Allconnect Site
The Allconnect site provides consumers with a concierge home services engine, allowing customers to compare and setup home services such as TV, Phone Internet as well as Gas, Electricity and Waste. I was responsible for creating and overseeing their entire online presence.
Project Summary
There’s not a lot of complexity when your checkout only requires quantity, price and maybe some color selections for a shirt or pair of socks; however, when you’re selling something that includes installation preferences, setup fees, social security information, channel selections, hardware selections, services fees, and more, then the challenges are multi-faceted.
With over 20+ years of product management and information/user design experience, these challenges were met where others failed. While delivering on time and within budget, I was able to champion colleagues to a successful site launch within 6 months where my predecessors were unable in the previous 2 years. Within 6 months after launch, we were able to double conversion within the checkout process, as well as introduce a white label storefront for our utility partners. We accomplished all of this using a back-end legacy system designed primarily for a call center platform.
Client Name
Allconnect Inc.
Project duration
6 Months to Launch
(ongoing iterations post-launch)
Responsibilities
Site Requirements, Information Architecture, Wireframing, UX Design, Product Development, Web Team Management
Strategy
At Allconnect, we partnered with utility companies who transferred customers to our call center after setup of customer gas and electricity services. When transferred, we would then offer additional home services such as Internet, Phone and TV. Allconnect’s revenue model was generated by reselling these home services and acquiring bounty commission from these utility leads.
Our Web team was formulated to offer these same extended home services online similar to our call center capabilities; however, unlike call center leads–with trained sales representatives walking customers through every step of the process–an online presence faced numerous barriers and drop-offs from online customers, namely: lack of brand identity and trustworthiness, confusion and length of setup requirements, and overall time of online transaction.
To overcome these barriers, I needed first to review call center work flows for all services being sold and determine how best to streamline a home services sale. Second, we needed to build a brand identity and campaign strategy that established us as a trustworthy source. Third, we needed to create a comparison engine that provided the absolute best plans and prices, backed with a guarantee. Lastly, we needed to provide customers with the option to complete online sales via the call center when either confusion or time were considerations.
As I dug underneath hundreds of these service plans from brands across our national footprint, I quickly realized through competitive analysis that many of the setup/information requirements captured within Allconnect’s call center were not required when completing transactions through our partner’s online flows. This exercise debunked the myth that these setup and information data points were hard requirements, and as a result Allconnect was able to rewrite contracts with its partners to stay in step with evolving requirements. Not only were we streamlining our Web flow, we radically improved our call center sales through narrowing the requirements for customer input. This exercise saved hundreds of thousands in call center cost while providing the most streamlined checkout flow online. To this day, Allconnect continues to leverage the principles that I established as a baseline.
Summary
Established Strong Strategy: 1. Build Brand Trust (over a million homes serviced!), 2. Provide comparison engine with price guarantee. 3. Make our experience fast & easy ((pairing down requirements from partners and providing options to customer to finish sale).
Saved significant cost – by reviewing existing call-center flows and customer input fields was able to streamline both online and call center experiences, increasing overall call center funnel conversion by 17% and saving Allconnect tens of thousands in call time costs on a monthly basis.
UX Design
As overseer of the Web team, I was personally responsible for information architecture, UX Design, Web Analytics and Site functionality and requirements. To meet aggressive timelines, I created a 35 page HTML prototype. This approach allowed a broad group of stakeholders to acclimate quickly to what customers would experience online while also doubling as our prototype for usability testing. Once our site launched, we used conversion funnel metrics and A/B split testing to further our evolution in experience. To this day, Allconnect still leverages an experience pioneered through my wireframing, design and prototyping efforts.
SEO & Paid Search
From 2007 to 2009, our Web team was one of the first to deploy a holistic SEO and Paid advertisement strategy. With over 100K visits a month, our approach used spend analysis at the zip code level, deep keyword search, and proper HTML syntax for readability/usability. Our pages loaded fast and provided deep, useful information to visitors, ranking well in SERPs.
Team Building
Our core Web team consisted of 4 developers, one designer, one online marketing manager, and one content writer. We also partnered with our call center development group, product development team, and various business owners and stakeholders. The challenges were many: building a strong online strategy, e-commerce requirements, partner contract negotiations, online marketing strategy and streamlining development/creative processes that would allow us to launch 6 months after new leadership’s arrival. Providing a balance of motivation, support, team spirit, goals, competence alignments and inspiration all contributed to our team’s success…we even managed to have fun!
