Background
Bharti Airtel is the biggest telecommunications company in India with a yearly revenue of over $18 Billion/year out of which the B2B clients bring in over $4 billion of revenue for the company.
Designing for Airtel is a challenge I love because of the customers coming from diverse backgrounds across the sub-continent.
Project Overview
Re-design the ordering and order management journey for Airtel B2B’s self-care portal which helps customer manage their services and place/track orders. This was mainly targeted at the Fortune 500 companies Airtel caters to but not limited to them.
For most B2C products, there is usually one set of end users, but for B2B products, multiple end users require careful decision-making while designing a journey for large enterprises as many stakeholders are involved.
My Role
Led the project as a Senior UX Designer and
UX Researcher
The Team
- 2 Product Managers
- Engineering Team
- CX Team
- Marketing Team
- Business Team
Timeline
November 2022 - January 2023
What was the problem?
⏳
Lead-to-order time for enterprise customers was 10–15 days for each order.
💰
Payments for these services (over $4 billion per year) were being done offline through a physical purchase orders.
👨💼
Customers were dependent on
KAM/AM (Account Managers) to place and track orders.
📊
Current average monthly orders: 12,000–15,000 done offline. These orders were dependent on a large on-field workforce.
🚫
Customers were not able to place
orders online.
📈
0 growth in digital orders since customers were not onboarded on the self-care portal.
Discovery
Participant Criteria for Research:
- Top 20% of users of our B2B services both EGB and SMBs.
- The customers who used the old digital ordering tool.
- Customers with orders with more than 1000 sites for EGB.
I went on field visits with Account Managers to meet multiple EGBs (enterprise and global businesses) and SMBs (small to medium-scale businesses) to understand how they currently use the order management tool on the self-care portal.
12
EGB Customers Visited
8
SMB Customers Visited
1 Month
Duration
Insights Gained
🔍
Order Tracking Challenges
Customers need help tracking the originator of orders on the self-care portal and encounter issues when attempting to trace offline-placed orders through our sales executives.
👿
Employee Resistance
Key Account Managers (KAMs) and AMs express fear that digital ordering might replace their roles. Their reluctance to onboard customers onto the self-care portal poses a challenge to the successful implementation of digital orders.
💡
Limited Awareness
A significant number of customers are unaware of the online self-care portal, revealing a gap in onboarding efforts by Account Managers (AMs).
✅
Feasibility Assessment
Banking customers engage multiple network providers for feasibility assessments, selecting the provider who offers the quickest results.
👨💼
Stakeholder Complexity
The B2B space involves various stakeholders, including the IT team, finance team, authorized signatory, and delivery collection personnel.
💬
Communication and Fact-checking
Within customer organizations, manual communication and fact-checking are prevalent during the order placement process, indicating a need for streamlined and automated workflows.
Key Personas Identified
1. Account Manager
This is an internal Airtel employee who helps customers with order placement, service management and assurance.
This person plays a key role in communication between the customer and the service provider and also acts as customer's frequent point of contact for any help they may require.
2. IT Admin
This persona is a customer employee and is the one who shares technical specifications of the service requirement with account managers.
3. Procurement Specialist
This persona negotiates the commercials with Airtel and is a full-time employee of our customer. This persona also co-ordinates with the IT Admin to make sure the specifications shared are correct and also raises a purchase order for the order.
4. Key Decision Maker
The key decision maker in our customer's organisation is usually the owner in case of an SMB or someone like the IT Head in an EGB. This person confirms all orders in the organization as it is a regulatory requirement by the telecom ministry of India.
Low-Fidelity
We explored the basic flow that considered all our findings using Figjam. This collaboration was between three designers including me (senior ux designer),a lead designer and Principal UX Designer.
We did affinity mapping and translated the key goals and actions each persona needs to perform into low-fidelity wireframes.
Since the customers were comfortable sharing their order requirements using an Excel sheet, we kept that as one of our core design needs which led to a minimal learning curve.
What facilitated design decisions?
I worked on the high fidelity individually and designed a few UI components from scratch in collaboration with the design systems team.
I broke the whole process into 4 super easy steps backed by strong decision-making to create an experience that did not require a big learning curve for the user.
Step 1: Submit Order Details
This is the first and most crucial step in the ordering journey. Most of the information is pre-populated and requires a secondary confirmation from the customer and lets users upload the Excel sheet that they are already used to giving orders in.
Step 2: Feasibility Check
In the telecommunications business, it’s a race between brands on who can give the feasibility for a site the fastest, usually the one who is the fastest gets the order.
This step is crucial for the customers as it gives them confirmation of the availability of services at a particular location.
Step 3: Plan & Configuration
This step helps the procurement team (persona 2) negotiate the pricing and is a secondary confirmation of IT admins if they want to change a plan for a particular site.
Step 4: Order Confirmation
The procurement/finance team (persona 2)plays a big role here as they upload the purchase order details before confirming the order.
This section had to be designed according to the standards of financial service models so that there was no learning curve for our persona (finance team of large enterprises). This step was crucial to the journey since it brought in over $4 billion of Airtel’s revenue every year.
The order is then confirmed by an OTP sent to the Key decision maker (persona 3) and the order is confirmed when the right OTP is entered.
Validation
Design Validation (User Testing)
The journey was then tested with internal users (account managers) and our customers before being pushed into development. The tool I used for user testing was Maze.
96.2%
Task Completion Rate
24
Number of Participants
A few changes were made like the addition of ingress points on the self-care portal home page that made it easier for both account managers and customers to initiate the journey. Feasibility buckets were also created on the UI to simplify data for enterprise customers who usually order services for 500 sites in one go.
Final Design
Journey Walkthrough
Impact of the re-design
13.6%
Increase in digital orders
8%
Increae in MAU
-
Role-based UI on self-care portal increasing work efficiency and clarity.
-
Easier to onboard new customers on the self-care portal for Account Managers.
-
Transparency between Airtel and its users through the portal and emails and increased trust.
-
Growth in digital ordering passively reduced the hiring of more Account managers, thereby reducing Airtel’s spend on hiring.
Key Learnings
Stakeholder Management
This is one key skill without which I would not be able to ship this project. At one point I had to justify a design decision to 4 different teams on the same call and explain why certain strategic design decisions were made.
Building transparency and trust with customers
While interviewing customers, I met a few frustrated ones too (we all face a few). I promised I’d try to understand their problems the best way I can and solve them. I reached out to the same customers after the journey was shipped and they could use it, and they were happy that their inputs were taken into consideration and told me I made their work easier and that they had transparency about everything related to the order.
Addressing employee resistance
The internal employees assumed the journey I was re-designing would take their job. I assured them that this would only make their work easier and not replace them. Addressing this concern was very important for a smooth transition of customers to digital ordering and management.