Vodafone DesignOps • December 2018 - Today
Vodafone Omnichannel
Following the succesful work done by the team on the My Vodafone App, the company looked to expand the design language and interaction pattern more broadly resulting in an omnichannel approach. A framework that takes into account all of the digital retailing activities aimed at successfully selling products to consumers using multiple available channels simultaneously.
Within this context I helped the company execute its digital transformation strategy, creating new products and services following an omnichannel approach. We evolved to a new operating model that removed legacy systems and working siloes and enabled the organization to innovate and deliver at pace.
UX/UI
prototyping
Experience Strategy
Service design
Creative Direction
User research
Task
Understand the role of each digital touchpoint in the customer universe and define how the different channels coexist consistently to maximize sales opportunities and elevate the brand top of mind
Functional Pillars
After the discovery research, we had a substancial amount of qualitative user data, and the challenge was to present the findings to stakeholders and teams. We summarised those as functional pillars, which helped us illustrate the proposition and establish the design direction. Thanks to this, it was easy for stakeholders to see the core challenges and the underlying user needs.
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Successful organizations take care of customers loyalty and user retention. Emotional experience is an essential part of user-brand interaction. Positive and delightful experiences can be reached only by a robust service that shows cohesion and consistency between multiple touchpoints.
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VF OMNICHANNEL
My Role in the Project
My role:
UX/UI Design lead
The team:
Product Owner
Program manager
UX chapter lead
Service chapter
Design Squads X4
VF OMNICHANNEL
VF OMNICHANNEL
The Vodafone design operating model enabled us to work collaboratively within all the design squads, guide the work of the designers and align with product managers from the discovery to the delivery stage. I worked closely with the product owners, program lead, Service and UX design lead and the business analyst on all VF consumer touchpoints and determining user needs, pain points and the broader experience framework. I led a few multi-purpose design workshops and went through the design thinking processes to help designers validate assumptions. I helped the team consolidate our visual design language across channels and cement our design system in our design processes.
Ultimately I supported the work of agile teams, signing off the UI design work and
helped product owners prioritize features based on the balance of business objectives and user expectations.
Journeys Mapping
After several interviews with customers and staff advisors, we identified critical "to be" user journeys to provide a baseline for developing the holistic Design10 experience. In this exercise, we considered all the touchpoints and non-existing functionalities based on our collected information.
Journey mapping
After several interviews sessions with both customers and staff advisors, we identified critical “to be” user journeys to provide a baseline for developing the holistic Design10 experience. In this exercise, we considered all the touchpoints and non-existing functionalities based on our collected information.
MY role in the project
My Vodafone as a Service
When considering the broader experience, My Vodafone is ultimately a utility service designed to resolve customer needs across multiple touchpoints. Website, chat messenger, mobile, smart home devices, wearables and retail kiosks. I worked on the holistic framework and experience strategy model to meet the customer's expectations in each context. The goal was to provide a continuous, seamless, and consistent experience that would enhance the touchpoint thanks to signature moments and ultimately enhance the specific channel experience for customer and staff advisors.
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How can we transform transactional journeys into engaging, authentic, personalised and consistent customer experiences in both the digital and physical environment?
FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION
To-be Journeys
We crafted customer journey maps to visualize the process a customer, prospect, and advisor go through to achieve their goals. Thanks to these visualizations, we were able to get a broader sense of our user motivations, needs, and how to satisfy those efficiently. Here you can see an example of one of the maps we produced.
User Research
Given the complexity and the scale of the project, we went through multiple stages of investigation to exactly find out the user needs and determine the business goals we wanted to focus on. We collaboratively work to establish a coherent experience strategy by pursuing design thinking artefacts and exercises that would support the execution, elevate the experience and ultimately align the different parts of the business at a global scale.
Feel free to navigate the full pdf document attached.
Customer journeys are beneficial assets to understand the customer engagement on each touchpoint. However, communicating the bigger picture to different levels of stakeholders can be challenging and cumbersome. To facilitate understanding the journeys and long-term opportunities, we created few vision videos that worked as north light for the design direction and helped align the teams towards common goals and objectives.
Retail Experience - Pain Points
Retail was a crucial element to tackle and solve in our digital transformation efforts. With Vodafone's extensive and widespread retail store presence, it was imperative to ensure that the digital retail experience in our shops was seamless, intuitive, and fulfilling for our customers. Many customers initiate their journey with the brand by purchasing a SIM card in-store or renewing their plans with the assistance of in-shop advisors. Therefore, optimizing the in-store digital experience was essential in providing a strong and consistent customer journey from the very first touchpoint with our brand.
In this context, we conducted in-depth research through Store Safari activities, interviews with store managers, and customer surveys. These efforts allowed us to pinpoint specific pain points and shortcomings, enabling us to design solutions that addressed real user issues, benefiting both end customers and shop advisors
Design Principles
As soon we started tackling the design framework, we developed few design principles to guide the execution of Design10 Omnichannel. We acknowledge that user needs and motivations were a fundamental factor for the experience success. For this reason, we leveraged those desires to create critical principles that helped us resolve the complexity of targeting very different personas and multiple touchpoints. The design principles were broad and inspiring to enable the teams to experiment and innovate whilst being detailed and considerate when making critical decisions for both customers and advisors.
MVA Wearables
In recent years we witness new, disruptive innovations in the world of wearable technology, advances that will potentially transform life, business, and the global economy. The wearable revolution is also shifting long-established patterns of utilizing data in our daily lives and social interactions. It's a lot more personal, immediate and accessible. With the advent of new interface mechanisms transforming how we view and interact with technology, we explored how MVA would surface on these devices. Leveraging our Omnichannel approach, we determined few opportunities and innovative use cases on smartwatches, extending the MVA capabilities towards new scenarios to help the customer and the business achieve further goals.
My Vodafone app - "In-Store" Mode
Modern users use their smartphones when shopping in brick and mortar stores and expect consistent customer service that will learn from their in-store and online activity. With the power of integration, deeper analytics, and more robust technology, we explored the opportunity to do more to drive and enhance the in-store and omnichannel experience. Within the standard MVA framework and its design approach, we developed the "Instore" solution to make the customer experience original and seamless in the physical space. I was in charge of leading the design activities. We developed an omnichannel design strategy with the team that focuses on providing a superb customer experience by maximizing the product&services browsing inside the shop.
MVA10 "InStore" mode can guide the customer to the shop thanks to AR directions, prompt check-in, allow automatic login and ultimately delight the customer by transforming the user interface to contextualize the retail digital interaction. The application can then surface further opportunities from the specific store, such as live deals, events and gamified activities to unlock rewards.
Retail Kiosks
Retail X
Thanks to My Vodafone backend synchronization, data optimization, predictive analysis, and automatic queue management, we uplifted the role of the store advisor, so that he/she could discuss offers, plans, and upgrades easily while also negotiating side-by-side with the customer. This solution empowers the advisor to be more productive and enhance the customer experience in the shop. Also, as the customer interacts with digital kiosks and interactive tables located in the physical space, the gathered data can help determine the user's behaviour all along their buying journey. These insights would converge into the Retail10 application on tablet, assisting the advisor to build stronger relationships by informing the offers and experiences that the specific store can provide.
With "Retail X", Vodafone advisors have access to a shareable and accessible single source of truth to make decisions, a solution that impacts their business's health from the ground up. A platform that offers a 360-degree view of customers' needs and data enables the advisors to strategize more customer-considerate products, marketing, and customer service.
Vodafone Web Portal
The web portal experience -code named "Web Semplicity 10" or simply WS10 - represents the next evolution of the Vodafone web experience. Implemented successfully in 24 markets, WS10 has contributed to the overall increase in Vodafone digital sales, task completion, and customer satisfaction, as well as a decrease in the overall bounce rate. With WS10, we leveraged the omnichannel framework. We evolved the design to deliver a more personalized experience, a state-of-the-art interface, and a common design language between web and app. WS10 created a fresh, innovative, and inclusive experience that better serves our users' needs and gives them the confidence to establish a trusting relationship with Vodafone.
Tobi experience framework
To kick the project off, we conducted several group (multi-discipline) ideation and brainstorming exercises. By building upon insights learned during research, we created design principles, an archetype for our chatbot TOBi to guide our tone of voice and an interaction model to guide our experience design.
Advisor tablet
Additional Screens
User Journeys
Taking inspiration from smartwatch best practices and popular products like Uber or Deliveroo, we decided that the smartwatch experience should complement the overall MVA experience. Utilizing the sense of immediacy that the smartwatch provides, we focused only on critical features that the user would find helpful 'on the go', such as the dashboard, TopUp or the rewards journeys. This guarantee that the full details of the digital journey are still accessible on the mobile/desktop solution, still presenting the most relevant aspect of the experience at the user's fingertips.
TOBI Expressions
A component-based framework was also created to allow design teams to develop conversational user interfaces across targeting user journeys requiring an extra level of support. The objective was to create an intuitive and personalized chatbot experience by applying consistent design patterns in local markets. To enhance the delight and achieve empathy, we created TOBi expressions and engaged more effectively. Expressions are used to add a delighting feature to journeys, amplify a message, and convey a warmer meaning during the interaction.
TOBi - VF Digital Assistant
A big part of Vodafone's promise to improve this customer experience is TOBi. The IBM Watson AI-powered' chatbot' assists customers and can manage online enquiries, deflecting contact centre requests. It allows users to access account information and complete customer tasks easily. When I joined Vodafone, Tobi was already deployed as an MVP in Italy and the UK, unfortunately lacking usability and maturity. These challenges made Design Studio keen to support its customer experience. We defined a project goal and described the optimal experience strategy and interaction model for the digital assistant and the solution targeted the whole VF digital product suite, including My Vodafone App and WS10. I did oversee the design of a pattern library for conversational UI components that delivers the user experience via familiar, easy-to-understand paradigms and established best practice UX guidelines for Vodafone Group and local markets.
TOBi in WS10
Within WS10, we followed the same interaction model we set for the MyVodafone section. The "help" item now fully features the digital assistant, and the navigation allows the deepening of the conversation, making TOBi more prominent as its capabilities evolve. He will be providing reactive support to the customer by embodying the Vodafone characteristic traits. As the maturity model develops - sales related activities weren't in its initial remit - this solution enables the chatbot to handle these tasks more efficiently, thanks to its pivotal positioning in the top navigation menu.
Smartwatches. Setting the context
We started this exercise by asking ourselves what other devices or screens should help MVA thrive beyond mobile. We conducted a few user research and landscape analyses. As a result, we defined top use cases for users to complete crucial tasks or check data over smartwatches. Now that the eSIM solution is becoming more common, we considered few opportunities to amplify the immediacy of smartwatches for the user's benefit. We also evaluated the project from a business angle to support our design assumptions against the implementation value. As the adoption of smartwatches rises, users may come to expect certain functionalities. We acknowledge this solution would enable the business to be 'ahead of the curve' by pursuing a fully connected MVA eco-system.
Vodafone's approach to digital customer experience limited the end-user satisfaction as all the vertical businesss operations were siloed and not working collaboratively. Each team was responsible for delivering a unique product, and we wanted to disrupt this framework thanks to desgin thinking methodologies. The ambition was to bring the user back at the centre of the brand experience and leverage a full-fledged omnichannel approach, where simplicity and consistency were at the core of the experience. The challenge was to create a process that would enable the teams to work in a unified strategy against a common objective. To avoid duplication on close touchpoints, increase user fulfilment and bring more monetization opportunities to the business.
VODAFONE OMNICHANNEL
The Challenge