Internet outages suck :(
THE CHALLENGE
How might we (nbn) enhance our systems to provide more useful information on outages so that telco's can pass on more accurate network information to their customers
DESIGN APPROACH
Discover
To understand the current state and purpose of the work
Explore
Planning and running co-design workshops
Develop/deliver
Designing solutions from data and solving real customer problems
Discover
Unpacking the current experience
Mapping out the current state journey allowed us to understand what the relationship between nbn and the internet providers were, constraints as well as pain points and potential opportunity areas.
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From the co-design workshops we want to understand what the real pain points are from the internet providers perspective, their processes and 'good' looks like for them. These co-design workshops will help us realise the combined vision for both nbn and our providers.
Explore
Using Rose, Bud Thorn and affinity mapping to unpack the outage notifying experience.
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Synthesis
We were able to gain a-lot of valuable feedback from the sessions and it was crucial for us to have a system to help us identify which provider it came from and the type of feedback they've given. Rose, bud and thorn was a useful key for us to identify what sort of feedback we received and helped the overall synthesis process.
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After a few rounds of theming this feedback, we were able to boil it down to key themes and problem areas that need to be addressed. Internally we ran workshops to identify opportunity areas for each theme and brainstorm ways that we could overcome these issues.
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Theming our feedback

Mapping problems to solutions

Future State Story
These workshops helped us identify key problem areas within the outage notification process which would have otherwise been looked over if we had made assumptions about what the problems were. The importance of running co-design workshops was evident, we were able to align with our partners on how to best trigger outage notifications and to map out a future state process that would improve our end user customer experience.
At the core of it all, customers don't want to be notified about an outage that they won't experience, so we want to make sure that only the impacted ones were notified. With this in mind, we plotted our sticky-notes onto a matrix of Cost of Implementation vs. Importance to the Customer to prioritise these problems. With the customer as our priority we were able to identify quick wins as well as long term strategic goals that will improve customer satisfaction and minimise the impact we make on customers when an outage occurs.
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Impact
More houses than necessary are notified on a 'just in case' basis, which means we notify up to 4 houses away from where the outage will occur even though from our data we know only up to 2 houses may experience an impact. Customers have had to plan for outages since many work from home or had children schooling from home and relied heavily on the internet. This process has caused a lot of anxiety and stress for customers who need to plan ahead and spend the day anticipating an outage.
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If we refer to the below diagram, House #5 is impacted with an outage, if we follow our current processes then houses 1-4 and 5-9 will be notified of the impact and be cautioned for an outage.
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With the improved notification process, only houses 3-4 and 8-9 will be notified. This process decreases the number of houses that will be impacted by up to half. Relieving customers from the stress and anxiety and decreasing the disturbance we make to their lives.
