REFLECTION- STORYTELLING

Challenge

Storytelling is the essential human activity and is a tool I particularly use in complex, difficult to  understand situations. As a customer experience personnel managing an app for a home Wi-Fi service, I  work with people from all ages who can use the internet. Most of these people are not IT or tech gurus  and are not very familiar with certain terms and actions. Late last year, there was a surge on the calls we  got from customers wishing to unfreeze their accounts. The freeze option was to enable a customer who  was going to be away for a while prevent his account and data from running or getting expired. A  customer could freeze his account for a minimum of 7 days and a maximum of a year. Customers  however, froze their accounts and mostly could not wait for 7 days and so had to call for it to be  unfrozen.

Selection

The tool I used is Storytelling. Storytelling helps explain the interconnections among humans in  situations and tells real life challenges experienced by individuals. It is the tool that ensures that the  organization empathizes with the humans involved in order to define the challenge, ideate and then  develop a prototype that is later tested.

Application

I used storytelling to understand why customers kept freezing their accounts when they did not want to  use their Wi-Fi instead of simply turning them off. Listening to these customers and hearing their  reasons helped me empathize with them and gain great insights on their thoughts and needs.

The very first thing I did was to monitor the people who called complaining of frozen account for a week.  Instead of simply unfreezing like I always did, I listened to their stories. I asked them nicely why they  froze their accounts.

I got some interesting stories which I put together to help me ideate. Per my raw discussions with them,  I learnt that a few customers froze their accounts to prevent others from using the Wi-Fi when they  were away simply because they either did not know how to block devices or just felt the procedure for  blocking was too long and would rather freeze these accounts. The block option was located at the  management side which took you to an IP address where you had to sign in to block an account. I  discovered that customers did not know that the freeze option had a minimum validity of 7 days as  there was no information telling them that. I also learnt that customers did not know that they could  turn their devices off and their data would not run and they also did not know basic account  management procedures. Through storytelling and listening, I got to understand that there was the  need to scrape of my initial solution, which was a clear education and rather brainstorm on all these  insights to develop the highest satisfaction to the customers so they do not settle for the easiest option,  freezing accounts.

I told their stories to my team and we sat down to play these calls and listen to all stories. Through  brainstorming, we put down thoughts, all while replaying the customers’ reasons for freezing their  accounts and the suggestions they gave us.

Our ‘what if’, was to first of all, assess the block account tap and develop an easiest and user friendly  method to block devices. We also decided to educate customers via the app on blocking accounts. Then,  we brainstormed and added a disclaimer to the Freeze option, informing the customer that freezing the  account meant that it will not be available and he or she could not unfreeze until after 7 days.

Our IT team worked on the app and gave the ‘block option’ on the app a big blue banner and the view  devices connected tab so customers can see it easily at the home page of the app. Since the app only  works for the owner of the router and checks are already confirmed before one logs into the app, we did  not need all the initial security measures.

We also created a bright yellow banner at the top corner of the app’s home page that displayed a catchy  phrase, “You want some users of the WiFi for a while? Here’s how” with a button that leads straight to  the devices connected so you can easily block them.

We also started a ‘nursery project’ in which customers were sent notifications daily on the app on how  to do easy things like reset, turning the device off and managing accounts and devices.

We run the update first on few customers that had previously called more than 3 times to unfreeze their  accounts, a sample size of 72 people. In a month, none of them called to unfreeze their accounts.

The update was pushed to all customers after a month of studying and since then, we have had only 6  calls requesting for unfreezing and this was mostly because their travel plans got cancelled.

Insight

Using the approach of storytelling was the most fulfilling tool as it brought out enormous insights we  would have previously ignored. It got us to get into the lives, hearts and minds of our customers and live  through their challenges. This made it very easy to solve the problem and made our design thinking  process a 100% success.

Approach

Using this tool was as great as it helped us fulfill our most important duty as a company, customer  delight and satisfaction. We have looked at this approach and are going to keep using this, and next  time, we will live their lives, get into their homes and live their challenges. Great changes a simple story  can create!

