Cricket Aktivate UX Discovery

Identify opportunities to ease friction and enable advocates to better serve their customers

Switching mid-stream from product transformation to experience transformation.

Overview

Cricket Wireless is a the leading prepaid wireless service provider, owned by AT&T. They offer nationwide 5G network, award winning service and a variety of partnerships 
with well known brands such as WWE and HBO Max.

2022 - 2021

Company Type
Pre-Paid Telcom

Platform
Point-of-Sale Web App

Design & Research Timeline
2 Weeks

Methodologies
User Interviews
Stakeholder Interviews
In-Store Observation
Document Intake

Role
Lead Experience Designer and Co-Researcher, Big Nerd Ranch and P202

Team
Brittany Herold, Lead Researcher - Projekt 202
Clint Miller, Experience Director - Big Nerd Ranch
Dustin Guice, Senior Project Manager - Big Nerd Ranch
Terrell Dudley, Associate Program Manager - Big Nerd Ranch

Setting the Stage

Cricket’s long-term success depends on the in-store experience and performance of their point-of-sale (POS) application. Cricket asked us
 to conduct a pre-discovery to analyze the in-store experience when advocates (reps) interact with the POS application. They wanted 
to validate what they were hearing from their advocates to ensure 
they were solving the right problems.

Cricket was very aware of the following challenges..

• Built without advocates and customer experience in mind
• Performance issues resulting in down time
• Hard to customize for the needs of the business


What they wanted was…

• Performant, secure, maintainable and well documented
• Customizable to meet ever-changing business needs
• Simple and easy to use. Reduce process and tech friction for better customer experience

To ultimately impact the business by…

• Reducing the down time that negatively impacts sales
• Increased sales figures from improved retail experience
• Decreased maintenance and configuration costs

Discovery

We learned that advocates had positive feedback and we observed very little friction when using the POS with customers.

However, we did identify areas for improvement that directly and indirectly related to the POS application. Keeping that in mind, we stayed true to Cricket’s core principles of “Simple, Smarter, Better”. While keeping consistency and simplicity at the forefront.

With high advocate turnover it’s critical to keep all offerings and interfaces simple — supporting even the most inexperienced advocates.

One other very important take-away was that advocates, call center and corporate employees didn’t differentiate between the front-end and back-end of the POS. Cricket’s back-end was using a 3rd party vendor and the front-end was created and managed in-house. Most of the issues corporate had identified were associated to the back-end technology.

What we learned very early on was that the POS wasn’t the problem. While we addressed some POS opportunities we set our sites on the overall experience customers had in-store. And discovered that there were many other areas of opportunities that we could shine light on, that did impact 
not only the customer experience but Cricket’s ROI.

4 Tasks
+ 2 Days of In-Store Observations
+ 7 Stakeholder Interviews
+ 1 POS Demo =

We Learned about touch-less checkout as a workaround when the platform went down.

Cricket Advocate

Assistant Manager
Atlanta, GA

Challenges

This was the first project where P202 (our sister company) and Big Nerd Ranch were paired up to work together. We struggled along the way with roles and responsibility, varied processes and many bruised ego’s.

I stayed neutral and became the lead that worked towards bringing the team together. I coached both P202 and
 Big Nerd Ranch employees on how to best work together, I conducted retro’s to allow team members to discuss 
these challenges in more detail — focusing on solutions vs finger pointing.

And, I successfully sold senior managers at Big Nerd Ranch on what we were actually findings (experience transformation) vs the initial ask (product transformation). This is a new way of thinking and they needed the reassurance and additional touch points throughout.

When there was tension on the team due to how P202 and BNR approached projects differently, Bridget was able to bridge that gap with open communication, as well as proactively setting up meetings to gain alignment together. Without her, the project would have been significantly more difficult to accomplish.

Brittany Herold

Lead Researcher
Stellar Elements formerly Projekt 202

Overwhelmingly, advocates provided positive feedback on Aktivate, and we observed little friction when using the POS with customers.


However, throughout our conversations with advocates and Cricket stakeholders, we found multiple areas for optimization, both directly and indirectly related to the POS system.

ID’d 8 Areas
of Focus

Alignment workshops were conducted to coordinate a recommendation with a strong point of view.

Constrained Processes
Explore ways to ease friction with the ACP and Port In processes.

Goal: Take strain off of advocates and customers, and 
reduce transaction time.

Call Center
Focus on enabling advocates to troubleshoot customer issues without needing the call center.

Goal: Improve customer satisfaction rates, while reducing call center volume.

Training and Communication
Ensure advocates are being consistently trained and in their ideal learning style.

Goal: Reduce knowledge gaps, errors in-store, and provide better customer interactions.

POS Scalability
Explore areas of efficiency while introducing POS UX best practices.

Goal: Long-term design scalability. Ensuring simplicity stays at the forefront as functionality increases.

Prioritized Focus Areas

Digging deeper into those 4 primary focus areas, will allow us to narrow in on actionable opportunities.

Helping Cricket achieve noticeable improvements, that have an immediate benefit to the advocate, and ultimately the customers.

Outcomes

  • All Focus Areas
    To identify opportunities that enable advocates to better serve customers.

    Future Business Impact:
    • Improve Customer Experience
    • Increase Employee Satisfaction

  • Constrained Processes
    Find areas of opportunities to ease friction and improve customer interactions.

    Future Business Impact:
    • Improve Customer Experience
    • Reduce Transaction Times
    • Increase New User Sign-Ups

  • POS Scalability
    Provide recommendations for future scalability of Aktivate, as new features and functionality are added over time.

    Future Business Impact:
    • Reduce UX Inefficiencies
    • Increase Employee Satisfaction

  • Call Center
    Look for ways to empower advocates, while minimizing call center volume 
to improve customer experience.

    Future Business Impact:
    • Decrease Transaction Time
    • Increase Employee Satisfaction
    • Minimize Call Center Volume

  • All Focus Areas
    Ensure all suggested opportunities and recommendations 
are feasible.

    Future Business Impact:
    • Reduced Down Times
    • Increase Employee Satisfaction

  • Training and Communication
    Align training and communication in a way advocates like to be trained, using their ideal learning style to confidently serve customers.

    Future Business Impact:
    • Improve Training Quality
    • Increase Employee Satisfaction
    • Improve Customer Experience

Suggested activities and timeline for Phase 2 research.

...I would highly recommend Bridget for any Sr. Leadership role as she’s extremely talented, thoughtful, a true Professional and knows how to deliver value added results.

We were lucky to have her on our project and I sincerely hope our paths cross again as she was an absolute delight to work with.

Rick Allen
Assistant VP of Technology
Cricket Wireless

Happy Clients

Outcome

The next phases were placed on hold due to reduction in spend for 2023. This projected savings outcome was roughly 3.3 million dollars just with the POS platform. Additional savings and overall ROI for the larger opportunities were not scoped.

Internally we learned how to work together and pivot to a broader way of thinking. This project has become one of the most successful discoveries Big Nerd Ranch
 has ever conducted, with one of the highest possible returns. And, because of that I have become an key player in enabling sales through project scoping, building case studies and crafting pitch decks to use during the sales process.

What this project did do was strengthen the relationships between P202 (our sister company) and Cricket. In fact, it’s resulted in several smaller Cricket projects.

This project is slotted to be picked back up in 2024.