Changing hearts and minds in the home connectivity category: Leveling up digital experience by building a beta community

Room 3 | 10:00 am - 10:30 am | Wednesday, May 8, 2024

Consumer demand for reliable home connectivity and high-quality digital services has undergone an acceleration. In today’s post-pandemic world, evolved consumer lifestyles and a digital revolution mean connectivity is king, inside and outside the home. Within our homes, an explosion in the number of connected devices, a desire for wall-to-wall coverage and a hybrid working culture have elevated customer demands and expectations towards humble home broadband. To delight customers, connectivity providers need to work harder than ever before.

Increased customer expectations require new testing paradigms but we identified gaps in our research process. While research at the early stage of the innovation funnel was well established (discovering attitudes, behaviors and needs; identifying opportunity spaces; evaluating and optimizing concepts and testing beautifully designed prototypes was business as usual), during product development, real customer feedback in natural conditions was rarely sought. Projects became technical and the end customer an afterthought, with testing reserved for product managers or respondents following strict scripts evaluating functionality rather than feeling.

Behavioral science tells us that context matters. We needed to be in customers’ hands and homes to truly understand and optimize the experience. To bridge the gap between lab and launch conditions, we built an agile qualitative online beta-testing community, leveraging a digital platform to drive engagement and bring the community to life. Learn how we challenged the status quo, the successes and failures we had along the way and the internal mind-set shift we achieved regarding CX.

Key takeaways:

1. Hear how we challenged colleagues to put customers first in an evolving category landscape.
2. Learn key benefits and challenges when setting up an internal beta-testing community.
3. Discover how insights best practice can be a tool for strategic and systematic change within an organization.