Example Reflection – Learning Launch   (small remark: I am not a native speaking English person, so please forgive wrong grammar and maybe  sometimes wrong words chosen)

I was product owner within marketing for the cable access product. This product is about 25% of full  company revenue and the major driver for company profit. As the basic cable access is a non- innovative product the challenge is to reach any kind of profit growth substantial for the company.  The product itself got sold over two ways. A direct sale to single family houses and a kind of B2B (to  end customer) sale to bigger apartment blocks to the landlord who then further charge the tenant  over tenant bill.  The core project scope is to drive price increase with lowest reachable customer churn due to the  increase by maximize the company revenue.

Selection

We have done many increases before this challenging one, so we experienced many tools from HIPO  (highest paid Opinion), over customer and landlord interview rounds how to do best up to engaging of  so-called communication experts. At the end we decided this time to go in a learning launch setup with  a surprising output.

Application

In the first learning launch we internally marking tried to gather all relevant information’s we are  aware of and tried to visualize it on a big board. We grouped the information and we tried to build a  first communication idea for the direct end customer explaining him why he must pay more.  We tested this approach with our internal call agents normally getting the angry customer calls and the  feedback was very bad.

For the second learning launch we changed the setup of attended people. We took additional a  moderator, call agents, friendly customers and landlords in a bigger round.   The moderator structured the information gathering of all the different viewpoints in a very fast and  accurate way. The total compiled picture was the basis for further discussions and decisions.

Insight

By using the learning launch in this specific environment, we identified very quickly where we had  wrong assumptions of customer behavior. Additional we identified that a core reason of churn is not  the price increase itself, it is the “try to explain” why a company wants to get more money out of  customer pockets.  This got obvious when landlord explained that our price increase on tenant bills  never was a discussion worth for the tenant. Compare to the rent it was nothing, additional even the  timing could have been 6 months shifted as tenant bills only got shown once a year.    Additional our direct customer (single family house) explains us, that this yearly bill rarely got  compared to the past paid amount, so even on his side we learned that there was no need for  justification

Approach

Given that we did already lunch several price increases with big communications campaigns, we  changed our approach fully to a reduced communication only serving the need of legal obligations.  This was done by a one liner on the customer bill telling, we increased the price by xy.

The result was lowest churn ever and a blueprint for the future, without the learning launch and the  direct feedback of customers we would have never even thought of this radical minimal approach.

