surfacing why 100% of customers cancel service within 1 year
Wunderman Thompson was working on optimizing customer experience for an oil & energy company. This company needed to understand why they were seeing 100% churn within the first year of people signing up for their service. Wunderman Thompson had no CX (customer experience) or UX department locally in Texas, so I was brought in to research from the customer perspective of the Oil & Energy company as a provider. The larger objective was to learn where and why this company was failing its customers.
My Role: UX/CX Designer and Researcher
Tools: Sketch, InDesign, PowerPoint
My Contributions:
- Conducted interviews with stakeholders in various client business units
- Created end-to-end journey map
- Conducted interviews with customers churned from the last year
- Explained how each touchpoint impacts customer experience
- Exposed internal processes that were broken
- Created high-fidelity customer experience walkthroughs
- Presented findings to C-suite
- Recommended prioritization of quarterly deliverables
Methods used:
Stakeholder interviews
Customer interviews
Customer service analysis
Customer journey
Emotional journey map
Touchpoint analysis
Affinity mapping
Walkthrough maps
High-fidelity presentations
What i’m solving
The problem
While this company brings in 600,000 new energy customers a year, 40% leave within the first 90 days, and 100% of new customers leave within one year. There is internal confusion on why this is happening, and how they could be providing a better service and experience for their customers. This was also a priority because they are a new acquisition for a larger energy company in the UK, and needed to be in top-shape before taking on their parent companies name.
Approach
Discovery/Research: Here I'll ask for all data and current research available that The Energy Company has on its customers. I'll explore the user experience by calling sales people to learn how they pitch, review the language used on their website, and more.
Define/Map: Here is where I poke, prod and gain insight to define where the disconnect is between The Energy Company, and its customers. With the knowledge I've gained, I mapped out and highlighted where I see the intersection between internal processes problems, and how it impacts the user.
Create/Present: Based on the previous steps, I created high-fidelity maps, walkthroughs, assumptions, and recommended solutions. These solutions were prioritized by effort & benefit.
Since this is a short-term contract, this is where my work is completed.
Research
Discovery
The first thing I did was ask all available data points, and current research about their customers. I requested surveys, touch-points, timelines, logged complaints, and more. Based on this initial analysis and a conversation with C-suite Executives, it was clear that the areas that needed a deeper review were:
Company-to-customer communication touch-points and language
Stakeholders feedback on internal processes
Customer feedback of their actual experience
User-portal deep-dive UI review
Communications/Touchpoint Review
I evaluated and reviewed all communications materials from marketing through to churn, including:
Listening to sales and customer support calls
Calling in as a prospective customer
Reviewing language used on their website
Reviewing all emails, texts, and snail-mail
With this information, I isolated the differences between messaging intentions and messaging outcomes. I then laid out all the touchpoints on a map, and added communication that happened within each touchpoint.
Layout of the first three stages of a users journey, listing out touch-points and current data.
Various processes specific to help and payment problems.
Customer feedback from the company, and public reviews.
Stakeholder Interviews
Here I obtained a deeper understanding of the business units and their general processes, operational challenges, as well as any additional customer-driven feedback. I spoke with:
Company President
Technology Lead
Data Science Lead
Marketing Lead
Sales Lead
Operations Lead
Customer Service Lead
UX/UI Lead
Customer Voice Lead
and more…
Sample Stakeholder Interview Questions:
* How do you receive customer complaints?
* How do you temperature check customers? Surveys?
* What do you do with the complaints?
* How are you prioritizing complaints?
* When on-boarding new customers, how are you assessing their risk for churn?
* What are your top five customer experiences, themes, and complaints?
* From a customer care standpoint, what ways the company could better enable customers for success?
* What do you think is the biggest area of focus or opportunity to enhance the customers’ experience?
Customer Interviews
I exposed the breakdowns and misalignments between the expectations set for customers, and what was delivered. I used Usertesting.com to interview at a distance, and then mapped out the reasons on post-its, and subsequently clustered them by shared themes.
User Portal Review
I had a current customer do a walkthrough of the customer-portal. This helped to identify the differences between the information the energy company told me was available to customers online, VS what the customer's actual experience and what the users perceptions were about the same service.
There were some stark differences here.
- The online payment system often did not work
- The reporting system for energy usage was flawed
- It appeared as though customers were being charged on the weekends, even when they had signed up for a plan with free weekends
- The customer support was not clear, easy, or helpful
DEFINE
Prioritizing changes
Based on all the data collected, I prioritized what would have the biggest impact on users, vs how much effort/time/money was required to repair it.
research Findings
Operations: From the customers' claim of not receiving the specific services they had signed up for, to also having never received notifications of payment being due- its clear there is a big disconnect with internal processes and operations. A lot of this was due to the fact that there was no CRM.
Customer-Facing Roles: Upon listening to sales calls, and speaking with former customers, it was clear that expectations were not adequately managed for customers.
Technical problems: Here I'll ask for every bit of internal information The Energy Company has on its customers. I'll explore the user experience by calling salespeople to learn how they pitch, review the language used on their website, and more.
Create / Present
Thematic Insights
The documents below are a portion of what was presented to the key stakeholders as overall-understanding and findings for the reasons for customers churn.
Journey Maps
Business Unit Insights
This is an example of one summation I had for the companies top business-strategists
