account switcher

How might we ensure that the SMBs (AO and FA) with multiple accounts (personal & business) and over 10 services are satisfied with their experience when managing their services in My Telstra.

My Contribution 90%

Research Objective

How might we ensure that the SMBs (AO and FA) with multiple accounts and over 10 services are satisfied with their experience when managing their services in My Telstra.

Research Questions

How do we handle multiple accounts views?

Authorities and Employee Access

Data Pools, usage and key tasks

Methodology

Participants were presented with 3 prototypes, each containing a different approach for managing multiple accounts and services.

The prototypes acted as a stimulus for exploring how the customers manage or, in an ideal world, would like to managing their Telstra accounts and services digitally.

Survey

The survey provided information about current digital experience, channel preference and current satisfaction as well as providing a mechanism to recruit for our qualitative research (n=9).*

* Survey list = 260 Account Owners and Full Authority SMBs with +10 services

Who we spoke to

4 Account Owners and 8 Full Authority customers from a wide range of industries including IT managed service providers, physiotherapists, cleaning and pest companies, a circus, service station franchise holder and charity.

Current Experience

Dealing with account / service complexity

1. Some businesses have many more accounts than they want due to set up errors or adding / changing their plans and services over time and some had the wrong account type (e.g. residential instead of business or visa versa which caused access issues)

2. Getting help to get their accounts set up in the way they want is arduous and sometimes too difficult for our customers to resolve. The impact of this is a huge amount of time and effort for the customer and Telstra agents to change.

3. This issue can be exacerbated when people with the knowledge of the Telstra set up leave the SMB and a new person with Authority tries to understand the set up and make changes.

Recommendation

Customers would benefit from a service (digital or assisted) to consolidate their accounts and set them up to suit their needs better.

Common Tasks – Summary

I asked participants to tell us what management activities they completed with Telstra and how.

Common Tasks – Data Usage Insights

The need to keep track

Customers often sighted less of a need to check usage in recent months/years due to having ample data in their data pools

Data Pools

None of our participants expressed issues with having limits on the number of services it is possible to have in one data pool.

Checking for anomalies

Customers are checking for anomalies in data usage. They want to see past months to have a comparison point which could provide an opportunity to optimize.

Common Tasks - Desktop vs Mobile

Desktop - Bills

SMBs are likely to use a desktop where there is a large amount of content to view for example lengthy bills. A preference for mobile was expressed for identifying issues and anomalies.

SMBs need to have a downloaded version of the bill which they may file or upload into an accounting system for tax purposes.

SMBs sighted a preference for getting bills emailed to them for easy download and save rather than having to login to access the bills via the desktop.

Desktop - Chat

Contacting Telstra to resolve issues was sighted as a primary task for large proportion of our participants. Most sighted issues with getting a resolution over the phone so preferring chat to save waiting on a call.

Authorities and Employee Access

Where do people look for adding a new contact to their account?

The majority of our participants went directly to ‘Settings’ to answer this question. Only 3 went directly to ‘Security Settings’, 9 clicked on Account settings first. A couple of people also went to Services before heading to Settings.

Employee Access

Access to the Telstra app wasn't expressed as very important for the majority of our survey and interview participants. The reason for having access was predominantly so they can keep track of their usage, although most of our participants either did that by checking on data usage for the employee or not tracking this due to having ample data available in the pool.

Viewing all, one or some of your accounts?

If viewing only one account, what should be the default?

We asked what would you expect to the be the default (when looking at the switch prototype)?

Customers should be able to choose the default account (where switch is utilised) or it should default to the last account you accessed.

For those who use personal and business equally, it would be important to help them make a choice upon entering the app and create a highly visible visual identifier.

Payments

Where do people look for updating payment methods?

The majority of our participants (8) went to Payments - Option 2 to look for where to add a new payment method.

The rest of the participants (4) went to Settings - Option 1. Two of which went to Account settings and two straight to ‘My wallet’

Will SMBs want to pay using the same or different payment methods across accounts?

For those who had personal and business accounts, we asked
‘Do you pay for your personal and business services using the same or different payment method?’

From our survey and interviews, this was a relevant scenario for 14 participants.

Of that number, 9 used different payment methods and 5 either used the same or could see value in updating multiple accounts with the same details.

Bulk Actions

What repetitive tasks could we improve?

We focused on updating payment details in this research as an example of a potential bulk action but what else is annoying to do multiple times when you have multiple accounts and / or services?

Concept 1 – Organise Features

Can you think of an example of why you’d use search?

Some interest expressed in search, but it would probably only be used with those with over 20 services. Not as desirable as being able to identify relevant services at a glance (e.g. by sorting)

Sort

Can you think of an example of why you’d use these sort options or others?

SMBs with many services are interested in finding out where there is a service which is over or under-ultilised. Good support for sort by, which our participants could see it helping identify those issues and opportunities, saving them time compared to their current process of scanning through bills.

Sort, Search or Scroll?

Without prompting, the participants tended to bring up scrolling vs search or sort…

There is a preference for a simple view where the list of services is not too many clicks away and it’s therefore easy to just scroll down and see the mobile number or nickname you are interested in checking. (The list would be shorter where not all accounts are visible on the same screen).

Re-arranging accounts

It’s important to make accounts easily distinguishable and allow people to see their most important / frequented accounts most easily. Some interest in re-arranging accounts, this is even more desirable for those with many accounts.

Concepts 2 and 3 – Switch and Tab
(App Level Switch vs Page Level Tabs)

Tabs

People thought the advantage of the tabs was that they could clearly distinguish between the accounts, and it shortens and simplifies the content. It also have a familiarity which made it very easy to use.

Switch

The main advantage of the switch view was it’s delivery of clearly separated accounts. Negative feedback was received around the ease of switching between the accounts. It is also the most difficult to see your ‘whole business’ for those with multiple business accounts

High Level Feature Feedback

Participants were given a sorting activity to allocate the features we had discussed as ‘useful to me’ or ‘not useful to me’ and in an order of most to least useful.

Implemented Changes

According to the research conducted and with some tech limitation, we implemented Switch view , allowing users to differentiate between their profiles through visual icons.
There will be more changes implemented in future which will incorporate more of the feedback received from this research allowing for a better experience for users with multiple accounts.