Overview
A national telecommunications company sought research to support a large-scale consolidation project that would unify the digital customer experience for over 28 million customers. I was engaged to develop a research strategy, and coordinate a team of two researchers to execute the research across 14 product teams over the course of a 6 month engagement.
The challenge
The consolidation project spanned three different platforms, four lines of business and 14 product teams. With a fast timeline, the primary challenge was to provide customer insights as teams delivered, communicate insights across teams, and fill in newly identified gaps with customer-centered themes.
Role
I was responsible for creating the overall research strategy, coordinating the work of two other researchers, facilitating cross team dialogue/insight sharing, and executing research as needed.
Tools
Mural, Usertesting.com, Optimal Workshop, Survey Monkey, InVision
Stakeholder Interviews
I began the process with stakeholder interviews in order to understand the scope of the research, and prioritize questions that teams were seeking to answer. Importantly during this phase, it became clear that there were backend dependencies that would impact an ideal customer experience and so research needed to be pointed at both articulating a north star experience for customers and also mitigating those dependencies to help create an ideal MVP experience.
It also became clear that there was a body of existing research that could be re-leveraged to support teams at the outset as additional work was being conducted to help inform next steps.
This step was also crucial in gathering important invites to standing meetings across teams and getting into the proper communication channels. I find it particularly important for research to be a “fly on the wall” for conversations in order to better understand context and underlying questions when possible.
Proto-Personas
The fast timeline didn’t allow for new qualitative research to be conducted in order to inform new persona development. So, I reviewed customer analytics across lines of business and platforms in order to inform top tasks. This included both data from digital platforms and call center data.
The proto-persona artifacts allowed teams that were working in a new product space to quickly understand key tasks and behavior across lines of business as they created designs. They helped establish key variations related to login frequency and “quick check” information a customer may be seeking upon login.
Researcher Onboarding
We brought on two additional researchers in order to support this project. I created resources to quickly get our new team members up to speed on the company, our team, the project and the existing research.
In addition to the self-serve resources, I also set up bi-weekly syncs to review project status as well as weekly one on one’s with each of them to discuss their individual work. These sessions allowed me to continue to articulate project goals and priorities as each of them worked with a sub-set of omni teams.
User Testing and Communication
Our first goal was to provide user feedback in discussions and so quickly tested a prototype to help inform the dialogue that was taking place across teams.
It also became quickly clear that I needed a perspective on how prioritize research requests across the 14 teams. In looking at what was central to both business and customer goals, I prioritized requests related to billing, troubleshooting and mobile use cases.
Research activities over the course of the project included:
First-click testing
Moderated and unmoderated usability testing
Tree testing
Survey
Workshop
Communication of results became a challenge. These tests would often be from individual team engagements but insights would be beneficial across multiple teams. In order to help build a common understanding across teams, I facilitated a research sprint review where we shared our research findings.
Another outcome of these meetings is that we could synthesize our research and highlight emerging themes that showed cross-team impact. These themes rose beyond feature-based questions and allowed us to accurately show user behavior across products and platforms to better inform collaboration across teams.
Opportunities
By engaging with so many product teams, our research was able to get ahead of problems that the consolidation might create for customers. I had a unique view across many teams and was able to identify additional research that would help inform next steps after the MVP experience. Next steps included:
Research synthesis and recommendations
Experience benchmarking
Notifications strategy research