Telecoms: Building a conversion and containment rate-boosting platform

The situation

Our customer – a major telecomms company – was facing a business problem. Demand for their support services had increased exponentially during the country-wide Coronavirus lockdown, causing an internal drive to digitise all support services to meet this increased requirement.

Simultaneously, the client had a desire to upgrade their existing legacy platform to a new end-to-end digital experience.

The programme was pursuing specific KPIs: a 12% increase in new customer conversion rates and an increase in containment rate to 90%. This would also mean a reduction in headcount from call centres and an associated cost saving. As the original system was built on legacy technology it was slowing the development of innovative customer experiences, and so the new system needed to be built to initially work alongside the original, before finally replacing it.

The solution

Taking inspiration from the ‘Spotify model’ to orchestrate the programme, the customer journey teams were split into two tribes. Tecknuovo was brought on to partner with the in-house team on both these tribes, spanning the end-to-end sales funnel. The first tribe was seeking to improve the conversion rate of new customers, while the second was looking to improve the containment rate; keeping existing customers in the digital journey to alleviate dependency on the call centres and answer their potential problems in a more time-efficient way than speaking on the phone.

After understanding the requirement, the Tecknuovo engagement manager proposed an agreed team plan for delivery. This included facilitating remote onboarding for the initial team of four onto the customer’s secure infrastructure. The full team was operational within one week following sign off. Using a combination of product mapping, AB testing, and validation, the first team began iteratively improving the ecommerce platform.

The techniques used ensured that any designs implemented were based on user research and need, removing the possibility that stakeholder opinion could sway the design build. Through experimentation, incremental improvements over the old platform were introduced which unlocked the business value inherent in the new system and allowed the programme to move on to the next milestone on the product roadmap.

Using similar techniques and processes as the first tribe, the second team were building a new website layout. This ensured that customers who completed the full digital journey before calling the service desk were rewarded by being put at the front of the integrated voice recognition queue.

By completing the digital journey first, the team was given valuable data on what problems the online platform was not able to solve. This was then built into the platform ensuring continuous improvement.

Our results

As of March 2021, the conversion rate was 18% higher on the new website (6% higher than the aimed for 12%). This is evidence of the effectiveness of the checkout journey on the new website. This success resulted in the customer wanting to migrate all their customers to the new website ahead of schedule.

Although the customer’s teams were used to working in a traditionally Waterfall way, through the continuous learning culture the Tecknuovo teams have worked in partnership to develop an iterative agile contract based on story points and velocity. This has led to a marked increase in predicability and provides fresh insight on cadence from the teams on the ground. This enables Tecknuovo to proactively sold issues as they arise and help inform broader programme improvement initiatives.