Unified Customer Messaging

Telekom

How can we guarantee coherent, targeted client messaging in the pursuit of greater customer satisfaction?

Challenge

Delivering personalized, helpful and consistent messaging throughout the customer journey

Omnichannel journeys are no longer buzzwords in board presentations but the everyday operational reality. During such a journey Telekom customers will receive numerous automated messages and notifications to guide them through the process.

The goal of the service provider is to deliver personalized, helpful and consistent messaging throughout the whole journey. However things got challenging when we took into account the plethora of specialised backend systems used, as well as the mixture of channels involved, which included email, SMS, push and in-app notifications. Isobar’s experience design team joined forces with Telekom’s internal product squad and design chapter to find a way to guarantee coherent, targeted messaging in the pursuit of greater customer satisfaction and increased operational efficiency.

Solution

A centralized communications system that handles all transactional messaging

Sometimes simple ideas open the door to huge leaps forward. For example most of us can recall how painful it was to collaborate on a document before cloud solutions - like Google Docs, offering a centralized approach - became widespread.
In our case the simple idea was: “What if we build a centralized communications system that handles all transactional messaging towards our customers that our backend systems can use as a standalone service?”

Besides the obvious advantages of saving on both development and maintenance resources by avoiding the duplication of notification capability in each individual system, there is an important customer experience (CX) benefit as well.
Such a system would provide an end-to-end view of customer journeys along with the exact messaging used at each touchpoint. This tool could enable a move away from siloed communication to a coherent cross-channel customer experience.

Isobar and Telekom experts worked together in an agile team to design and implement this central notification  service. The cross-functional team approach combined with Isobar’s involvement from the earliest conceptual phase, allowed for the delivery of user experience design and user interface artwork in a very short timeframe.

Despite the ambitious timing, quality control targets set by the agile team at the outset guaranteed that only outstanding user experience was acceptable even if it meant more design exploration – something often compromised when it comes to developing internal software tools at large corporations. Through the use of interactive prototypes we enabled the squad to rapidly iterate on design solutions, perform effective follow-up user-testing sessions and synchronise learnings amongst the team.

Results

Increased client satisfaction and unprecedented journey analytics

As part of a phased rollout, select journeys were transitioned to the new application and as of late 2020 the system already handles 1m+ transactional messages per month.

Customers now receive relevant, personalized, and consistent messaging throughout their full journey.

Using the new application Telekom CX professionals gained an unprecedented overview and level of control on customer messaging, and in a broader sense about user journeys. The browser-based drag and drop journey builder is easy to work with, while built-in templates ensure an efficient workflow.

As an additional benefit, the application’s analytics module helps to evaluate company performance at specific messaging touchpoints and consequently identify opportunities for improvement.

This bottom-up project that was initiated, planned and executed by an autonomous squad is a testament to the success of Telekom’s agile transformation.