Help Site Redesign
UX Strategy - BT
Background
When I first joined BT in 2015, the customer assistance 'Help' site was in a bad state. Cluttered design made information hard to find, and the site was littered with inconsistent UX patterns and journeys.
As my UX Team grew, it was a constant ambition of mine to improve this area of the customer experience. In late 2017, we were finally able to secure funding and agreement to undertake a major re-design of the BT online Help estate.
Stakeholder workshops
Experience maps, wireframes and detailed designs
Execution
More than simply testing and re-designing the experience, our UX Team undertook a detailed Discovery period, establishing principles to be used throughout this project, and in future design and maintenance.
Research activities included:
- 8 week detailed discovery phase
- Use of card based classification
- 5 rounds of user testing and prototypes review
- Heuristic and analytical evaluations
- Agents, stakeholder and customer feedback
Using this wealth of research, the team then implemented extensive changes during the design phase.
The information hierarchy was vastly improved, replacing consistently irrelevant and outdated content, with decision trees based on customers’ needs. A thorough review of the content, led to a reduction from 2000 Help articles to 800 articles. The non-responsive search bar was replaced with a new intelligent virtual assistant based on natural language.
On the home-page alone, the number of calls-to-action was reduced from over 30 to only 10 distinct choices. Throughout the Help site, a clear and simple customer experience was delivered.
The previous Help homepage
The new Help homepage
Results
This project delivered great results as soon as the new homepage and new journeys went live. Online customer journey flows showed great improvement, with exit rates decreasing by 30%.
There was a large reduction in non-digital customer contacts, showing a reduction of 156,000 customer calls, and 78,000 customer chats in the first year alone.. These improvements in online self-service led to overall savings of £1.2 million per year.
This huge, successful project, was only the first MVP phase of the larger re-design. BT product team deliver constant on-going improvements, using the templates and principles established by this project.