Case Study: GLOW app

Context

Most people know Asurion as a mobile phone insurance provider. However, in an effort to become the trusted companion for all things tech, Asurion expanded their offerings to cover all of your smart home tech with the introduction of Asurion Home+. There are many ways we pitch this service to consumers, whether it be direct to consumer, upselling while we are in the home fixing another problem, or upselling while a customer is calling in for help with their mobile phone. This is where GLOW comes in. GLOW is the platform that our call agents (also called "experts") use to pitch and ultimately enroll the customer in Home+.

The problem

Since the GLOW app is a tool designed to aid in enrollment of customers to the Home+ product, our main KPI was to increase sales. The truth: many of these call agents have little to no experience in sales. Through research, we found that new call agent hires fall into two buckets: those with prior sales experience and those with prior technical support experience. For those with a sales background and no technical support background, we provide many tools to help fill in the tech support gap. For those with a tech support background and no sales background, the tools are few and far between to help with the sales support. In many ways, GLOW is all they have in the moment to help with the sale.

When I first joined the team, the GLOW app was less of a tool to empower experts to make strong, informed pitches and more of a tool to simply enroll the customer after they got that "yes." But getting the "yes" was the hardest part! The scope of our focus quickly shifted to: how might we make GLOW a powerful tool to help experts make strong, successful pitches?

Stakeholder alignment

As lead design on this project, I couldn't solve this problem alone, nor was this work to be done within a vacuum. One of the first tasks I did was conduct stakeholder interviews to make sure all stakeholders were aligned on not only where GLOW was today but also where they saw GLOW in the future. Through these interviews, I discovered "tensions" – two seemingly opposing directions that were sometimes in contention with each other and that would be hard to focus on both at once. One example of this was focusing on take rate versus churn rate. Each stakeholder put a point on a scale for all of these pairings for where they thought we were today (blue) versus where they would like to see us in the future (green). The graphs that had the most difference between where the blue points where and the green showed me where the most work was to be done.

Some of the biggest points of focus that came out of this research were improving information hierarchy and making sales better rather than simply enabling sales. So, how do we do that?

Making sales better

Since the beginning of GLOW up until this research started, the philosophy of the platform was to give experts all of the tools they needed at once to use whenever they saw fit.

This worked fine for those experts who had a knack for sales, but what about those who didn't? How would they be able to take all of this information, put it into natural language that hooked the customer and close the sale? The truth is they couldn't! So how might we create a more focused experience that gave them the right information in the exact moment they needed it? In talking to our partners in operations and sales enablement who worked with and trained experts in how to sell, the answer was clear.

You might have been wondering why the platform is called "GLOW." Well, before it was an application, it was an acronym for a sales framework. It stands for:

G - Gain their interest

L - Look for opportunity

O - Offer the solution

W - Win the customer

Aka a step by step approach to naturally navigate through and close the sale. This is something they're taught in onboarding but never really see again. So why isn't it in GLOW, the platform it was named after? So many of the bottom-selling expert calls we would listen to wouldn't know how to bring up the Home+ product, would catch the customer off guard, and ultimately fail at making the sale. This framework was what they were missing.

GLOW 3.0

So, with that, GLOW 3.0 was born! We created a focused, keyword-based scripting flow to help those struggling with how to bring up the product and close the sale.

We worked with the teams whose work was dedicated to listening to calls to pick out the best of the best and common mistakes, and used keywords they found to have the highest rate of success. I also conducted research with average consumers by way of highlighter tests to figure out what words and phrases were most attractive to them.

This new flow helped the expert identify a customer's lifestyle in order to find the right way to pitch the product and naturally guide that conversation into an enrollment. It's available for those who feel like they need the help and allows the seasoned sellers to skip it if they want.

The aftermath

We rolled the pilot of GLOW 3.0 out to a cohort of experts and left it live for a few weeks before I started setting up interviews with the coaches of the cohort teams. It was hard to determine success based just on numbers (we had metrics on click rates, but were they actually using the scripting in their calls?), so the need for qualitative feedback was crucial.

Some of the insights I got was:

GLOW 3.0 helps target the biggest difference between a successful seller and those struggling: the collection of "breadcrumbs" – little things the customer mentions that allows the expert to target that customer specifically (ex. they work from home, so they probably have a lot of tech at home; they hear kids in the background, so they'll ask if the kids have tablets or video game systems, etc.). The "Listen for opportunity" section helps the expert do this
Success stories: one expert consistently had around 1 sale per 100 offers. While using the new GLOW scripting, she started getting at least 1 sale per day!
One team's metrics:
- [Pre-GLOW 3.0] November 2020 [59.6% offer rate; 2.1 SP100, 102 Sales]
- [Post-GLOW 3.0] December 2020 [73% offer rate; 4.2 SP100; 112 Sales]
Overall metrics:

Overall, it was clear from the pilot that GLOW 3.0 was an improvement to the platform and would provide a solid base to continue to build upon in the future.