Project Summary

QLink is a telecom provider that partners with the government to help offer discounted phone and internet services to low-income individuals by providing them with free phones. However, as more customers expressed interest in bringing their own phones to the service and other companies began optimizing their digital versions of this process, our team was asked to review and update the current user experience in order to reduce customer friction throughout the process.

I was tasked with leading the research and redesign of this Bring Your Own Number experience.

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Research and Analysis

When a telecom provider offers the option to "bring your own phone," it means that you can use your existing phone with their service, rather than purchasing a new phone from the provider. This can be a convenient option if you already have a phone that you like and want to continue using however, it can be a fairly lengthy and complicated process.

I partnered with two developers and product managers to get an in-depth understanding of the current system in place and how it was affecting the customers using it. To kick this off we did some comparative analysis work on other company flows being offered as well as connected with our customer service team gather additional insights from customers.

Due to the complexity of the system, time constraints, and number of shareholders on the project we also opted to rapidly iterate a number of potential solutions in whiteboarding workshops with a few members of the team along with our digital prototype testing.

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Design and Iteration

Upon conducting our evaluation, we identified several problems with the current process. Customers were having numerous issues activating their devices at home. A few of the main problems included:

- Customers struggled with checking their phone's IMEI numbers which were necessary as they ensured compatibility with the service

- Activating SIM cards was quite a long process and wasn't intuitive enough for users

- Users weren't clear which network to activate with and the requirements needed.

Building on the insights we gained from customer feedback and the responses from the prototypes we found that customers were primarily being overloaded with information and the interactions within the current flow which were not very intuitive.

To simplify the customer experience, we focused on designing flows that progressively disclosed only the necessary and relevant information needed at each stage of the process. This approach greatly streamlined the user experience.

To use your own phone with a different provider, you need to ensure that the phone is compatible with that provider's network. Modern phones are designed to be used with multiple carriers and will work with any provider that use the same type of network (e.g., GSM or CDMA) but phones can become disconnected if you try to connect to the wrong network. This section was a major part of confusion for customers so we focused on ensuring this section was easier to understand by both simplifying the language and reducing the number of needed steps here.

The complex nature of the complete process necessitated more than 70 screens covering sign up, confirming eligibility, document uploads and other features like port forwarding.

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Results

Following the initial update, we observed a 62% increase in the number of completed BYOP signups. A pretty signifigant increase but we were identifying areas that we could further refine to further streamline the experience.

We continued to analyze data on customer interactions with the updated process and used it to guide further improvements to streamline the flows.