Increasing customer loyalty with the My Vodafone app

Abstract

A design intervention to stimulate loyalty is aimed at the MyVodafone App, a digital self-service tool primarily aimed at cost control through credit- and billing information. Although repeat usage of the app is suboptimal, the app fits with the vision of the brand to empower people and make them in control of their service. As a centerpiece to the CARE customer care program, the app is becoming a strategic asset for customer interaction and is becoming increasingly personal, with a vision to create a fully personalized experience. Vodafone has formulated the ambition to Reward Loyalty, although the initiatives are highly transactional and not personal, as is the vision of Digital, this transactional nature is found throughout the Dutch telecom market. The design challenge formulated is to recognize, cultivate and harvest loyalty in a personal yet scalable way. Loyalty is found to be dependent on customer-, environmental- and dyadicrelationship characterics along with perceptions of the firm. It is dynamic and built up over time throughout critical moments in the lifecyle, which implies different degrees of loyalty. True loyalty, and it’s economic benefits, is only unlocked if a fair relationship is built up for which multiple tactics exist. The economic benefits of true loyalty do not come automatically, but rather must be harvested actively. The type of relationship Vodafone customers have today is characterized by a lack of recognition, not thinking along, a steep change in interaction density before retention and a lack of benevolence trust. What customers desire is Vodafone to think in their best interest based on the insights they have, and empathisize with the customer by sharing knowledge. The design direction boiled down from these key insights is formulated as pro-actively guiding customers in an ongoing, recognized interaction throughout the cycle,to build an honest relation and generate true loyalty. Requirements and wishes were formulated that translate this vision into design specifications, surrounding the themes of Performance, Recognition, Communication, Equity and Operational constaints. Business stakeholders’ wishes regarding the renewal journey were integrated too. Three personas are drafted with different levels of behavioral and attitudinal loyalty by variation of antecedents of loyalty in the profiles. Mechanisms on how to stimulate benevolence trust are presented and integrated into the creative process. The outcomes of the creative process are ideas, that are presented along the themes of ‘insights data & offers’, ‘omni-channel & real-life integration’, ‘feedback’, ‘content, updates & expertise’ and ‘personal assistant’. The most promising ideas were selected and integrated into two concepts, MyVodafone Buddy and Vodafone Rode Draad. Buddy is a digital assistant that thinks along, and helps customers to consciously get the most out of their phone. Rode draad is an interactive timeline giving insight and control in the past, the present and the future at Vodafone. Three rounds of iteration were made, in the first round the Rode Draad was selected based on its’ desirability, feasibility and viability. In the second round content is generated to elaborate the concept, and in the third round the elaborated concept was evaluated by customers. The results of the third round are very positive, a large majority sees the added value of the concept, thinks it improves their relation with Vodafone in terms of transparency, honesty and trust, and indicates that the concept has a positive contribution to their loyalty to Vodafone. De Rode Draad timeline is a highly flexible paradigm, and is detailled to include service and commercial messages that improve the perceived recognition and honesty. (For example; interaction loggings, surveys,contact moments by Vodafone, guidance at key moments, special throwbacks on anniversaries, expiration dates, etc.). From the interactions with customers, it introduces surveys that are tracked personally to enable NPS tracking/follow-up & advanced loyalty profiling. Aesthetics and interactions are defined to build on the Notification Center in Starship, to accomodate both user cognition and technical feasbility, and additional suggestions for an omni-channel interface are made. A customer journey & service blueprint put the Rode Draad in perspective, and show that it has the potential to not only improve personalisation through a relational approach, but is also an asset in service delivery. The concept is designed and approved to be compliant with the relevant Dutch laws (Cookie, privacy, spam). The input of the service blueprint is transformed into a feasibility study and roadmap that maximize organisational commitment and minimize risk, by building a scalable capability on top of the existing notification center, letting evidence accumulate and then gradually expanding the concept. A ‘gate-keeper’ is recommended to guide this process, with a consolidated team of multi-disciplinary designers. Lastly a business case is presented that displays a 4,6 million upside potential (NPV) in light of a 1,3 million investment, based on modest assumptions driven by company data and the websurvey evaluating the Rode Draad.