Improving the experience of acquiring and managing Internet at TELUS

Client: TELUS | Project focus: UX, eCommerce, service design | Role: Lead designer | Year: 2017

01 | Summary

TELUS is one of Canada’s largest telecommunication companies but up until October 2017, customers were not able to acquire and manage their Internet services online. The experience was a combination of customers having to do their research in-store, on call or online and then have to order or change their Internet either in-store or on call.

The voice of customers and call centre team saw that this was a major frustration on both ends. It impacted the business negatively by losing acquisitions on the business’s most profitable service and affected brand perspective as customers were frustrated with the long wait times and disjointed experience in getting this fundamental service.

TELUS aimed to be the first in the Canadian market to provide customers with the ability to acquire and manage their Internet services online and reduce the number of calls to our customer care team so that everybody would have a better experience.

Results from Discovery

02 | The Process

Discovery

We undertook a comprehensive Discovery process that brought together teams from TELUS Digital, Backend Technology, our Business Partners and our Customer Care agents to do an initial and high level uncovering of the following

• Painpoints and needs of the customer
• Painpoints and needs from the business
• Current journey to acquire or manage your Internet plan
• Steps required in a digital experience
• Possible technology challenges related to these steps

Research

Our holistic research process included the following

• Audit of Voice of Customer
• User surveys
• Journey mapping of current TELUS experience and touchpoints
• Journey mapping of what a user does when they are acquiring Internet
• Competitor audit
• Insights from the Mobility team’s online experience for Mobility plan changes

Through this we were able to understand where painpoints lie, best practices, mental models and the customer archetypes and jobs to be done.

Conceptualization

Samples of early conceptualization sketches and wireframes

Testing

We conducted multiple moderated testing rounds on medium and high fidelity designs and iterated upon each round

Challenges

There were a number of challenges that we had to consider in our design and process including:

• Business rules and logic around new customer acquisitions and promos, existing customers and grandfathered plans
• Keeping the design scaleable to account for changes and additions to the commerce flow
• Inter and intra-departmental silos with separate teams handling services, new customers, existing customers and checkout
• Project pivot(s)
• Infrastructure and backend technologies that required deep integration without impacting the customer experience
• A new technology stack was being implemented at TELUS Digital
• A nascent design system that at the time only handled UI
• Managing customer expectations

03 | The Design

User flow

Release 1

Release one allowed new/existing customers to be able to research, compare and select/change Internet Plans with full integration into the Cart and Checkout flow.

Release 2

Future releases will scale the experience to enable customers to be able to add and manage their Internet service add-ons and hardware.

04 | The Outcomes

Customer Impact

• We enabled users an end-to-end experience that permitted users to be able to order and change their Internet service online
• We improved order automation to reduce the need of manual order fulfillment from our customer care agents
• We integrated multiple systems of infrastructure and provisioning technologies and shielded the customers from this by providing a seamless experience
• We delivered a consistent and seamless experience for ordering and managing Internet for new and existing customers

Business Impact

• We broke down silos and demonstrated successful cross collaboration across New Customer and Existing Customer teams
• We were the second project released to market that integrated with a unified Cart and Checkout experience, contributing to an improved holistic and consistent experience across Telus.com
• We demonstrated initiative and adaptability amidst a project pivot that required fundamental changes in the design
• We reduced calls to the call centre by 30,000 calls / year
• We reduced the need for agents to have to manually fulfil Internet orders
• We were the first Canadian telco to be able to provide this end to end service online for customers

Accolades

My sincere thanks and appreciation for your collaboration to elevate our online Internet ordering experience. Your customer focus has empowered our customers to engage with us in a positive online experience…this new process, which enables customers to change or upgrade their plan online, will eliminate 30,000 calls to our call centres every year. Well done!

— D. Fuller, EVP & President of TELUS Consumer and Small Business

05 | The Team

My Account Home Services, Existing Customers
Lead team

Diana Ewing, Scrummaster / Matthew Tse , Product Owner / Renée Mak, Lead Designer / Chris Choi, Tech Lead / Addison Lee, Lead Developer / Ruxandra Fediuc, Developer / Patrick Zhang, Developer / Brandon Teng, Developer / Alexandra Price, Developer / Ken Kwasnicki, Developer / Suzanne Scott, BA / Eric Murphy, QA / BA / Kalaivani Chellamethu, QA

Go To Market Home Services, New Customers

Jack Reeves, Product Owner / Gary Chow, Designer / Denise Tade, Designer

Research

Krispian Emert, UX Researcher