Background
Airtel PRI or Primary Rate Interface is an end-to-end digital communications connection that helps businesses connect with their customers efficiently.
Currently, the acquisition journey for the product is done manually on paper which required manual intervention at every step and is dependent on partners.
Project Overview
The project was about digitizing an existing assisted journey that Airtel's on-field sales executives were doing. This enabled sales executives to fill in the complete details (including online feasibility, range reserve, plan selection, etc.) and complete the acquisition journey from their end.
The order to installation TAT was 12–18 days using manual order logging which was being done through emails between various teams, the goal was to reduce the TAT by 10–15%.
My Role
Led the project as a
Senior UX Designer and
UX Researcher
The Team
- 1 Product Manager
- Engineering Team
- 2 CX Managers
- 1 Senior Ux Designer /
UX Researcher
Timeline
3 Months
Strategic Fit
What was the problem?
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Order completion was taking 12-18 days because of manual order placement.
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The communcation between teams to execute an order was being done on e-mails which led to delays in installation of services at the customer's location.
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On-field sales executives were using up the majority of their time communicating with teams and could not focus on selling more.
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Manual communication also led to miscommunication between teams and left the customers unsatisfied.
Discovery
User Research
I led the user research by getting in touch with the TSMs (territory sales managers) who managed a particular territory in a city.
The TSMs helped me get in touch with multiple AMs (Account managers) and FSEs (on-field sales executives) to understand their process of placing an order to its completion.
18
Accounnt Managers
12
Field Sales Executives
6
Territory Sales Managers
2 Weeks
Duration
Key Persona
Account Managers (AM) & FSE (Field Sales Executives)
The account managers are employees of the company and their day-to-day responsibility is to manage customer accounts, sell them new products and services and help them if they face any issues with their products.
The responsibility of an FSE is to sell the company’s product offerings by generating leads from businesses by cold calling them or visiting their offices.
User Stories
Received user stories from the product manager and collaborated to enhance stories for edge cases and information architecture.
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The user should be able to get the leads from various sources and they should be able to create a new lead, edit existing leads, schedule customer meetings, discuss the requirement and capture the solicited product details.
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The user should be able to enter the installation address to check network feasibility.
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The user should be able to select standard plans or customize plans based on customer requirements.
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The users should be able to reserve customer's choice of number.
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The user should be able to complete customer KYC as per telecom regulatory requirements.
User Journey
Next, I created user journey flows to ideate and understand what the user’s flow on the journey would be. We discussed the same with the PM and other stakeholders to be in sync with the business requirements and existing product construct.
Snapshot of the user journey
Competitive Analysis
A competitor analysis was done to map out the various features offered by Airtel’s competitors.
The Solution
To solve this complex structure of selling, I segregated actions into small action buckets.
Designed the solution in a way that it had 4 easy steps to place an order for our sales executives.
This would allow them only to focus on customer inputs for what they want for their business and fulfill it without any paperwork whatsoever.
Step 1: Plan Selection
Upon lead creation, the user can browse through the existing plans and specify the quantity of DIDs (referred to by sales professionals as the number of connections).
Step 2: Number Reservation
After selecting the plan, the user can reserve the customer's choice of numbers with a pilot number.
Step 4: Billing Summary
The billing summary helps the user to validate all of the information entered by them before placing the order. This step also allows them to send the quote for the order to the client to get their approval before confirming it. This helps in building customer trust and transparency in the ordering process.
Step 4 (edge-case): DOA Approval
This step caters to an edge case where the FSE or AM requests for custom pricing or a CAPEX wave-off.
Validation
Design Validation (User Testing)
The journey was then tested with internal users (account managers) and FSE (field sales executives) before being pushed into development. The tool I used for user testing was Maze.
94%
Task Completion Rate
46
Number of Participants
A few inputs were taken from the questions asked after user testing which are as follows:
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Users were unable to understand a few abbreviations for product terms. Ux copy was updated in the design shipped.
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Users were unable to choose a pilot number in the initial design, which was later updated from their inputs.
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2 users were not able to understand a few terms for which tooltips were added to eliminate the learning curve for new on-field sales employees.
Impact
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Enabled on-field executes to increase productivity by reducing the time taken to log an order from over 2 hours to just 5 minutes resulting in a 95.83% reduction.
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Decreased lead to installation TAT to 3 days from 12–18 days earlier.
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Increase in 12% orders for the landline products within 5 months of release.
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The same journey was used as a skeleton for selling other connectivity products for Airtel, thereby streamlining user acquisition.
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Helped new customers to be onboarded by sales executives digitally through the digital transformation of this journey.