EE’s focus is to become a digital-first culture and, eventually, a users-first culture. The company’s leadership understands that they can further establish this elite status among customers by delivering digital experiences that their users can easily navigate and enjoy.
BT’s researchers and designers are embedded in the company’s digital product teams, and they evaluate the company’s experiences across the EE website and app. To future-proof their digital platforms (and ensure they build the right things in the right ways), they test prototypes of their experiences with a mixture of existing customers, prospective customers, and people who use products from EE’s competitors.
Improving the EE app, with a harmonized ecommerce experience
EE had built its app for customers to manage their communications subscriptions, but they wanted to broaden its scope while simultaneously increasing personalization. Because they sought to introduce a whole new ecommerce marketplace beyond internet use and mobile phones—extending into gaming tech and other new verticals—the app and the website both needed a complete overhaul of their information architecture.
The goal is to create world-class experiences that integrate key learnings from the best apps across all industries. Customer feedback through UserTesting played a key role in this effort because it enabled researchers and designers to directly observe user behaviors.
Through iterative research, EE discovered that by introducing a new area called “Manage” to the navigation, they would reduce cognitive load on the homepage and improve findability of common actions customers need to take to manage their products and services with EE.
Sharan Gandhi says this structure was a breakthrough for Research and Design. “Manage is now the go-to place to access and use all of your products and services—and discover new ones (like managing wifi access), encouraging regular app usage.”
Within the first month of launch, Manage became the most popular hub destination in the EE app. The company saw an increase in traffic for people tracking their orders and setting a spend cap, an increase in subscription activations, and an increase in broadband and mobile/sim sales via the new "get" tiles. In terms of searches alone, EE saw a 50% uplift in traffic to the company’s broadband pages.
The aforementioned experiences interact through a unified structure on which the company can build moving forward. Per Conor Ward, “One of our key principles for the information architecture and the navigation was for it to match across app and web, and for it to match across logged in and logged out.”
Testing and refining the Aimee AI chatbot
Aimee is the EE app and website’s personal assistant. The first two letters are AI (as in Artificial Intelligence), ME for personalization, and EE for the brand name. Specialist User Researcher Adel Kalman says, “The ambition for Aimee is to help customers make a purchase, manage their services, and help the customers with whatever they need.”
But through their research, EE researchers observed that Aimee was overwhelmed with questions about roaming. Only 16% of the enquiries to Aimee about roaming were solved by the chatbot directly. The remaining enquiries required phone calls with an advisor.
Designers created new prototypes, which Sharan’s team put in front of UserTesting test participants. The team used generative AI to predict where people would travel and the costs of their roaming packages. They discovered that Aimee now answered questions much more accurately.
EE launched a new version of the chatbot that tested extremely well with users and Aimee became a great success story for the brand. Average chatbot containment rates increased by 75%. EE also saw a 50% click through rate increase from the roaming calculator, and a 2.4% decrease in calls to their contact centers.
