How could Vodafone have avoided customer frustration and increased revenue during the World Cup with the help of UXCam?

 

User story | How Vodafone's app ruined my World Cup experience

I traveled to Doha excited to be attending the Fifa world cup for the very first time (I’m an absolute football fan). As anyone who travels to a different country, I needed to get a new SIM card for my phone. Vodafone was one step ahead and gifted me a free card with unlimited data and calls for 48 hours that I could easily top up with an app later. Easy peasy!

48 hours have passed, I’m at the stadium and I’m out of data, I need to find my family in a sea of people and it’s nearly impossible. So, I open the app to top up my account and this is what I find: 

 

         Welcome Screen

Bare with me, I have limited wifi (duh, free wifi is never reliable), I’m in a rush and I must confess, I never read the small letters, who does? So, when presented with this screen I just see two buttons to tap, either I’m a resident or not, so I just tap on the correct option. And I tap, and I tap, and I tap. Nothing happens. Look at this screenshot and tell me, how many of you would have done the same as I did?

 

"I just see two buttons to tap, either I’m a resident or not, so I just tap on the correct option. And I tap, and I tap, and I tap."

 

To cut the story short, I never figured it out, I dropped the app and left the stadium feeling super stressed and annoyed. The icing on the cake? I couldn’t meet my family, so I left alone. 

The next day, I complained about the app and shared the story with my family. While looking into it over a coffee we realized you need to swipe that ball to the right. Honestly? I understand the concept of gamification, but the base of a good UX is to let your users achieve their goals fast without thinking. 

 

Regardless of what Vodafone does now, they went into my ‘non-reliable’ mind bucket and if I can choose, I won’t choose them again. Vodafone failed me when I needed them the most, and I can only think, do I want an internet provider with an app that can fail me in an emergency? Not really.

 

 

What would have happened if Vodafone's team had been using UXCam?

Let's rewind and start again.

If Vodafone had been using UXCam, this issue could have been identified and resolved in minutes. Not to mention they could have increased revenue. As a major telecom and sponsor of Fifa, the Vodafone team knew that millions of visitors would be using their app to top up their sim cards and needed to guarantee the best possible product experience for their users. This is only possible with the right planning and tools in place. Here’s where UXCam comes in place.

 

“If Vodafone had been using UXCam, this issue could have been identified and resolved within minutes, resulting in increased revenue”  

 

Let’s take a step into Vodafone’s product team and see what could have been done better.  

 

1. Building Custom Dashboards

Vodafone's team would have started by creating a custom dashboard to track the main KPIs to measure the success of the new release; measure feature adoption,  identify friction points, discover bugs, and explore opportunities for improvement to iterate fast.

This Dashboard with key metrics would have enabled them to identify at a very early stage that the feature adoption was very low and users weren't converting.

 

2. Analyzing Conversion Funnels

To dig deeper into conversion blockers they could have created a funnel with all the relevant steps to identify where exactly the drop-offs happened.

 

(Below is the top-up account path from the app and its matching funnel.) 

 

With the funnel, they would have found that in 48% of the sessions, users dropped out between the welcome screen and the home screen. That's clearly a problem! Almost half of the users that go into the app bounce right after the home screen. 

To get to the nitty gritty and explore the problematic step they could have let UXCam work its magic by playing the drop-off sessions.

 

3. Diving deep into the why

By clicking on the drop-off they could have replayed the sessions to analyze the users' experience. That way, after playing 10 sessions, reality would have struck them; users are trying to tap to top-up the account but failing unceasingly. They either tap or don’t realize the ball needs to be used to swipe successfully. This is a major obstacle because users are not even getting through to the app and are dropping out from the start reducing any potential purchases.

4. Using heatmaps

To understand how users interact with the problematic welcome screen, the team could have used heatmaps and filtered on rage taps and unresponsive gestures. This would have clearly shown that this area is causing a lot of frustration to users.

The initial hypothesis that users mostly tap rather than swipe with the element would have been validated and changes could have been made. 

 

5. Taking action

Vodafone's team could have released a quick fix by making the CTA tappable and large. To ease the adoption of the new release, Vodafone could also send a push notification to all users to update the app and get a 5% discount.

 

6. Tracking Results

Finally, a week after the new release, the product team could have tracked KPIs using custom dashboards and funnels to analyze the impact of the changes by comparing app versions.

Both adoption rate and conversion rates are crucial to monitor.  

 

 

In a nutshell, many apps launch and go into build mode again, underestimating the importance of post-release analysis. However, the effort and work invested in a functionality can go down the drain if the user experience is not analyzed and optimized accordingly.

To act fast, you need an all-in-one tool that allows you to track the most important KPIs but at the same time observe and find what you were not able to foresee with the tracking, go beyond the events and observe the user experience and the interaction with your app to find those friction points, unexpected activity or opportunities for improvement.