Unifying the Customer Sales Experience

Unifying the customer sales experience

Sprint | Share + Compare Plan Calculator | Winter – Spring 2017

Client

Sprint was a telecommunication company based in Kansas City, KS. Before it merged with T-Mobile, it was the 4th largest mobile network operator in the United States, serving over 50 million customers. For this project, we worked with the Customer Experience team responsible for the sales process and the customers’ experience in stores across the country.

Weber Team members

Members Involved: Abigail Crock (Graphic Designer), Dan Petrovski (Graphic Designer), KC Marren (Copywriter), Nicole Sampson (Project Manager), Brad Dreshbach (VP Creative Strategy), Andrew Leatherman (Partner and Former Graphic Designer)
My Role: I was overseeing the designer on this project and was responsible for providing direction on the interface design. I was also behind the calculator’s brains, developing the logic and the design/functions of the CMS

Project Narrative

In the ideal world of customer experience, a customer in California could get the same sales experience in your store as a customer in New York City or in West Virginia. But there’s always some managers who find something else that works better for their store, deviating from the ideal process. Sprint sales reps used handwritten quotes and field generated calculators to provide estimates to customers. The Customer Experience team wanted to unify the customer’s sales experience across the nearly 4,000 Sprint stores by giving the field a digital estimating tool.

We developed the Plan Calculator, housed on Sprint’s web-based retail tool, Share & Compare. It enables reps to provide consistent, detailed, and accurate estimates on a desktop or tablet for shoulder-to-shoulder customer interactions. Customers could get both a PDF and an emailed version of their estimate. Plus, reps (and their managers) could follow up after the initial conversation by accessing their archived quotes.

Sprint continued to invest in the tool since its launch in 2017. In 2019, they started to allocate nearly $100,000 each quarter for continual tool enhancements. By 2020, 89% of Sprint stores adopted the tool, and an average of 1,400 estimates was generated by the stores each day. That’s over a 400% increase from the daily average the first year the tool was in the market (260 estimates/day from May 2017 – April 2018).

Before the calculator, each district, each store, and each rep had its way of providing quotes to customers. Some stores would use excel calculators that they made for each plan. Some would use the paper quote sheet that Sprint provided, and others would just jot down the estimate on whatever piece of paper they had handy.

Before Examples (from left to right): Field Generated Excel Calculator, Sprint Provided Paper Quote Sheet,
and Typical Quote from Field

Calculator Concepts (from left to right): Step-by-Step Quote, and At-a-Glance Quote

We created two concepts for the calculator, each designer working on their idea.

Step-by-Step Quote (AC): Offers the feeling of staying on a single page but moves through the options by selecting points on the timeline. The quote is treated as the hero, only displayed on the last screen.

At-a-Glance Quote (DP): Displays all the options in a single view, while keeping a summary of selections and the final quote to the right of the page

The client preferred the “At-a-Glance” version as they liked having the constant summary displayed on the screen. The team took that idea and reworked the design to fit the overall design of the tool better.

Screen recording of Sprint’s Plan Calculator tool.

IMG-SAC-PlanCalc-iPad-PlanCalc-Devices-NC-041317

Device Section

In the calculator’s final design, we replaced the heavy black and gray tool with a lighter white and gray color scheme. We significantly increased the size of the sections to make it more tablet friendly. Yellow was used as a highlight to draw attention to the totals – clearly showing your total monthly cost and what you would owe today.

While we were designing the interface, I was also determining how the tool calculates. I created a detailed output document with instructions for calculating each field, the totals, and how the new and existing customer journey differs.

Data Plans Section

The two most important sections to calculate were the device and data plans section. Each included a list of pre-populated devices and plans that reps could select from the drop-down menus. Sprint provided an automated pricing feed to ensure the latest device and plan pricing. Each section also had a custom device and plan form to allow reps to capture older phones and plans no longer in-market.

IMG-SAC-PlanCalc-iPad-PlanCalc-Results-NC-041317

Calculator Results

The customer’s sections are populated in the Selections column as the rep moves through the tool. The Monthly and Due Today totals only populate after the rep presses the “Calculate” button. After the totals display, a rep can print a PDF of the estimate or email the estimate to a customer directly from the tool.

IMG-SAC-PlanCalc-iPad-PlanCalc-Archives-041917

Archive Page

The Archive page stores all the rep’s quotes and allows them to follow up with customers or reference a previous customer’s quote. The Archive page also allows each store and district manager to see all the quotes from their reps and stores.

Customer Estimate PDF

The Estimate PDF template includes all the information from the results screen and provides additional details for the customer to remember, like savings and benefits for switching to Sprint. The template creates space for the maximum number of lines but only generates rows with information. The PDF back includes the Sprint Resource Guide Checklist, which provides information on account set up, AutoPay, support information, and device health tips.

The email generated from the tool is a generic email that includes a brand-approved message and subject line. The reps can customize the email with the customer’s name and their contact information. In addition to a PDF of the estimate, reps can also attach PDFs of current promotions.

Customer Estimate Email

In addition to the Plan Calculator, Share & Compare includes two other sections for reps to utilize. The Compare Plans section consists of the Rate Plan Comparison that quickly compares a competitor’s plan to the Sprint plan. It shows the monthly and yearly savings and data and talk & text difference between the two plans. Selecting “Compare All Carriers” allows the customer to see how all competitors stack up with their chosen lines and data amount. Weber was continually updating the pricing information in this tool, ensuring that the latest plan information was available.

IMG-SAC-PlanCalc-iPad-ComparePlans-041317

Compare Plans Section – Rate Plan Comparison

Promotions Section

The last section of Share & Compare was the Promotion tab. This tab included tablet-friendly versions of the flyers that we created for each plan and offer. These assets could be emailed to the customers (with or without an estimate) as PDFs. Weber was responsible for creating each asset and managing the expirations of each on the tool. Eventually, we expanded this section to include Spanish versions of each asset.

connect:

abigail.crock@gmail.com +1-330-931-2943