What happens you apply design thinking within Telenor Customer Service

When Customer Service for Business was put up with the challenge of reducing the total volume of customers calling they decided to go for a different approach, something new they’ve never tried before. This might sound risky and like a bad idea, but don’t worry. Continue reading. This story has a happy ending.

We had a brief talk with Arve Sandnes, agile coach and facilitator during this project, who shared their experience and key learnings from daring to do things differently.

What was your project about?

Our deliverable for this project was coming up with a concept for reducing the total volume of inquiries to customer support, focusing on some specific problem areas or reasons to contact, such as SIM-card, PIN codes and invoices. In addition, we also wanted to support Telenor in reaching their target of moving 30% customer inquiries from manually served to digital self-service platforms.

What would you normally do in a situation like this ?

For solving such a problem we would usually have a volume-oriented approach. We would identify problems based on quantity alone and rely on some assumptions within the team for finding the best solution.

…And how did you do it differently this time?

With help from a Designit we applied design methodology to our project. We were challenged to not make assumption based decisions, but explore whether our own hypothesis and assumptions could be confirmed or not, while staying true to certain principles:

• Being agile and customer centric

• Combine old knowledge with new insights (quant/qual)

  • Identify root cause by understanding how customers experience current portal/solution

“We were challenged to explore whether our own hypothesis and assumptions could be confirmed or not..”

In turn, how did this help you?

This way of working forced us to get close up on the real root cause behind the problems we were trying to solve. Applying design thinking and staying true to this process enabled us to approach the problem in a new manner, being open to insights and focused on action. Instead if sticking to our teams assumptions and implementing some emergency measures, solutions that we most likely wouldn’t have understood why succeeded or failed, we first had to test if our ideas held ground with our customers. This resulted in creating low fidelity sketches and prototypes that were tested with customers. This feedback was taken back into the team to adjust direction and further improve the concept.

“Instead of sticking to our teams assumptions… we first had to test if our ideas held ground with our customers”

Our sprint process with the mission to discover first and then use this insight to come up with new concept ideas

Any specific examples you want to highlight?

During the sprints we often experienced that the sprint direction would rely on the customer insights we gained, and sometimes it lead us to the unexpected. For instance, when working on invoice we discovered that in many cases it wasn’t the customer him or herself who contacted us, but their accountant. Learning this meant that we had to change our view of our users, going from a one-to-one relationship to customer to including a new user, a new role and coming up with ideas for how we would best handle this.

“… the sprint direction would rely on the customer insights we gained, and sometimes it lead us to the unexpected”

In the end, why was this such an important experience for your team?

This project proved to us how important it is to work methodologically and be true to the process. Insight equals knowledge. Instead of going full force on our own rough assumptions we got hands on experience on the valuable knowledge we could gain from customer insights.

June Kyong Trondsen

Written by

Designer Telenor Group

Telenor Design

Telenor design is a cooperative effort led by a group of designers, researchers, and developers at Telenor.

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