Overview
Shopping for cell phone is not a pleasant process, specifically when you also have to shop for wireless plans to suit your needs and deal with the rebates often promised when you sign up for new two-year contract. Amazon Wireless aims to make it easier. This document proposes a new feature to enhance the user buying experience for cell phones and service plans.
User Story - Understanding The Context Of A Typical Cell Phone User
Let's take profile of Jennifer Wilson, who is a working mom and obviously busy. She is due for a cell phone upgrade. She is currently using a voice-only phone and now wants to upgrade to voice+data phone so that she can keep track of her personal and work schedules as well as overlay schedules of her kid's after-school activities. Her knowledge of current smart phones is limited and she is not particularly keen on doing in-depth research of smartphones either. She knows that she is willing to spend about $50 per month for a voice+data plan and she doesn't mind signing up for new two-year contract if she can get a free phone in return. However, in order to get a good phone to last for atleast the period of the contract, she doesn't mind spending upto $50 on the cell phone device. With this data, she is hoping for a magic wand which she can wave and finalize her decision on her purchase. She has been a loyal Amazon customer, and she heard about Amazon Wireless. But when she lands on wireless.amazon.com, she is dealt with list of phones that she knows nothing about, and is not interested in learning more about them as well. All she wants is a reliable phone and a good service plan for a reasonable price.
Feature Proposal
For serving Jennifer Wilson (a typical customer described above), Amazon Wireless can provide a feature which asks user for some very basic information and help them make a purchasing decision. The picture below shows the information requested from the user who, someone like Jennifer, can easily answer and get a list of phones suiting her exact daily life needs. Such a feature will enhance the buying experience for a cell phone as well as service plans.
CLICK ON THE IMAGE BELOW TO SEE THE SCREENSHOT
Challenges
In implementing this feature, there are several challenges - both engineering and business - that needs to be overcome. The high level challenges and their proposed solution are listed below.
Engineering Challenges And Solutions
User Profile Sensitivity Indicator For Cell Phone
Problem Statement: How can cell phone(s) be mapped to a User Profile? i.e. given a user profile, how can Amazon Wireless determine which set of cell phones are highly relevant?
Input: Data provided by user: spending capacity per month for service plan (voice only, or voice+ data), spending capacity on device itself, willingness to sign two-year contract for getting a bargain (free) on cell phone.
High Level Solution:
1. Build user's technology profile (i.e. technology footprint) from purchase history if available and rate her on a scale of 1-10. This can be based on user's past technology product purchase from Amazon.com, or relevant reviews on technology products. If user is deemed to be technologically literate
2. For the scenario where technology profile cannot be built predictably because there is no purchase history or there isn't any relevant information in purchase history, then Amazon Wireless can provide broad profiles for user to choose from. The profiles can range from Working Mom, Road Warrior Business Traveler, Small Business Owner, Parent buying phone for their teenager kid, etc).
3. Each profile has to be mapped to a set of cell phones. This can be done at the point of data entry by vendor for each cell phone. This mapping can be further improved by learning about purchases made by users on AmazonWireless.
4. Once the user's technology profile is evaluated, a set of highly relevant cell phones can be provided to user to choose from. Note, that these cell phones have to be overlayed with the relevant service plan depending on the user's willingness to spend on service plan on a monthly basis.
Equalizing Service Plans
Problem Statement: How can cell phone service plans from different vendors be equalized for fair and exact comparison, so that the user doesn't have to compare herself?
Input: User's zip code, service plan data provided by vendors
Solution: While business development can play a key role in equalizing the service plans from different vendors by mandating requirements for doing so (see section 'Business Challenges' below), from the engineering side following can be done:
1. Define categories that define parameters of a service plan - Anytime minutes, Night and Weekend start and end times, Additional minute charge, per SMS charge, etc
2. Using the above parameters, specifically Anytime Minutes, come up with per minute cost for each plan which can used as a guidance to equalize the service plans. The algorithm can also take into consideration the rollover minutes and provide user dollar amount for a range of minutes used for a particular interval (monthly, quarterly, yearly).
Business Challenges
Both the above engineering challenges can also be complemented with solutions from business side as well, as listed below:
All Cell Phones Are not Equal
Assumption: Cell phone vendors provide the data for each device they list on selling on Amazon.
The ability to show highly relevant results to user (depending on their profile) depends on the data for each cell phone provided by the vendor. On business side, if there is a process of getting data from vendors to describe their cell phones depending on the parameters expected by the engineering solution for showing relevant phones, it would greatly improve the search experience and also make the purchase experience more user friendly.
All Service Plans Are not Equal
Amazon Wireless can play a key role in bringing about an order in the chaos of choosing wireless service vendor and also service plans for each vendor. In return for volume business, Amazon can demand uniform structure of service plans from different vendors. A classical example of 99cents song purchase from Apple's iTunes. It was a monumental effort on part of Apple to help music industry see the value of selling single song for 99 cents as opposed to entire album. It was able to do so and now is reaping the rewards.
Making wireless service providers to agree on a uniform service plan structure is no less than a monumental effort, but if done successfully can be a very rewarding deal for Amazon.
NOTE: You can read a similar document capturing How to Improve LinkedIn here.
