Reflection on Learning Launch

Jorge Bernardo, 18.05.2021

Challenge

As a head of remote entry agency for clients using wallets for a popular Moroccan bank, my main  goal is to ensure that the services ordered by a client are successfully activated. However, successful  integration is only guaranteed if the customer carries out certain steps himself.

These steps are emailed to the customer after placing the order. Although these emails are very  personal and detailed, we noticed that customers often did not complete the steps and as a result  the onboarding did not always go as smoothly which also resulted in a drop in the customer  satisfaction.

Selection

Due to several possibilities to solve this problem, we decided to launch a learning launch. The  learning launch tool allowed us to test very quickly and at minimal cost if we were on the right track  or if we needed to completely change our thinking. Even if the result is not what you want, the loss is  minimal because the investment is low. A learning launch is indeed always beneficial: you quickly  know if you are on the right track with something or if you need to go back to the drawing board and  formulate a new or refined hypothesis based on the information gathered.

Application

Our guess was that the text of the mail might have been too long and people hadn't bothered to read  it. Based on this hypothesis, we decided to create a digital milestone plan. We were very excited  about the launch as we were hoping to see a lot of people click on the stage map. We did notice,  however, that the click-through rate was very low.

So we had to rephrase our hypothesis and realized that maybe the format was not the biggest  obstacle but maybe the channel! Our assumption was that customers viewed these emails as spam.  We decided to send our customers an SMS including a link to the stage plan. The results have been  phenomenal! Customers were actively viewing the road map on their cell phones.

Now that we've noticed that customers are hitting the milestone plan, we've decided to improve it  even more in a future sprint release. The plan was to make it interactive so that customers could  have an instant view of what steps have already been completed and what remains to be done.  Customer feedback was excellent! They considered this to be their personal to-do list and actively  wanted everything checked out.

Insights

With the first prototype, we quickly realized that we were not on the right track and not solving our  problem. But this idea itself was already so valuable to us that it outweighed the investment limits  we made in this prototype. Because it forced us to go back to the drawing board, change our  assumption which ultimately led to an even better result in the end.

Approach

I cannot stress enough the importance of data. It is very important with such a learning launch to put  in place the necessary metrics to measure its success. Always go back to the original problem and  watch closely whether the prototype fixes it or not. For example, we initially focused primarily on  click-through rate, but actually just opening the stage map wouldn't solve the problem. Equally  important in determining whether a customer is actively completing the milestone plan was to  include the number of visits as a metric. Data is essential!

