Understanding Telstra’s partner experience

The challenge

Telstra's Partner program is a high priority for Telstra Enterprise as they look at new ways to serve their customers and accelerate the growth of their Enterprise business.

After building an MVP of Partner Central, and prior to national launch, I was engaged with a new team to discover the gaps in the feature set.

My Role

Leading core UX processes like wireframing, testing and prototyping, as well as stakeholder facilitation.

Following zero based design practices

We came together to identify pain points and feature gaps of our users. We completed the following core items:

• Formulating a valid hypothesis from an internal ZBD workshop.
• Conducting early and frequent user testing with initial and revised wireframes to unveil pain points and new learnings, led by me.
• Defined our MVP from these interactions.
• Focused on research and testing results to refine features that users really needed.
• Presented the work to our stakeholders using research results, prototypes and a shareable final pack for backlog prioritisation.

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Of the 10 features identified as high priority and tested throughout, we landed on three key versions we presented to the business sponsor.

Smart Quote to Order

Partially deployed (Quote).

The quote and address lookup feature consolidates a number of fragmented systems and spreadsheets, simplifying the way partners quote.

Order Status Tracker

Deployed.

The order status feature enables partners to track their customer orders in near real time, giving them more order data than they've ever had.

Whole of Customer View

Backlog.

A simple feature, ensuring partners can view the customer account data they need to get their job done faster.

What I learned

• There is a saturation point- During the research phase, there came a point where the same information was consistently being repeated. This meant we could scale down the research and interviews to focus more on the feature outcomes.
• Verbatim is king- I was able to change perspectives and key project outcomes through the use of clear user feedback.
• No one has all the answers- Even the best subject matter experts can discover something new. With the combination of research outcomes and verbatim comments, we were able to prove the best outcome for the users.
• Not everything has to be digital- Throughout this process I discovered many pain-points could be solved without developing new digital solutions. It's important to keep an open mind and not rely on digital development.

In the news...

Telstra expands its use of Salesforce (IT News, 15 August 2019)
“Salesforce is also now the single portal for Telstra Enterprise and our partners to manage our sales opportunities and has helped increase our sales pipeline by 27 percent over the past 12 months”.

Telstra completely changes how it sells enterprise services (IT News, 20 June 2018)
“We’ve shrunk our product release cycle from years to months, and our forecast is over the next three years this new stack will reduce calls from our customers into Telstra by 65 percent.”

Awards

Telstra was recently recognised by ARN Innovation Awards.

Telstra won the award for Telecommunications Vendor Value, which recognises high achieving technology organisations for the value they provide partners. We were recognised for our ability to provide partners with a similar digital tool our internal teams use with Telstra Partner Central, helping to make it easier for partners to work with us.