Reflection - Storytelling

Challenge

I work with the largest telecom company in a third world country. Our customers recharge their SIM  cards primarily through two methods- a) through electronic recharge in a telco retail shop (around 70% of

the base) or b) through scratch card which is available in telco retail shop or any retail shop (around 30% of

the base).

Coming to the challenge part, we have a very popular recharge campaign (Rotaract Society) where people can  recharge a certain amount (29 unit of local currency) and in addition to all the benefits they used to get, they  also get very low voice call rate for 3 days. This campaign is quite popular among the customers. On an  average, nearly one third customers take it in a month. But the campaign does not have any scratch card  version. If a scratch card user wants to have it, he/she has to recharge electronically. Now my company  wants to check whether there is any real demand for a ‘Scratch card equivalent’ of the same campaign.

Selection

I selected storytelling to present my analysis as it is a compelling method to say what I want to say and  enable the audience (in this case our management) to take an informed decision.

Application

To find out the solution, I gathered data from our systems which clearly show that there is an 8% gap  between scratch card users (25%) and electronic recharge users (33%) when it comes to availing the  campaign. As the campaign is only available through electronic recharge, the 8% gap among the scratch  card users could be attributed to the absence of a ‘Scratch card equivalent’.

In addition to utilization of system data, we also asked a group of customers regarding their willingness  to purchase ‘Rotaract Society’ through scratch card. We found that the customers who are currently scratch  card users, showed interest for this product. Those who use electronic recharge, showed little or no  interest for the product. They are quite happy to avail the campaign through electronic recharge.

As we got support from these two sources, we built our case in storytelling format. We tried to tell that  scratch card users are taking the campaign 8% less than the electronic recharge users because they  cannot get the campaign through their preferred method (i.e. through scratch card).

Insight & Approach

We presented the first version of our story to some stakeholders for their feedback. One stakeholder  told us to dig deeper into scratch card users. There should be two types of scratch card users- those who  use only scratch card and those who use both scratch card and electronic recharge. Percentage of  ‘Rotaract Society’ takers should be different among these two groups. And yes, we found exactly that when  we dig deeper. ‘Only scratch card users’ (6% of the base) do not take the ‘Rotaract Society’ at all (which is

natural as the campaign is now available through electronic recharge only). On the other hand, those who use both

scratch card and electronic recharge take the campaign in almost the same percentage (32%) as the  electronic recharge users.

This discovery made our story even stronger. We found out that there are 6% customers in the market  who are unable to take the most popular campaign only because their preferred mode of recharge (i.e.

scratch card) do not support this campaign. We also collected customers’ feedback which told us the same  thing. At the end, we strongly recommend to introduce a scratch card version of ‘Rotaract Society’ in the  market.

