65% of the Spectrum customers who attempted to install their new equipment were unsuccessful and were forced to call a support agent or schedule a pro-installation to complete activation. These customers required at best a phone call (average cost of $9) or at worst a technician visit (average cost of $80).

Customers that want to install their equipment themselves, have to navigate to activate.spectrum.net to activate all of their equipment manually. This means customers setting up their internet had to have a laptop device connected to the internet to install themselves.

Customer Satisfaction and Success Rates were trending down and overhead costs were trending up.

User Account Requirement
The company had a mandatory requirement that customers would need to create a user account. This meant that all customers would have to create a new user ID and password, thus adding a layer of complexity to the idea of plug-and-play. No Research Budget
Unfortunately, the client initially did not want to allocate any of their budget for user research. No Single Point of Contact
With no single point of contact, feedback and direction came from several different sources and departments, ranging from in-house developers to executives. Because of this, priorities were largely unclear.

What messaging is most effective for them to connect, turn on and plug in their equipment?

Do customers expect to see all their equipment on-screen even if it doesn’t activate?

What can we learn from the app and the portal to improve each experience? What type of assets (printed materials, written online content, videos, diagrams, animated diagrams) do customers find most helpful?

Does putting a video into the app flow improve the customer experience?

Keeping the ultimate goal of simplicity in mind, we streamlined the login section as much as possible, redirecting users to the equipment activation screen immediately after login.My team conducted in-house tests to show Charter the intrinsic value of user research. This ultimately led to the allocation of an adequate testing budget.I created a scrum board, implementing agile processes, weekly grooming, and review meetings during which all stakeholders could check in, connect, and comment in a collaborative environment.

Provide guided, sequential, in-the-moment instructions. Put all guidance and info within the same experience. Show and identify all equipment.

There were countless challenges to our progress from the outset: teams in silos, research data needing to be pushed, teams in different time zones, and the education of stakeholders on the importance of user data

Despite the challenges we faced, the user data and project analytics we collected during testing allowed us to suggest solutions that could be measured and tracked and (most importantly) implemented into the next version of our app. This result provided clear value to the business, who moved forward with the online application.

I was able to lead my team to a result that was as successful given the challenging circumstances. Based on our team’s ability to pivot, prioritize, strategize, and maintain focus on the ultimate goal, my team developed a solid framework guiding our future efforts today.

We saw an increase in self-install success rate of 5%.

We saw a decrease the number of customers who call in during self-install of 33%.

There was an increase the positive reviews regarding equipment activation.

We broke down some of the barriers to incorporating user feedback that were used in future versions and updates.