Defining a unified strategy to create consistent customer experience

Empathizing

When defining product strategy , it is crucial for the strategist to deeply understand customers' preferences for every aspect of the experience. To learn to walk in their shoes, we conducted extensive mapping of customer journeys for various types of Orange customers in the form of 2-day workshops.

Opening Lightning talks by experts and product owners got everybody on the same page and resulted in an extensive proto-journey, identifying potential pain-points. We validated our hypothesis through customer interviews right on the spot and created a real map of customer journeys. Then we prioritised the key moments, identified shortcomings, created hypotheses and formulated potential experiments. Each workshop ended with drawing dozens of possible solutions.

Carpet bombing

The customer journey map provided us a good knowledge base about non-digital customers and we already spotted some patterns. In order to prove them, we carried out Carpet-bombing – a series of 30 intense customer interviews in just 3 days, asking a question:“Tell us about the barriers that prevent you from online shopping.” These intense dialogues, whether in person or by telephone, helped us uncover the true motives of customer behaviour.

Defining a problem

The pile of insights needed prioritisation. We analysed observations, synthesised them, and suddenly we discovered a surprising insight that moved us closer in understanding to the target group: There actually were no non-digital customers. All customers across Slovakia, all ages, all social groups, all of them already have an experience with online shopping.

Ideation

Being sure about the core problem, our focus switched to the concept, an underlying motive that would respond to our design challenge. We intended to strengthen customers’ trust in digital purchase and boost their loyalty at the same time, so that they would renew their plans digitally. In 2-member groups we utilised many creative methods such as brainstorming, the “worst possible idea” or brain-writing. Our final idea concept derives from the fact that we no longer look at the customer through the optics of channels but from the perspective of experience.

In addition, we created a detailed customer journey covering stages of the entire 2-year contract, with specific sales and care operations leading to better customer satisfaction. In collaboration with channels’ product owners we defined hypothetical solutions that support our concept. They were placed into the map with at least one effective validation proposal per solution.

The final selection of hypotheses was prioritised on the impact-risk matrix, comparing how risky it is to implement a solution and what impact on customers we expect out of it. The proposals in the “high impact” quadrants are worth trying: they are either safe and ready to be implemented, or risky but impactful so we need to test them as soon as possible.

Ongoing testing and prototyping

We finished with the roadmap for the upcoming year in our hands. It is currently being implemented by picking one hypothesis at a time, testing its viability and implementing it further. In other words, conscious decisions reflect specific needs of every single channel.

Results

Although we are still implementing, the results seem very promising already. In half a year, the total amount of leads has increased by 104% and the number of successful transactions has increased by 244%. The fact of sales growing even faster then acquisition is a proven signal that the digital channels are able to bring more quality leads when developed strategically, in synergy.