendations across the customer journey to provide an exceptional experience and act as trusted partners to their business.
In phase one, my focus was research and persona development and in phase two, I lead the project, conducting the interviews and synthesis then developing deliverables with light support from another designer and oversight from a senior design lead.
Key responsibilities (Phase 1):
Develop research plan, recruit and conduct interviews with existing customers and non-customers
Synthesise findings across key inquiry areas and other insights of note to the broader context
Identify common characteristics and drivers across participants to develop a set of 5 SMB personas
Key responsibilities (Phase 2):
Workshop design and capture outlining current state experience and known areas for improvement through online whiteboarding sessions with 3 key client teams
Development of an early prototype End-to-End customer onboarding journey
Interviews with customers who had recently joined to understand their onboarding experience, test and refine journey map
Development of a high level journey map with overarching experience principles, key phases and steps and illustrated interactions and journey milestones showing desired future state
Development of a supporting journey matrix / service blueprint, including a heat map highlighting areas for improvement and specific recommendations at each step for recommended changes or improvements to products and services
Day-to-day project management and client communication including assistance with recruitment/ booking participants
Phase 1. SMB Customer Insights & Personas
Phase 2. Customer Onboarding Journey
Phase 1. SMB Customer Insights & Personas
The challenge
This client had identified that they wanted to increase their focus on SMB and understand what they could be doing better to support this strategic shift. With an existing business unit strategy in the process of being applied at an organisation-wide level, targeted work was needed to support their aspirations for growth.
Early conversations highlighted that the transition to service excellence for business customers was going to be the most effective tool they have to make this desire real. We collaboratively identified that the key support needed to help them achieve this goal was to:
Define what the desired future customer experience will be for these SMB customers.
Identify the shifts (in capability, people, process) that are required to consistently deliver the future experience.
Support staff through this change so they can continue to deliver award-winning service during the transition, and ensure they are fully prepared for the future.
Process & Deliverables
I conducted interviews alongside another team member and captured what we heard using dovetail interview transcription and analysis software. We started by identifying the themes we heard across our participants then working in tandem to categorise information across those themes to build a strong base of evidence with lots of specific examples we could talk to. We then turned these overarching themes into key insights and recommendations, communicating the ‘so what’ in a way that was actionable and specific.
I then used the research findings to develop a set of 5 unique personas representing different kinds of SMBs that the team could use to:
Help guide the decisions they made as a business about how to offer better services to them
Drive targeted improvements to the overall customer experience.
The personas brought the customer base to life for the client’s teams and enriched the focus on CX for the three key projects critical to enabling their desired strategic shift.
Personas
When developing the personas, I focused on what their attributes, behaviour and key needs were rather than identifiable characteristics to ensure these tools would be useful and not overly perscreptive so the client could see a wide range of customers in one or more of the personas. This meant they could tailor their approach and product offering to real need, with meaningful insight into what different customers might need from them to provide support that suits the needs of this unique customer segment.
To activate these findings with the team in a meaningful and collaborative way, I conducted a shareback/walkthrough workshop where we talked through what we heard, presented the personas and answered any questions the team had about what we heard and how the personas had been developed. I then asked them to think about ‘how [client] can win’ for each persona and to jot down some ideas for what they could amplify or do differently.
Phase 2. Customer Onboarding Journey
The challenge
The experience of onboarding is important to SMBs, as it is the first major test of the relationship with their Telco. The client had identified that even when everything goes smoothly, the transition to a new provider during the onboarding process is, by nature, highly disruptive. Feedback that the current experience was ‘not enjoyable’ had sparked some initial discovery work internally to understand what’s driving this and surface suggestions for how it could be improved.
However, without a well-defined view of what the ideal onboarding experience looks like for the client’s SMB customers in their own words, they knew efforts to improve likely won’t have the desired outcome. To shift the needle on this critical moment, a customer-centred approach to defining the problems currently contributing to an unsatisfactory experience and developing a vision for the ideal future state was needed.
Process
The project began by collaborating with three key teams to understand their perspective on the current onboarding experience and identify challenges through journey mapping workshops. This provided an internal view of onboarding that was later tested and iterated based on customer feedback.
I used the insights from these workshops to develop a research plan and early prototype journey map, then conducted one-on-one interviews with SMBs who had recently signed up. The interviews revealed detailed feedback on their onboarding experience, including challenges faced, interactions with various teams, and areas for improvement, ultimately helping to identify what worked well, what could be improved, and how the client could better support customers.
Deliverables
The real, tangible insights gained throughout our conversations with SMBs allowed us to paint a clear picture of the desire future state in the End-to-end journey map, and highlight what matters most for customers.
The detailed, specific examples of where and how these improvements could be made in the journey matrix was of significant value to the team, describing it as a ‘cheat sheet’ that was highly actionable and resonated with the goals and wider strategic focus areas the client has as they look to shift the needly on this critical moment in the customer journey.
These artefacts were supported by a full research insights pack providing an overview of the high level themes across the participant feedback, tieing them to the experience principles outlined in the E2E journey map and highlighting specific feedback to support the recommendations.
While much of the feedback echoed some of the team’s early hypotheses about where they could be performing better, to hear directly from customers how anything not working well impacted them gave them a greater understanding of how important seemingly small details can be and the impact they can have.
End-to-end Customer Onboarding Journey Map | Future state
Customer onboarding journey matrix | Current v. future state experience
CLIENT QUOTES
“This is the real gold... [the insights] align with what we are trying to do, but this work unpacks what it actually means. It's not just aspirational, but how you actually achieve it"
“Ngā mihi tīma, This is an excellent set of resources, and I’ve really enjoyed learning this in such a structured manner as part of my onboarding to the team. Thank you for all your hard work!”
“The E2E Journey Map is looking fantastic. It's so nice to see all these workshops, customer interviews, and collaboration sessions coming together into a customer-centric journey that reflects our current stage and aspirations.”
“The Customer Journey Matrix is very helpful in terms of the detail contained. It's almost a 'cheat sheet' for my team how to go from good to great. I'm really looking forward to working with the leaders here to share this content and think about how we can prioritise the actions in the business.”
Image credits:
Café photo by Rod Long on Unsplash
Florist photo by Ellicia on Unsplash
Illustration credits:
Persona visuals developed by Jennifer (Jenn) Susanto
E2E Journey Map visuals developed by Rachel McPhee