Telus Vision
My role as Group Creative Director: Leading local and international creative teams in unison with multiple clients to create and impliment the building blocks of a new global experience vision.
The Ask
As with many telecoms, major Canadian provider Telus needed a uniting vision for the way forward. Multiple business units had historically operated within their own mandates with an absolute hand, creating a fractured user experience. The new internal group Telus Digital was charged with uniting the various strands of business needs and platforms — and for more than just the digital channel. My goal as Group Creative Director on Huge's Telus team was to help Telus formulate an omnichannel vision, uniting the needs of end-users, potential customers, Telus representatives and techs in a single set of experiences. My team was located in three offices across two countries, and our goal was nothing short of making Telus the world's friendliest, easiest, and most welcome telecom.
From Beginning to End
Working with our clients, we established priorities for which experiences were the most important to tackle: All of them. From home services to business customers, from sales to onboarding to retention. We established a full end-to-end service design framework, and began tackling the problem not in terms of pages or sites, but instead by thinking from a wholistic perspective. The user journeys we investigated crossed from digital to phone to in-store and in every stage of the consumer lifecycle. Picking the right mobile phone is important, but so is knowing where your cable installation tech is and when he or she will arrive. Knowing how your monthly bill is put together is as important as knowing the best place in your house for a wifi router. And for the user, every step of that experience should feel friendly, welcoming, and useful. Working holistically allowed us to create these experiences in a unified way.
Business Needs and Design Carry Each Other
Creating a seamless and smooth user experience can't just be left to designers. In our role consulting with Telus, Huge had the opportunity to engage with business owners from across the Telus organization to improve their users experience from every point of view. In any large organization, legacy technical and business systems can become siloed, and create warrens of inconvenience and inefficiency. By working with stakeholders throughout the organization, we were able to break down barriers and help Telus identify opportunities to improve the way they worked with their own clients. And once that was done, we helped them roadmap solutions, spin-up teams, and begin making real systematic changes to the way they did things. The result is a constantly improving customer experience, which breaks away from the traditional telecom structures of what you can, and cannot, do for yourself as a user.
All Users are Users
Any vision for a united, cohesive user experience is incomplete without accounting for all the people who are a part of that system. That's why we saw Telus itself as a user from the very beginning of the project. As we created an omnichannel platform for shoppers and clients, we were doing the same for the people who served them. Working with the Support team at Telus and their technical partners, we created a support structure that could integrate with the systems already in use. These are the tools which will allow service representatives to know who they're talking to, and get a 360° view of their relationship with Telus — including any past problems and how they were solved, what the client is expecting to be able to do, and how to serve them best.
Telus has a hard-earned reputation as being friendly and helpful. All we had to do was help them deliver on that promise, no matter what way their clients approach them.
Make the System of Systems
Of course, a design is only as useful as it is functional. All the work we did in creating visions and establishing working models and prototypes flowed into our work in creating a unified Telus Design System. Working in lockstep with the Telus digital, marketing and brand teams, we established a single, functional repository of design patterns. This design system slotted in with the revisions of the Telus digital platform, and created a single hub for the dozens of internal and external teams which would be creating, expanding, and revising Telus experiences.
The Design system site is designed to provide sample code for developers, Sketch files for designers, and informational guidance for business and team leaders, all in service of a united Telus platform. We also worked with the Telus Digital team to create an open-source based working model for the revision of the Design System, allowing feedback from the teams and revisions from code to be brought in from any working team, vetted, and pushed back out into the system as a whole.
The Result
Far from a single site or experience, the Telus work was much more than just a vision. Early concepts turned into launched sites within a year — the Telus Business site is already live in an early test of the concepts we had put together, and many more portions of the experience are now in advanced testing and revision. Experience packages that span business units and channels are now being assembled to push the work even further. It was a joy to work with motivated, talented and engaged teams across Huge and Telus — all of whom united and continue to work towards making Telus the best, and friendliest telecom in the world.
