BUSINESS CHALLENGE
While working at Universal Mind, I worked with AT&T managed security services (MSS) to analyze their business goals, success criteria, subject matter expert’s priorities, cultural impacts, consumer feedback, user experience, and technology capabilities with the intent to consolidate and differentiate MSS’s service offerings across digital touch points.
Network security is expensive, and – most of the time – confusing.. Everyone knows this — AT&T has spent years simplifying this complicated space and bringing the cost of large-scale network protection and recovery down. Over this time they have partnered, acquired, or built over two dozen tools all with specific strengths and weaknesses, but much to the dismay of those selling the products there was a large overlap between product offerings.
Our challenge in this application was to consolidate an extensive list of security offerings in a way that makes sense to sales teams and customers, while still giving users their full list of features they expect.
My specific role on this project was leading the User experience and strategy team. The team consisted of a strategist, a UX specialist, and myself. Also on the project was a technical architect and a project manager.
PROCESS
I used both their strategic and experience focused approach, concentrating on identifying a visionary path forward to facilitate alignment as AT&T transitioned from theoretical to practical. The process, designed to be iterative, involved 62 interviews, split between customers, sales teams, and subject matter expert interviews. From kickoff to final presentation the full project lasted 3 months. It resulted in recommendations to advance the managed security services offerings supported by journey maps, personas, strategic themes, an experience vision, a cultural analysis, a competitive analysis, and a technical analysis of their suite of offerings.
PERSONAS
A Persona is a summary of a set of users of a product articulated as an individual. For AT&T we did Personas, or User Roles, on both the customers and members of the sales team.
Personas Personas
Personas are built through direct interviews with users, capturing observed patterns of behaviors and attitudes. They come in a variety of sizes most commonly there is an executive summary expressed in a single page or slide and a specific section and a detailed section that contains all the information that designers use to build educated decision. The entire population of potential users should ideally be able to be represented by all the personas created for the project.
JOURNEY MAPS
A Customer Journey Map walks decision makers down the path that users have to travel every day. It calls out the highs and the lows that a user experiences within a process of flow.
For AT&T we realized that AT&T had a strong suite of offered products but the sales and installation process was opaque and confusing.
Utilizing our experience doing frequent quick research studies we were able to make small changes before problems got too large to fix.
CULTURAL AND COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
A Cultural Analysis addresses the Purposes, Practices, and People of an organization and compares them to the other companies in the space.
What is happening internally is only part of the picture — AT&T had spent years growing its relationships with its customers, and with its internal stakeholders, but competitors are changing daily.
It is important to know where you compare to others in the space.
EXPERIENCE VISION
Gaining empathy with an IT Manager’s user experience can be extremely challenging. In order to assist we built an Experience Vision that explains what Henry, our IT manager, would experience as he purchases and uses his AT&T Managed Security Service suite of software. This ideal state allows everyone on the team to align on what the customer experience should look like in an ideal state and build to that state.
SOLUTION
Our solution to AT&Ts problem was an outline to consolidate, improve, and in-house their existing offerings. The final deliverable contained a roadmap to upgrading their Sales, CX, Training, and Alignment. Also outlined technical recommendations needed to build a reusable platform to increase agility and mobility for consolidation efforts as well as streamlined ways to deploy their existing software
RESULTS
AT&T remains competitive and one of the market leaders in a space that is constantly improving and reinventing themselves.