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Brief
With the UK broadband market reaching saturation, BT needed to evolve its online brand communication to concentrate more on existing customers and ensure that the buying experience was consistent across the sales channel.
A comprehensive re-design of the entire pre-sales experience was required. BT appointed LBi as its digital agency of record with a brief to deliver an ongoing development programme across the whole BT site, backed up by thorough user research and knowledge of BT’s challenges as a business.
Strategy
In order to deliver the project to BT in very tight deadlines, elements of Agile programme management methodology were used to ensure a consistent agency team, with breadth of knowledge across the whole BT business as well as the ability to design, develop and release new work very rapidly. We set out a process of iterative design, in which teams of tightly integrated user researchers, experience architects, designers and developers work alongside each other. Each iteration began with user testing and the results of this piece of work informed all subsequent design decisions. A BT product owner working within the agency also ensured access to key BT stakeholders and immediate, seamless communication between the BT and LBi teams, preventing bottlenecks in the development process.
Execution
LBi kicked the project off with an intensive immersion phase to define the new online experience. This included market trends research, interviews, and visits with key project stakeholders across BT and 30 customer interviews across BT and non-BT customers.
From this initial research phase, LBi developed an approach for how best to work with BT to fulfil the brief and define the strategy for the BT.com sales channel. During user testing the initial finding was that customers were struggling to understand and identify with the BT Vision proposition, deterring them from purchasing any of the other services or packages online. This led to our decision to start with the BT Vision site. Using a blended team, including a planner and a copywriter, LBi delivered the new proposition with an emphasis on the clarity and benefits of BT Vision. The entire section was re-written to bring the difficult concept of IPTV to life for consumers, bringing a world of entertainment closer to them.
Building on BT Vision, the whole site was then overhauled to make it more customer friendly and to help people identify with BT’s products in the context of their own lives. The need for a refreshed design led to the BT Family characters being used online alongside BT’s vivid secondary colour palette to make the site more appealing and eye catching. To ensure that the design continues evolving in a consistent style, LBi also created an online design style guide ensuring consistency with and from the work of other agencies.
The BT site was launched in phases, with BT Vision www.bt.com/tv going live in October 2008 and the final overview page www.bt.com/consumerproducts completing the re-launch in January 2009. Since launch, sales conversion for BT Vision has doubled and this success has led to a long term programme to bring more editorial Vision content online with the incorporation of the On Vision site www.btvision.bt.com into BT.com.
Results
An ongoing programme of optimisation across the site continues to deliver incremental improvements across all lines of business. Following Vision's success, Packages, www.bt.com/packages, was launched to drive combined sales of Phones, Broadband and Vision products, with a sales conversion increase of 20%. www.bt.com/broadband was also re-launched, and immediately saw sales conversion increase of 25%. In the final section to go live, the individual Phones area saw a further 40% conversion uplift.
By embracing some elements of Agile process, without letting go of any of the rigour required by BT, LBi were able to produce and release new designs and pages on an almost monthly basis, and to analyse results rapidly post-launch in order to optimise and improve the site and continue to contribute to BT’s online sales growth.
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