Case Study: UX Research to Improve Onboarding
OVERVIEW
I conducted user research with customers for a fiber-optic internet provider based in NYC to further improve the onboarding experience.
The research will become our north star to both onboarding improvements and an updated customer portal (pending construction).
Project Details
Company: Pilot Fiber (current employer)
Project Type: UX Research
Timeline: February-April 2023
My role: Onboarding Lead, Account Manager
Tools: Zoom, Miro, Figma
BACKGROUND
Pilot Fiber is an internet service provider based in NYC.
For the last 9 years, Pilot Fiber has provided businesses of all sizes in NYC with reliable fiber-optic internet. Our customers range from tech giants like Amazon to a small businesses.
Pilot stands out from competitors by backing their service with the best customer experience in telecom.The company is currently in the process of upgrading the equipment we provide customers to allow for faster internet speed options.
THE CHALLENGE
Pilot now provides depending on the customer on their needs, complicating the onboarding process.
Pilot hasn’t overhauled the main customer onboarding process and materials in 6 years. Currently the customer onboarding experience is a combination of email templates, PDFs, and on-site installers.
The company used to only have two end user devices which made onboarding easy for both the user and the customer experience team. Pilot now provides 8 different end user devices, complicating the onboarding process.
How can we make Pilot’s process more operationally efficient without sacrificing the core values of our onboarding?
THE PROCESS
User Research
I conducted 1:1 user interviews to hear first hand how they use Pilot internet and what role it plays in their work lives.
The interviews were both a way to pinpoint areas we can grow and a confirmation of what we are doing well.
We interviewed ten Pilot customers from eight companies who were onboarded between November 2022-January 2023, each which different types of service offerings.
Most of them had experience with other internet providers.
They ranged from biotechnology companies, to pet insurance, to a lone seamstress.
Research Objective
We wanted to know the following.
What telecom needs do customers have?
Are they hybrid or fully in-office?
Why did they choose Pilot?
Have they used other providers in the past?
What was that experience like?
What do they remember about their Pilot onboarding?
Did customers use the PDF collateral Pilot provides during customer onboarding experience?
Post-install, what communications do you want to receive?
If you're moving office, how can we NOT be the last phone call?
I summarize their feedback into the affinity chart below.
Research Results
The biggest takeaways from the user research was what delighted customers and what were pain point for customers.
Customer Experience Brainstorming
Once the user research was completed, I did a brainstorming session with the customer experience team to get their ideas on how to solve the customer issues that were brought up.
The team had a lot of great ideas and were also able to share some of their pain points as well.
They needed a more streamlined process to onboard customers now that we had so many different types of devices.
OUTCOME
Because of the user interviews and the customer experience brainstorming, we are making the following changes.
Install guide PDFs are now being switched to online articles that are easier to edit for the CX team and easier for customers to share. Creating the PDFs were taking up a lot of our resources compared to creating online articles and learning that custzomers barely even used them was the push we needed to make a change.
Because the biggest customer pain points was outages and outage communication, we reviewed our outage communications are continuing to improve our outage protocol.
We will be asking customers their lease end date in order to potentially retain customers and get ahead of any customers moving out of their offices to new buildings.
NEXT STEPS
I will also be creating a new customer portal prototype to present to execs. The portal would include features that would solve both user needs and the customer experience team's needs.
While we don't have the dev capacity to update our portal this year, a prototype would go a long way in allocating dev resources in the future.
WHAT I LEARNED
Through this experience, I learned the following:
The importance of aligning with business objectives. I wanted to focus the interviews on how to improve the onboarding process but execs in the company also wanted to learn other useful information, like how to retain customers.
Qualify the customers more so that we aren’t wasting time & money talking to people who can’t give us the insights needed. One of the interviewees was the assistant of a person we had already interviewed and the assistant didn't contribute new data.
When presenting the research finding to the company, I found that some people already knew about a few insights I thought were previously unknown. Even within a relatively small company of 60 people, department knowledge is siloed. There is a lot to be gained by talking to other teams about their insights.
The end... for now.