Rogers AnyPlaceTV Consolidation
Increasing customer satisfaction while reducing operation complexity and cost.
Company: Rogers Communications, QuickPlay Media, AT&T DirecTV.
Platform: STB, iOS, Android, Web
Primary Effort
Lead UX Designer, managing three UX/Visual Design/Analyst teams (supporting desktop, iOS and Android) thru the Discover, Design, Development and Delivery phases.
Project Overview
Rogers AnyPlaceTV (RAPTV) was the companion service for Rogers Cable TV customers. Its purpose was to enable customers to watch TV, and schedule recordings when they were away from home using their smart phone or web browser.
RAPTV apps had very low customer ratings and a lot of negative feedback. RAPTV was supported by different apps and vendors for iOS, Android and Web, which created a fractured customer experience, customer confusion and inflated operational costs.
The Challenge
RAPTV was originally delivered as separate apps. This meant that customers needed to download 3 separate apps per device in order to watch TV, manage their recordings or control their set-top-box (STB).
To add to the complexity, customers in some regions (e.g. the Atlantic provinces) needed to download different apps than customers in Ontario. As a result there was a lot of confusion around which apps worked in which regions. Most of the negative app ratings and feedback could be traced back to customers downloading and experiencing difficulty using an app intended for another region.
The primary UX objective was to improved the customer experience by providing a single app that enabled customers to watch TV, schedule recordings and control their STB, regardless of region.
The main business objective was to reduce operational costs and complexity by using a single vendor to deliver RAPTV to customers on all the supported platforms.
The Solution
We were able to reduce the complexity for Rogers cable customers by reducing the number of options available for each mobile platform from 6 apps down to one app, that work for everyone. This immediately helped eliminated the problem of customers installing the wrong app(s) for their region, and experiencing difficulties. It also ensured a consistent experience for customers across devices and platforms.
By working with one vendor, we were able to reduce the operational complexity and cost of delivering the solution to customers on multiple devices.
Results
We were able able to deliver the new RAPTV app/desktop within 9 months of the project kickoff. The new solution helped improve the overall app store ratings (for 1.5 stars to closer to 4 stars for iOS and Android) and to reduce calls from customer experiencing difficulty accessing their TV content using RAPTV.
The Process
I began by reviewing current customer experience to identify pain points and opportunities, and capturing the them as User Stories. We reviewed a number of vendor solutions, comparing them to our User Stories to identify strengths and gaps. During the vendor selection and negotiation processes we used a strength/gap matrix to determine which vendor could help meet our customer experience goals and business requirements. Because RAPTV was a companion service, we used followed the existing cable platform’s visual identity, nomenclature and organization as much as possible.
My Activities
- User Comments and Feedback Review – reviewed customer comments made in app stores, community forums and reviewed support call drivers.
- Heuristic Reviews – expert review of existing RAPTV apps, and proposed vendor solutions
- User Stories – write end to end user stories (with Product Management) to capture functional and user experience requirements.
- Business Requirement Stories – write business requirement stories (with Product Management) to ensure regulatory and content rights restrictions are observed.
- Feature Priority/Gap Matrix – identified and prioritize feature gaps for vendor solution, after reviewing against User Stories and Business Requirements.
- Information Architecture – develop consistent solution IA based on STB conventions.
- Experience Mapping – map key customer journeys (e.g. new app acquisition or app upgrade, first login, pause and resume across devices).
- Task Flows (web, phone, tablet) – develop cross platform task flows for key customer journeys and features.
- Wireframes (web, phone, tablet) – manage the creation and evolution wireframes for each development stream.
- Visual Design ) – manage the creation and evolution of visual design artifacts, leveraging existing STB brand, identity, conventions.
- Low and High Fidelity Prototyping – manage the creation of low and high fidelity prototypes.
- User Prototype Testing – manage the user testing process of key features using low and high fidelity prototypes.
- Agile Development – participate in weekly Agile planning sessions, defect triage, backlog grooming per development stream.
- Employee Trial – participant in employee trials, triage and prioritize defects, review participant comments and feedback.