Consumer Case Study
Enabling Better Internet:
Lessons from a Large-Scale Network Upgrade
Case Study: Transforming Customer Experience in Network Migration with Targeted Insights
80+
Interview Hours
30+
Stakeholders
10+
Journey Maps
20%
Less Customer Churn
Project Details
Clients
Major Telcos (Retail and Wholesale)
Duration
21 months
Skillset
Service Design Design Research UX CX Metrics Framework Strategy
Tools & Stakeholders
Tools
Miro SharePoint Survey Tool Confluence JIRA Medallia Excel PowerPoint MS Teams Google Analytics
Key Stakeholders
-
Consumer Customers
-
Product Owner and Product Specialists
-
Scrum Master
-
Data Scientists and Data Engineers
-
Field Technicians
-
Customer Support
-
Call-Center
-
Network Engineering
-
Infrastructure Engineering
-
Wholesale Telco that the services were migrated to
Case study details
I led the customer experience strategy for a telco's network migration to another telco's network, impacting 50,000 customers. This migration, similar to the complex NBN broadband rollout (2012-2019), aimed to upgrade customers' internet broadband services.
In telecommunications, the "back-of-house" concept is especially relevant. A complex orchestration of teams, infrastructure, systems, and processes works behind the scenes to deliver seamless internet access. This migration risked service disruptions, affecting critical activities like remote work and medical devices.
The challenges were twofold. First, I needed to define what a "good" migration experience looked like for customers across all touchpoints, while minimizing churn. Customers had to take an active role in the migration—choosing new plans, coordinating the upgrade timing, and navigating multiple steps. With internet often viewed as a utility like electricity, there was a risk of customers overlooking key steps in the process.
Second, I needed to identify the key metrics and assess the available data across various teams and systems, navigating complex data, systems, and multiple stakeholders. This was crucial to ensure our team had a comprehensive understanding of the customer experience at every touchpoint as the migration was rolled out in waves across diverse geographic regions.
This image was generated using AI. If you're interested in more details of what a telco network is, you can search for "nbn network explained" or "Opticomm network explained" to find accurate depictions of networks. I don’t have the copyrights to those images, so I experimented with generative AI to create this one. :-)
"The migration required navigating complex data, systems, and multiple stakeholders while maintaining service quality across diverse geographic regions rolled out in waves."
As I led customer experience focus of the network migration, I followed Service Design and Human-Centered practices to ensure that the customer experience remained at the core. The migration was rolled out in waves per location, and my approach focused on embedding customer needs into data-driven decision-making processes. Here is an overview of the journey I took my team and stakeholders through:
Here’s how the journey unfolded:
1. Initial Planning and Briefing:
I started the project by developing a design brief with my product team, aligning with overall objectives and breaking down CX-related work into Agile epics and user stories. This helped keep my efforts transparent and in sync with the team as we worked through the planning process.
The brief acted as a living roadmap, outlining key activities, stakeholders, objectives, and risks. Each quarter, I updated it with the team to reflect the major epics and goals (QKRs) for that period. If objectives stayed consistent, I focused on executing tasks while keeping everything transparent and aligned with the team.
2. Literature and Desktop Research
Building on the design brief, I conducted thorough literature and desktop research, reviewing relevant customer insights from the NBN transition and analyzing existing customer personas from Telstra’s research repository. This foundational research allowed us to gain a deeper understanding of diverse cohort of customers and potential pain points, which would inform our journey mapping going forward.
3. Mapping Customer Journeys and Blueprints
Drawing from my research, I facilitated workshops with my project team and subject matter experts to refine and expand the customer journeys and high-level blueprint. It became clear that the initial journeys didn’t account for all necessary personas—particularly those with disabilities and individuals relying on medical devices connected to broadband services.
In these workshops, we considered the practical limitations of the migration, which needed to occur in waves, with customers selecting new plans and internet providers. Together, we designed an ideal experience, taking into account these constraints, and aimed to guide customers through the migration with minimal friction.
Our process mapping specialist then translated the journey maps into detailed business processes, outlining the complex activities behind the scenes. For instance, something simple for customers, like deciding to keep their phone number during a telco switch, involves multiple steps—especially when dealing with legacy systems. I influenced these background processes to ensure those were aligned with the customer’s desired experience as most back-of house activities essentially result in more or less impacts on the customer's experience. My role was to influence the efforts of all teams involved to deliver a consistent and smooth customer experience.
This is a simplified example of the actual blueprint. In reality, it encompassed many more steps, processes, teams, and systems. The goal here is to demonstrate not only the numerous customer touchpoints that required thoughtful design but also the complex "back of house" operations that supported them. As shown by the grey arrows, only a few teams had direct contact with customers, yet every team contributed to shaping the overall customer experience. It was important to visualise this in journey maps and blueprints so they could understand the impact they had.
4. Designing a CX Metrics Framework
One of the biggest challenges in this project was navigating the large, datasets needed to track the migration journey. We required precise information to understand each customer's progress, but at first, diving into these datasets felt like searching for a needle in a haystack. Without clear metadata or intuitive column names, it was a process of trial and error—visualizing data in Power BI or Excel just to make sense of it. I remember thinking how much easier it would be if there were usability standards for data labeling!
Through this experience, I gained a deep appreciation for the work data scientists, and engineers do. The Product Owner in my team gave me the opportunity to dive into the world of data-aligned metrics—something unfamiliar but surprisingly enjoyable. It was an eye-opening experience that broadened my skill set.
I believe it’s crucial to measure or understand what the experience is like, not only because it allows for data-driven decisions rather than relying on assumptions, but also because it enables you to communicate effectively with senior leaders who may not have a design background. Design can sometimes be perceived as subjective or "fluffy," so having evidence for design decisions helps shift the conversation to a more fact-based approach. This gives credibility to the design work and aligns it with business priorities in a way that resonates with decision-makers.
To tackle the initial data challenges, I developed a comprehensive CX metrics framework that spanned the entire migration journey. One key lesson I learned was to start with the end in mind: clearly defining customer and business objectives, goals, and desired outcomes. With that clarity, I mapped key customer goals to each touchpoint in collaboration with my product team and stakeholders, and from there, we derived the metrics.
If you’re unclear about which outcomes matter, it becomes nearly impossible to design metrics that align with the project’s success. This became especially obvious after those long hours spent sifting through CSV files and reading up on QKR frameworks and other best practices.
Initially, we included a wide range of metrics, but I remember the Product Owner asking me to scale it back—which made sense. As the availability of data was uncertain, the framework went through several iterations. Once the data went live, the team integrated the refined metrics into a Power BI dashboard, streamlining reporting and allowing for quick responses to issues and opportunities—a necessity when dealing with time-critical activities that risk interruptions in customers' broadband experience.
The CX metrics framework was something I shared with my CX colleagues in Service Design and UX, informing similar work in their projects.
The definition of metrics derived from customer goals underwent several iterations. Initially, we developed these metrics with our core project team, but this process later expanded to include all stakeholders and teams that impacted the customers' network migration experience. The image above is a simplification featuring hypothetical metrics. In reality, the first draft consisted of a comprehensive matrix in Excel, aligning metrics with customer goals and activities. As we gained more insights and a better understanding of the available data for reporting, this metrics framework was streamlined to focus on fewer, more meaningful metrics.
5. Designing and Validating Customer Touchpoints
I played a critical role in supporting the design of key customer touchpoints, including digital web pages, emails, app notifications and tech appointment bookings through providing target insights, review artifacts, assess heuristics on the web pages, informing about page and app analytics, and so on. This may be seen as potentially a too detailed job if you are working on strategic level as a Service Designer although I do enjoy zooming in on details and zooming out to see the bigger picture, and happy to help out where I can. It's also depending on who is working in the team, I try to compliment the team with my skillset the best way I can. In this case I therefore helped out with UX analysis and testing. It's ultimately about making something useful and meaningful together for the customer and for the company.
In addition, I supported the detailed journey mapping of all those artefacts and informing about key insights from google analytics, marketing tracking reports (two of our many data sources feeding into the journey metrics framework i mentioned above) and from the customer interview research working closely with different stakeholders from marketing, UX and UI teams.
These touchpoints were tested with customers both before and after the pilot migration to ensure clarity and ease of use. We iterated on the designs based on feedback to improve communication and reduce friction throughout the customer journey, ensuring that each touchpoint was clear and proactive before, during, and after the migration.
This image illustrates key customer touch points that we needed to design for such as web pages, emails, SMS messages and instructions, including the critical timing around each touch point. In service design, time is a vital design element. For this project, we not only validated what and when different types of communications should be sent out or made available on websites, apps, etc., but also carefully considered the duration of the network migration and any potential internet outages. These time factors were documented in the metrics framework and closely monitored throughout the project to ensure a seamless experience for customers.
6. Leading Customer Research and Applying Insights
Taking full ownership of the customer research phase was both a challenging and rewarding experience. I collaborated closely with marketing and other teams to ensure we had the right participants, managed the logistics, and prepared all the research materials, including carefully designed interview guides and service walkthroughs (if you like to see more examples of research artifacts, refer to Industry IQ project case study). My goal during the interviews was to create a relaxed, conversational atmosphere where participants felt comfortable sharing their honest thoughts. I made it a point to invite colleagues from my team to observe the interviews firsthand. I’ve always believed that there’s no substitute for hearing feedback directly from a customer—it's far more impactful than simply reading a long report.
To take it a step further, we made video clips from the interviews available to team members and key stakeholders. This way, they could not only read the feedback but also see the participants’ expressions and hear their tone, giving everyone a deeper understanding of where the real opportunities for improvement lay. I also made sure that no confidential information was shared, always adhering strictly to Telstra’s data protection policies.
After each round of research, out of four in total, I synthesized the data and led workshops to turn the insights into actionable outcomes. These sessions were key in updating our customer journey maps and refining our service blueprints. The customer feedback with the help from the metrics framework, wasn’t just about what customers said, it helped us align internal processes, ensuring that every step of the migration journey worked seamlessly behind the scenes.
The customer insights also played a pivotal role in helping our process mapping specialist understand the exact sequences of activities and systems required to ensure a smooth migration. This alignment between what we learned from our customers and how we structured the back-end processes was critical in delivering an optimal experience.
Above are storyboards I used to validate the customer experience during interviews. These are examples to illustrate what the original storyboards looked like. The initial hand-drawn storyboards were created by a fellow Service Design colleague, and later I continued the work. I must admit, the hand-drawn versions were much better, but since I no longer have access to them, I generated these examples using ChatGPT and CoPilot for the purpose of this case study.
My efforts
The data from this project, as shown in the accompanying image below, indicate the effort I brought to delivering meaningful results for the team.
While confidentiality limits the details I can share, I would be happy to discuss the process and outcomes in more depth if needed.
KEY OUTCOMES OF THE NETWORK MIGRATION PROJECT
My contributions led to key outcomes, including:
Customer Insights
Derived valuable insights from 80+ hours of user interviews, 100 agent survey responses, and two rounds of customer and agent research. This approach identified key improvement areas, enhancing the migration process.
Enhanced outcomes
Combined quantitative data with qualitative feedback, yielding holistic insights that drove business performance improvements and increased customer satisfaction.
Business Impact
Working with 30+ stakeholders and SMEs, I built a metrics framework from the ground up — shaped by 10 personas, 10 journey maps, and two rounds of service design walkthroughs with customers, including behavior analytics. That foundation made it possible to identify the moments that most drove customer decisions and ultimately reduced expected churn by 20%.
Personal Growth and Development
Gained a deeper understanding of starting with customer goals and business objectives to shape metrics, ensuring focused and actionable analysis without overwhelming raw data.
Disclaimer: Due to confidentiality, specific details or insights about the service or product cannot be disclosed. While my case studies focus on my contributions, I acknowledge that these achievements would not have been possible without the collaboration of my dedicated team and stakeholders. I am honored and humbled to have worked alongside such fantastic people on these projects.