Sky and TSW: innovating the customer experience

Sky and TSW: a partnership that began in 2017 with the goal of innovating customer experience in order to satisfy the needs and desires of people.

To date we have performed nearly 20 tests for Sky Italia. But what exactly have we been working on in all these years?

Our partnership with Sky Italia: test activities

One of the biggest Pay-TV providers in the world has turned to TSW to investigate the experiences offered by the entire Sky ecosystem, to identify issues and generate possible scenarios for improvement. The driving energy behind this movement has been awareness of the importance of the quality of the experience offered.

The TSW investigations have looked at the various aspects and services of the Sky offer, applying as and when necessary the test methods deemed appropriate to the object of the analysis and the desired outcomes.

We can point to five macro tests carried out for this project with Sky:

• Live user tests carried out in the laboratory with a group of up to 15 participants who interact with the applications and brand platforms.
• Remote user tests performed remotely with groups of as many as 250 people at a time.
• Focus groups, a widely-used research technique to fully explore the opinions, attitudes and behaviours of a sample of individuals.
• Card sorting, a task that engages users in the definition, classification and organisation of content.
• Shadowing, an observation technique that involves investigating the activities of people in real contexts without interfering with their operational flows.

Which Sky services have we worked on in detail?

Over the last two years we have applied our quali-quantitative investigative techniques on a range of services offered by Sky Italia, particularly on the following:

• Sky “Fai da te” (“Do it yourself”) App. This product test was run live: we asked people to use the application and we monitored their eye movements with eye-tracking glasses. The objective was to figure out what issues might arise from the way people use the app. Problems were graded in terms of severity.
• Multidevice landing page tests. This second test examined user experience while the user interacts with various landing pages of the website, in desktop, landscape and mobile environments. Eye movements were also recorded in this test.
• Workflow in Sky TG24, Sky Sports and Sky Entertainment news and operations rooms. The technique used in this case was shadowing. The aim was to monitor workflows and detect any related problems in the news and operations rooms. The shadowing process was supplemented with in-depth interviews, carried out after the observation stage in order to avoid contaminating the ecology of the workflows.
• “Acquista” (purchase) landing page. Three different versions of the landing page were tested remotely in order to verify page functionality and effectiveness, and also, more crucially, to check people’s understanding of the information structure.
• New “Offerta” (offer) page. In this case, the thinkaloud technique was used to get test participants to offer verbal feedback on the pages they were interacting with.
• New E-Commerce. This test was done live, simultaneously in the TSW base in Treviso and in the Milan laboratory. The test involved 50 people expressing opinions on different e-commerce options. As they did so, their eye movements and facial expressions were recorded.
• Comparative evaluation of multiple Sky landing pages. For this test we listened to users live, giving their feedback on the understandability of information flows of various Sky landing pages.
• The “Extra” offer. This test involved the live participation of registered users of the Extra service, as well as non-registered people. The aim was to evaluate the understandability of the offer for everyone.
• My Sky app, TV Guide, support and web self-care. These latter tests covered different services aimed at people who use Sky on a daily basis: in this case, the techniques used were card sorting, focus groups and thinkaloud

TSW and Sky: possible developments to further improve people’s experiences

The work with Sky Italia and the people who use their services daily involved the application of many of the qualitative-quantitative and subjective investigation techniques that TSW has relied on for many years in research projects.

So how can the Sky-TSW partnership develop going forward? The plan is to extend the research to other areas of the Sky offer and to possibly apply all the quantitative and objective methods of psychophysiological detection, in which TSW is a major national player.

In this regard, there are many possibilities for expanding the research: we could analyse television commercials produced by Sky Italia and record the emotions they generate in the viewer, or carry out tests to detect people’s stress levels during customer service support requests. There are many options for improving the Sky experience as a whole.

SKY comes into people’s lives every day and the partnership with TSW allows people to enter the world of SKY.