Zpeed

This is the journey through a recent project that resulted winner of our annual Hack Days competition at Zattoo. I'll share how I tackled a crucial issue, my role in it all, the challenges faced, and the impact made.

Understanding the problem

Imagine settling down for a cozy night of streaming live TV on Zattoo, only haunted by endless buffering and pixelated nightmares. That was what many of our users faced—complaints flooding in about bad streaming speed. The issue? Users get frustrated with streaming quality issues, and the frustration is amplified by traditional speed tests providing inaccurate results that don’t consider the unique network topology of our product’s CDN (content delivery network).

Why?

Enhanced CS

Reduce reliance on Customer Service and improve user satisfaction by empowering users to troubleshoot their connectivity issues

Why?

Data Insights

Correlating results with user IDs provides valuable insights into connectivity across regions and providers, guiding strategic decisions

Why?

Targeted Marketing

Understanding users' real connectivity helps us suggest personalized packages, boosting satisfaction, loyalty, and user lifetime growth.

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Enhanced CS

Reduce reliance on Customer Service and improve user satisfaction by empowering users to troubleshoot their connectivity issues

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Data Insights

Correlating results with user IDs provides valuable insights into connectivity across regions and providers, guiding strategic decisions

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Targeted Marketing

Understanding users' real connectivity helps us suggest personalized packages, boosting satisfaction, loyalty, and user lifetime growth

My role

As the Product Designer on this journey, I owned the entire design process from start to finish. I was responsible for conducting research (user interviews, gathering data insights), ideating, prototyping, testing, development handover, and implementation support.

Process overview

I was fortunate to have an amazingly full range of backend engineers, frontend and playback, engineers, product owners, QA, and customer service experts.

Our cross-functional team

Product Owners

Engineers

Designers

Customer Success

Project's interesting bits

Research

Now, let's talk about the juicy bits: the challenges. First, I took a deep dive into data usage. I found that:

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Key to churn decrease

12.5% of churn was due to streaming quality problems. Handling 4% of customer service tickets on streaming took an avg of 30 minutes per ticket, causing time-consuming resolutions.

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Streaming speed mismatch

Streaming quality issues were a problem for prospective users who signed up for packages needing faster speeds than they had, meanwhile, current users flooded CS with complaints.

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Tenant satisfaction

Integrating a speed test boosts tenant satisfaction and support, directly impacting Customer Lifetime Metrics. Setting us apart from competitors, increasing the likelihood of contract extensions.

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Trust Deficit

Lack of concrete data about streaming issues made Customer Service less trustworthy, leading to emotional and frustrated users.

Ideating and prototyping

This project was the ultimate brainstorming session with all key knowledge and stakeholders. Having experts from different areas buzzing around for days propelled us forward, allowing us to streamline the solution-finding process (and later the design and development). The major solution pillars:

Make tech jargon understandable for everyone. Interpreting results, translating to users what their speed can do. Providing proactive solutions for buffering problems. Gather historical streaming data to understand its behavior more widely.

Solution

Prioritizing process transparency, ensuring users feel informed but not overwhelmed by technical details.

Speaking the user's language by interpreting ping and jitter results to provide clarity on connection stability.

Cross-platform scalability. Involving stakeholders from all platforms to ensure seamless integration across devices and tenants.

Data-driven troubleshooting for Zattoo users. Accessing test history, identifying trends, and acting proactively.

Cross-platform scalability. Involving stakeholders from all platforms to ensure seamless integration across devices and tenants.

Data-driven troubleshooting for Zattoo users. Accessing test history, identifying trends, and acting proactively.

Curios for more?

Project's Impact

Our cross-functional collaboration paid off big time! The project was the champion of a company-wide hackathon, securing additional days for a production-ready standalone website and a StreamAPI. We replaced third-party speed tests on our marketing website, gaining valuable data insights.

Less support tickets

32% less CS Tickets

With Zpeed, customer service tickets related to streaming issues decreased.

We created

Multi-Platform Prototypes

A standalone website, marketing website, web application, and Android TVs.

Expanding our value

Unique B2B Advantage

The integrated speed test became our unique selling proposition, setting us apart in the market.

Next Steps

User testing, A/B testing, incorporation into more platforms, and user internet connection analytics are on our roadmap. Zpeed has laid the groundwork for smoother experiences, satisfied users, and stronger B2B relationships.