Vodafone UK cuts time-to-insight by 17% with streamlined research ops

By offloading day-to-day tasks to the UserZoom platform, Vodafone UK’s research operations have dramatically improved efficiency and productivity—translating into major cost savings and more time for researchers to focus on fieldwork and analysis. 

Results: 

• 17% reduction in project delivery time
• £100,000 annual participant recruitment cost savings
• 2-3 weeks shorter product development life cycle

Watch the video and keep reading for more details from our interview with Alberto Ferreira, User Research and Service Design Manager at Vodafone UK.

What is Vodafone? 

Vodafone is a global mobile network operator and home communications provider serving businesses and consumers in Europe and Africa. It employs over 100,000 people across 21 countries to deliver telecommunications services and products to 300m mobile customers and 27m fixed broadband customers.

What challenge was Vodafone facing and how did UserZoom help solve it?

“Our user research team needed to make its workflows faster and simpler. Prior to working with UserZoom, too much time was spent on repetitive daily tasks, like project management, recruiting participants, and making sure that we managed all of this in a manual way directly with agencies. 

There was a lot of overhead in terms of daily tasks. UserZoom successfully streamlines much of that work and also helps us organize and manage research results. Overall, UserZoom plays a key role in our workflow and increases our efficiency several times over.”

What UX measurement challenges was Vodafone facing? 

“For our team at Vodafone, UX measurement is an essential and complex business function. We  use multiple methods to achieve a complete overview of what the digital experience is like for our customers. We combine some standardized and conventional tools like NPS [net promoter score] with our internal scoring system—which we call Ucast—from our design team. 

We use a custom metric framework which focuses on the user experience part, but we also use UserZoom's QXscore as a way to triage the results.

UserZoom’s QXscore plays an important role in this model. it provides an external and consistent view of the user experience, helping us answer questions—like what’s most enticing and interesting in our UX and UI? So we use QXscore as a way to get a wider and more comprehensive overview of our own measurements."

How did UserZoom help Vodafone streamline research operations?

"Our researchers and service designers now use the UserZoom platform to capture, manage, and deliver the research insights that Vodafone UK relies on. UserZoom has contributed a lot to the speed at which we can deliver these research projects into the business.

For example, we run framework projects that consist of several different projects aimed at fine-tuning a specific design or journey for the customer. UserZoom allows us to run the same study or similar studies consecutively, offering a level of speed that we wouldn't be able to deliver otherwise. 

The UserZoom platform streamlines tasks that we previously managed via email and through other less efficient channels—like organizing studies manually, recruitment, and screening. The biggest benefit of working with UserZoom has been having a single research platform with various tools that can be used in very flexible ways.
 
UserZoom gives us a stable source of study participants, which means less time spent on recruitment and more time back for researchers to do what they do best: fieldwork, analysis, and communicating opportunities back to the business."

What is the financial impact of your research program changes? 

“We’ve already seen overall project delivery times improve by 17%. That’s for both moderated and unmoderated qualitative and quantitative studies. All have drastically improved in speed. 

Even if it were just 1%, it would already be a massive increase in our value as a research unit. But 17% is a major increase in speed-to-market and delivering solutions to the customer. It basically translates into two to three weeks shaved off the product development cycle.

By leveraging UserZoom’s recruiting and participant tools to more efficiently reach our target participant demographics, Vodafone has saved over £100,000 a year. And with simpler, less repetitive workflows, team satisfaction has also substantially improved.”

Why is UserZoom the right platform for Vodafone?

“Partnering with User Zoom was definitely the right decision for us. Not only has UserZoom helped us through a rapid growth—when we started digital research at Vodafone UK, we had 2 researchers… now we have over 10! - but from all the options in the market it is the best fit for our needs.” 

It has a toolkit that is easy to get into for newcomers because of the good support and documentation, but it’s also very flexible in how we actually run and design research studies. And the UserZoom team is incredibly supportive. It's always been about ‘how can we improve things for the team, how can we make the research team at Vodafone work more efficiently?

I would definitely recommend UserZoom as an essential part of any research team that is serious about continuously delivering high-quality research to their businesses.”