Reflection - Learning Launch

Challenge

I am currently consulting at an organisation that provides Fibre Broadband to most of my home city.  One of the challenges we have is that a retailer will be contacted by a person requiring a broadband  installation and then pass the order including the customer’s details through to our call centre. The  call centre then sends a text message (SMS) to customer asking them to call us to book a time for  two appointments required to complete the installation. Although we have tried different  permutations of this, we have on average only been able to complete ~60% of orders into completed  bookings. Unfortunately a project has already begun to increase order completions and initiatives  have been kicked off without the design thinking process. One of these initiatives is to simply text  (SMS) a time slot to a customer rather than waiting for them call us and then for them to text a  message back (yes or no) to say whether that appointment time was acceptable. This would require  a significant enhancement to our IT systems coming at great cost. What could I do to help make this  idea a success?

Selection

So, we were too far through the process to start at step one of the design thinking process. We do  have what seems a good idea. The Learning Launch seems like the ideal tool as it is designed to test  an idea by creating a hypothesis. To check this off we needed to answer the key questions of a  Learning Launch:

  What are the key customer execution and defensibility assumptions? We have assumed that  customers will react positively to having an appointment time sent to them rather than  selecting their own date and time. This will result in more successful bookings. – This is our  hypothesis.

  How can we quickly test this with the customers? We needed to find a way to design a cheap  and relatively quick experiment to test our hypothesis.

Application

We knew the existing statistic of 60% orders becoming bookings. How could we test this new idea  will “move the needle”? After giving it some thought the answer was relatively simple. We decided  to manually create appointments for 50 customers and then manually text the customers the  appointment details. We were pleasantly surprised when 80% of the customers accepted the  appointments within the first 24-48 hours. Another 10% required call back to confirm booking times.  That took us from 60% to 90% of orders booked. The idea is certainly a needle mover!  Armed with  this test we are now able to proceed with spending money on IT Enhancements to remove the  manual aspect of the test.

Insight

What has been interesting for me in this process is the speed at which you can validate your ideas. In  the IT domain there has been a lot of discussion in recent years about the Lean Start-Up and Minimal  Viable Products. The Learning Launch has taken these ideas one step further. A minimal viable  product requires you to build something and then learn if it is a good product or not. The Learning  Launch we designed required nothing to be built whatsoever. In fact we only utilised existing  technology in a different fashion. The cost to the organisation was a few hours and we significantly  reduced the risk of building the wrong thing. In future we will be looking to learning launches for all  of our new initiatives.

We were also fortunate to have a reasonable amount of data and statistics at hand. By having these  statistics we were able to be sure we had tested our hypothesis well. If we were to carry out

Approach

The Learning Launch has jump started thinking about how to get to 100% of orders booked. This  target seemed previously unobtainable but is now within reach. I have explained that the Learning  Launch is a tool used during design thinking the team are now willing to explore this further. We are  going to get closer to our customers and we will start a formal design thinking process across wider  aspects of the business. Woohoo!

