Comcast is one of the nations’ largest telecommunications companies providing cable, internet, telephone, wireless, and home security services to residential customers in 40 states through Xfinity. However, Comcast’s customer satisfaction often ranks among the worst in the industry.

This dissatisfaction is partly due to Comcast’s selling model, which has always relied on only allowing customers to get service in bundles. Through this model, customers can gain short-term savings but often end up with added services they don't want or need. These bundles often come with promotional discounts that expired after a certain timeframe, but the price increase after the discount code expiration isn’t clear to customers at the purchase time.

The Problem

Comcast prospective customers don't want to buy service bundles. Instead, they want to have the flexibility and control to buy only the products and services they want. Additionally, customers have expressed frustration at the lack of pricing, contract, and discounting transparency. They are often surprised when their prices go up after the promotional period ends for their plan. 

The Goals

Flexibility

Give customers ultimate control to pick their services and products

Transparency

Facilitate learning about services that fit into customers’ lifestyle.

Two Possible User Flows

We wanted to explore a traditional e-commerce cart model where prospective customers could add individual services to a cart and build their own package while also customizing their plan by making equipment and add-ons selection. While brainstorming, we decided to explore two user flows for customizations: a linear model and a hub and spoke model.

This approach allows customers to make their service selections upfront and then walks them through a single customization flow for all of their selected services. 

Benefits

• Smaller price jumps
• Service selection on one screen
• Works well with pre-configured service bundles

• Lots of scrolling on mobile
• Poor management of all-in price
• Upsells are less contextual
  

The Hub and Spoke Model

In this flow, the hub serves as a central location where customers can select a single service and continue through a customization flow (the spoke) for that service in a focused and organized way. After going through this flow, customers land back on the hub to access additional services and add to their plan. Once customers finish building their plan, they can move on to the checkout flow.

Benefits

Drawbacks

• Larger price jumps as customers go through several customization flows for each service added.
• Pre-configured bundles become a bit trickier to communicate

Three ways to build and customize

Flexibility was one of the main pillars of the modular concept. We identified three different shopping entry points when we analyzed how customers think about navigating the site and purchasing products and services. Both linear and hub & spoke models could service each of these entry points.

Based on the hub and spoke model, I roughly sketched out a simple user flow. In this flow, the user adds a tier of service to their cart, accesses the plan builder/cart, and goes through a customization flow. This gave us enough interactions to test out the concept at a high level.

The team explored a few design options based on the rough sketches. We also created Keynote and Principle prototypes to show interaction and motion, and we began to conduct usability tests with the high-fidelity mockups. Once we had confidence in the design concept, we began pitching it to stakeholders and Brian Roberts, CEO of Comcast.

User Testing and Insights

We hypothesized that participants would find the hub and spoke shopping model to be an intuitive way to build a service package that best fits their needs and is also easy to customize. Through 15 remote unmoderated tests, we aimed to gain insights on the following:

Learning Curve

Understand level of effort it would take customers to learn the new shopping model

Ideal Flow

Determine the best flow that would allow customers to have flexibility and control

Pricing Perception

Understand customers’ level of comprehension of pricing, promotions and discounts in the cart

The experience positively resonated with the participants; the majority of them thought it was clear, easy to use, and gave them confidence in knowing what exactly they were buying and paying for.

"They lay packages out clearly. You can see what you’re saving, you can see all that you’re getting.”

"This has been one of the clearest experiences I have ever had.”

Offer Construct Simplification

• A simplified tier structure of for internet and TV
  

• Systematization of discounting and contract agreements to promote a more transparent experience.

Scoping Down for The Trial Experience

While there was excitement at the leadership level about the initial concept, we decided that instead of betting everything on a major launch that would require a longer timeline and additional resources, we would take a phased approach delivering the "hub" portion of the concept as plan builder page to start.

Hypothesis

Allowing customers to build their own plan using the modular framework will drive an increase in new connect revenue-generating units (RGUs).

Audience

•  Prospective customers
•  Geo-localized to Indianapolis
•  All primary shop pages
•  Mobile and desktop devices

Scope

We determined that we would test the plan builder page only and not include any of the customization steps as part of the experience.

KPIs

•  Sales Conversion Rate
•  Checkout Start Rate
•  Revenue Per Visit
•  Engagement

Updated Design

I simplified the experience to be a one-page plan builder where customers could see all of their available options at once and select the tiers of each service they were interested in. All of the equipment and channel customizations remained a part of the checkout flow.

Price Transparency

I wanted to provide as much pricing transparency as possible for customers, so I provided clear information around discounting in the cart with obvious indicators for contract length and promotion expiration dates. I also added the option to toggle contracts and optional discounts on and off to clearly see the price difference while retaining control of what they purchased.

Trial Results and Expansion

The Indianapolis modular trial was successful in not only improving the customer experience but also improving sales numbers. Because of the trial's success, the experience was expanded to heartland Indiana by mid-January of 2019 and the entire Central Division by the end of Q1 of 2019.

After the modular trial's success, the West and North East divisions have shown interest in adopting the same shopping model. The UX team is currently partnering with Product, Pricing & Packaging, Research, and Engineering teams to leverage some of this work as a foundation for a vision of what the future of xfinity.com should look like. I am actively working on a Join Customer Journey work track to define a strategy for this vision and start creating a roadmap for 2021.