Case Study: Telstra’s Enterprise customer uplift

Overview

Context

Telstra's B2B Digitisation program aims to radically improve customer and employee experience. The ambition is to make Telstra the easiest technology company to work with in the government and enterprise market by delivering a transformed global value chain that seamlessly serves all of their customers, employees and partners.

The three core objectives are:

• Reinventing the customer experience
• Developing a simplified, modular and agile ecosystem
• Disrupting themselves to stay relevant

Challenge

Design solutions to enable B2B customers, partners and employees to have a seamless experience from solutioning, quoting, contracting through to their bill.

My role

I lead the user experience portion of the project, working closely with our customer experience and research team, legal team, product owners, SMEs and architecture.

The Approach

Co-design

I worked actively with the teams and people impacted by the change to create a proposed design. This enabled engaged internal stakeholders and customers, allowing us to identify new opportunities and improvements.

Often being seen as a facilitator, I enabled better participation through asking the right questions so that meaningful participation can occur.

The Design Process

Review of old documents and processes

It all started with understanding where we currently stood. There were literally hundreds of pages of documents to comb through, from initial quoting all the way through to final invoicing.

We also took to interviewing those actively involved in pricing, contracting and sales activities to understand their pain points and begin to identify areas for improvement.

Legal and business review

The legal team had early parts of a new proposed contract document available, which enabled the design team to gain an understanding of the core legal requirements.

As much as a standard design process would like a total rethink and a low fidelity beginning, it sometimes isn't the most feasible approach. Ensuring early and consistent business and legal input, couple with high fidelity designs, allowed a faster and more present involvement from all teams. It's often when the details are added at the end of the process that more information or challenges come to light.

Initial refresh with stakeholders

Following the review, I presented an initial refresh, based on input received from all the teams involved so far, previous customer research, Telstra's exisiting brand guidelines and established document design patterns. This set the expectations and vision of the project, including some new design guidelines I would stick to.

• Simple - use simple terminology to improve understanding of information and products.
• Best practice - use known best practices from branding, document design and legal to improve design delivery and trust in information.
• Consistent - use consistent branding and structure to improve information architecture and present a cohesive experience.

These came about from the key identified challenges, including:

• Simple view of how much a customer needs to pay
• Lack of trust in information
• Navigation of complex documents is difficult
• Poor structure and complex language
• Little consistency in pricing structure

Testing and iteration with customers

Following some early prototypes, I was able to move into customer testing over several weeks. This saw three distinct iterations occur after several interviews each. These interviews were split between different types of customers to ensure balanced and well-rounded feedback.

After each testing round, the learnings were shared with our stakeholders, and new document iterations progressed. I was able to build an entire flow for testing, to match this as best as possible to the real world experience.

Revised processes, documents and new objectives

The testing, research, prototyping and reviews all culminated in several outcomes for the program and mission teams:

• Requirement to uplift processes so they better aligned to customer expectations
• New documents and email comms that better helped customers understand their orders, agreements and bills from Telstra
• Removal of some artefacts which meant little to customers, or only confused them more. Always a good pickup.
• New objectives for the wider mission teams to ensure further input outside the scope of this project was taken onboard.

Iteration with the build team

Once we had a semi-finalised prototype, we immediately worked with the build team for technical review. Several updates were required to fit within technical limitations, with a number of features flagged for future release.

The Outcome

In build

Iteration on these documents continues alongside the entire program. As features are available, they are built and deployed for use in customer ordering.

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Final Thoughts

This project was completed 100% remotely.

Due to COVID-19, everything from initial research, to daily checkins, through to customer testing and deployment, was completed 100% remotely. This posed new and complex challenges when it came to working collaboratively and gaining the right insights from testing.

Whilst working with teams and customers from all over Australia, or even the world, isn't new, to be entirely remote is. It meant more time understanding each other, presenting packs or iterations and collaborating in virtual environments.

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