Designing for a unique market
How prototyping, MVP approach and extensive customer engagement helped Telenor Myanmar develop a recharge solution that reduced recharge time and increased satisfaction
Credits: Telenor Myanmar’s Customer Experience team and Arsalan Mahmood who prepared resources for this article
Telenor Myanmar’s Customer Experience team embodies the mantra of customer empathy, which is why we regularly put ourselves where our customers are and engage with them. Being a unique market, Myanmar customers were different — more than two-third of the population are using smartphones, but only topped up enough prepaid balance to last for a few days. Mornings in Yangon would see quite a few people stopping by their local retailer and getting the day’s worth of ‘juice’. This insight revealed a customer peeve in the time it takes to get a recharge.
The team took on an ambitious target — to halve the top-up time on E-load as well as recharge cards. In addition, females were hesitant to spell out their phone numbers when asking for E-Load at shops they did not trust due to privacy concerns. The team came up with multiple ways of redesigning the scratch cards to incorporate the QR codes.
After testing out different variations the team went back to the market, this time with prototypes of the most voted solution. The idea clicked instantly, and the QR Code Recharge was “Customer Validated”.
Immediately the team challenged themselves to update the Retailer app to be able to generate secured and encrypted QR codes for recharging customer’s on-the-go. For the recharge cards, the Service Design team held meetings with suppliers and vendors to lock in designs and exchanged prototypes of the proposed designs.
Phyu Mon Theint, Digital Service Design Manager, recalls “We would tweak a design, print it out at scale on cardboard, run down to the passport office nearby and get feedback from random people standing in line. In one day we tweaked the design as many as 10 times. Though tiring, this was the reason we were able to quickly home in on a design that was intuitive and clicked with the masses.”
And the feedbacks received were astounding. Even before any formal advertisement was made, customers were able to connect the dots to discover the new recharge mechanism and started sharing their discovery on social media. Knowing that our customers had smartphones and were already exposed to QR Code, Telenor Myanmar was the first in the Telenor Group to launch QR Code top-up for electronic recharge.
While the design success may seem like a lucky break, keeping customers at the heart of design ensured that success was not left to chance. With the QR Codes an everyday item in customers’ daily life, the scene was set to take them from paper to digital recharge.
