Customer Obsession
| Objective
Improve the product to become the pay TV service provider with the highest customer satisfaction.
| Team Leads
| Insights
Customer satisfaction with available pay TV services was lower than most consumer products and services.
FiOS TV was the 5th entrant in most markets, which required it to be 10x better than the incumbents to drive switching behaviors.
The platform had technology advantages over the competition that could enable differentiated value propositions.
In-person interviews of customers and prospects could only reach dozens of people from a subset of geographies each month.
Customers and prospective customers were independently engaging in online dialogues about what they liked and didn’t like about FiOS TV.
Thousands of customers were willing to continuously allocate time to interact with the team during product discovery, delivery, and post-launch activities.
| Hypothesis
Increasing the scale and frequency of customer feedback will accelerate the discovery and delivery of product improvements that will increase customer satisfaction, driving acquisition and retention for FiOS TV.
| Methods and Processes
While the UX research team continued customer interviews and usability testing, product, design, and engineering teamed up to implement tools to facilitate efficient interactions with thousands of customers across the United States.
To recruit participants the team employed always-on content marketing tactics through Twitter, Facebook, and email channels, driving people to create an account on Verizon Test Track.
Test Track provided FiOS TV product teams and customers:
◦ Staff and customer discussion forums
◦ Live events (e.g., Q&A, demos)
◦ New features and enhancements submissions, upvoting, and commenting from customers
◦ Public facing roadmap
◦ Prototype, alpha, and beta testing collaboration with customers
This included the ability for customers to directly interact with FiOS TV product leadership 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year.
Official Tweeter, but not a Pro Tweeter – my day job is to make FiOS TV the coolest. Seeking folks that want to provide suggestions or just geek out.
| Experimentation
A completely re-imagined experience was made available to 5% of the Samsung connected TV’s and XBOX consumer base starting in January 2019.
The control for testing the experience’s performance was the existing in-market user experience that offered the same content but was heavily curated by editorial staff into a carousel and grid design pattern.
After confirming that the new experience increased engagement metrics, it was made available to 20% of the base to generate sufficient traffic for A/B testing. The team employed ICE (Impact + Confidence + Ease) to prioritize the implementation of solutions that would further increase total minutes. Each test that increased engagement provided the team confidence to increase the audience being served the variant to reduce the time it took to get statistically valid results.
The variants tested through April 2019 included:
◦ The number and type of options as well as the icons in the global navigation.
◦ The number and duration of transitional steps into autoplay and continuous playback.
◦ Locked content presented to unauthenticated visitors.
◦ Location of login prompt in visitor’s journey and its messaging.
◦ Manually curated videos versus machine only.
| Retrospective
◦ Prioritizing the presentation of unlocked on demand videos and locked live channel to unauthenticated visitors generated the highest minutes viewed.
◦ The login prompt increased the authentication rate best as the first step in the journey.
◦ A three-step transition that took 7 seconds from open app to auto playing a video had the lowest abandonment rate.
◦ A global navigation menu with 4 options converted the most visitors to viewers.
◦ Demoing to fans at IDCon was rewarding for the team. Getting their qualitative feedback uncovered the polish necessary to achieve the engagement goal.
| Key Results
More Logins
◦ 19% more visitors authenticated
Higher Streaming Starts
◦ 26% more visitors converted to viewers
Longer Sessions
◦ 31% more minutes watched per viewer
Happier Customers
◦ “I don’t think I’ll ever watch live TV again.”
◦ “The new app has helped me discover new content. Starting with one show I was interested in, snowballing into another and another.”
◦ “Seeing the changes to the app has me watching ID even more. I’m an ID fan for life now.”