Small Business Design Strategy
Comcast Business offers a dozen products to small business owners with millions of existing customers. The existing customer experience was fragmented across digital portals and multiple channels. I conducted foundational research to define the small-business segment better. By identifying crucial opportunities, my team delivered progressive recommendations that could transform the way millions of business owners think about their telecom needs.
Problem Definition
How might we improve the customer-product fit for Comcast small-business customer segment?
How might we design a digital experience that simplifies the telecom experience and creates new avenues for product integration?
Qualitative Research
Our team needed to conduct foundational qualitative research with real Comcast Business customers to ground all of our assumptions. I conducted 10 interviews, some on-site and some virtual, to see what their telecom needs were up close, meet the customer, and observe the variety of pain points and opportunities telecom service offers. My team built individual customer profiles in lieu of statistical personas of the customer base. This research sparked the need for on-going customer interactions like these.
Customer profiles, research overview
Quantitative Research
As NN/g says 6-10 good interviews can tell you about 80% of your users’ needs. The other 20% can be sussed out with quantitative analysis. In parallel to in-context and remote interviews, my team helped survey the Comcast Business’ customer advisory group, a subsample of the 3 million active customers, and found results and insights that supported our qualitative work. Small business customers had unique stresses while interacting with Comcast and making IT decisions. The product need was becoming more apparent.
Quantitative research supported our qualitative findings.
Synthesis
We found that the small business customer segment was defined internally by monthly IT spend but fewer than 5% of customers defined themselves as “small” based on that metric. We looked for characteristics that defined an average customer and designed ways to address their IT needs using Comcast’s resources. We talked with business leaders to synthesize our concepts with internal needs for viability and market position to create targeted digital experiences as part of a broader product strategy.
Insights, design problem, strategic model definition
UX Strategy
My team’s strategy landed successfully with leadership and we moved ahead with designs for a comprehensive portal that could integrate various products and begin the aspirational curve of our designs. We used storyboards, value sorts and usability tests to judge what features were most relevant for an MVP. Then we developed jobs-to-be-done, a research schedule, a voice & tone guide, visual patterns and began prototyping for a beta release.
Storyboards, requirements, prototypes
Beta testing of this product is expected to reach customers 2021.