Mapping the first month after buying a mobile plan, and showing where trust quietly breaks.
The first month after purchase was creating avoidable confusion, contact, and complaints.
Used research, complaints, journey review, and data to understand the welcome experience.
Identified issues across delivery, billing, setup, app journeys, and support.
Showed where the service needed operational changes, not just clearer messages.
EE wanted to understand why new Pay Monthly customers were unhappy during their welcome journey. The work was initially framed through a marketing lens: customers were complaining, NPS was under pressure, and communications looked like an obvious place to start.
But the research showed a wider issue. Customers were not only frustrated by messages. They were frustrated when phones arrived late, when delivery information was unclear, when customer service could not see enough to help, when the first bill was higher than expected, and when setup or app journeys added more friction.
My role was to make that whole first-month experience visible, so the organisation could see where the customer promise was breaking down.
From the outside the problem looked like "too many messages", a comms problem with a comms solution. The deeper problem was that no team owned the first-month experience as a whole. Marketing owned messaging. Delivery sat with a partner. Billing sat elsewhere. Customer service had limited visibility into delivery status. The app was a separate product team. Each team was doing its job; the cumulative experience was breaking trust.
The risk was that the organisation would optimise within marketing, send fewer or better messages, and miss the fact that the dominant trust-breakers were delivery delays and first-bill shock, neither of which marketing could fix on its own.
Without a shared view of the whole first month, the welcome experience would keep feeling fragmented to customers no matter how good any single touchpoint became.
The work combined multiple evidence sources: diary studies with customers buying and using Pay Monthly phones, customer interviews, surveys, call-centre data, NPS complaints, Google Analytics, and a cognitive walkthrough where I went through the purchase journey myself. This gave us both behavioural evidence and lived customer examples across the first 30 days, quantitative volume from analytics and contact data, qualitative depth from diary entries and interviews. The combination is what made the wider service framing credible to teams who were used to looking at their own slice in isolation.
Customers cared deeply about when the phone would arrive. If delivery failed, EE had already damaged trust before the customer had even started using the service. The issue was not only the delivery delay itself, it was the lack of visibility around what was happening, who owned the problem, and whether EE customer service could help.
Customers did not distinguish between EE and the delivery partner. They bought from EE, so they expected EE to know where their phone was and help when something went wrong. When customer service had limited visibility and customers were sent to the delivery partner, it felt like EE was pushing the work back onto the customer.
Billing was another major trust moment. Customers struggled to understand why their first bill was higher than expected, what they were being charged for, and how the bill related to what they thought they had bought. This was not just a copy problem, it affected whether customers felt they had made the right decision.
Customers were receiving too many messages, often across different channels and numbers. Some were useful in isolation, but together they made the experience feel cluttered and disjointed. The issue was not simply "too many messages", it was that the messages were not always helping customers understand the moments that mattered most: delivery, setup, billing, and support.
Marketing could improve comms, but many of the biggest pain points sat with other teams or partners. The work exposed where the welcome journey was not owned as one customer experience, even though customers experienced it that way.
The work gave EE a clearer view of the Pay Monthly welcome journey and showed that the problem was bigger than communications. It exposed where delivery, billing, setup, app journeys, customer service visibility, partner handoffs, and messaging were combining into a poor first-month experience.
Some improvements could be made through marketing and comms, including reducing message volume and signposting customers more clearly when delivery was handled by a partner. Other findings gave the team evidence to share internally around delivery visibility, partner performance, first bill clarity, and ownership across the journey.
The main impact was that the organisation now had a stronger basis for a programme of work: not just "send fewer messages," but "fix the moments where the first-month customer promise breaks."