Starting a
conversation
with Jio
"A strong strategist, Sarah elevated the relationship Jio has with their customers."
OVERVIEW
I came in to work with AKQA on their newest and largest client, Jio, an Indian telecoms company with over 443.2 million users, as the UX Copywriter for the Design System Platform (DSP) and copywriter for MyJio. The platform would be the main source of truth about Jio’s products and a resource for employees.
CLIENT
INDUSTRY
Technology, SaaS, Mobile
SCOPE
UX copywriting
Strategy
Tone of voice
The challenge
Research & Understanding
Jio had the opportunity to nurture and connect with 443 million users, and a whole ecosystem of incredible products.
Our UXD team worked to determine an approach, proceeding with a discovery phase through different research methods to understand the problems. We looked at existing customer journeys, benchmarking for other design systems like Material.io, employee testimonials, and website traffic. Our goal was to identify any signs of employee (and customer) frustrations.
Employees need to feel supported at every step of their Jio journey, while customers reaching out to Jio for help were desperate to feel heard, not receive a robotic, cold response. Indian culture is warm and inviting, with families giving an incredibly warm reception to total strangers, which was something we wanted to emulate. Customers in the awareness phase felt suspicious and hesitant; they did not trust Jio as a brand, while customers in the post-sign-up phase were not being nurtured.
KEY INSIGHTS
Through our discovery, research themes started to present themselves and we started to see where the opportunities were to create a better experience for our users.
Indian culture is warm and inviting, which is something we wanted to emulate in the experience itself. We discovered that “showing off” is a strong part of Indian culture – an air of competitive bravado is key to feeling like you’re getting ahead.
This insight led to the exploration of humour and warmth throughout the design system pages, as well as the JioPay customer comms. Phrases like “Did you know that you can recharge faster with...”, or “You’ve recharged, now you’re moving faster than ever...” performed well, as did Indian English expressions like, “We’ve sweetened the pot”, and “Jio welcomes you.”
STRATEGY
A one-size-fits-all approach to the Jio tone of voice was not going to cut it. We needed a scalable solution for a scaling brand.
Working with my strategic partner to define Jio’s verbal identity, we landed on a tone that was caring, warm, inspiring and inviting. We developed an internal framework to help simplify and differentiate each stage of the customer journey, wherever they are in their MyJio contract.
This evolved into a responsive and dynamic tone of voice that could evolve with the customer relationship while maintaining brand consistency, making customers feel special at each step of the way. The tone ranged from a warm handshake at the start of the customer journey, to a fist pump, to a hi-five, to a hug, as the customer became more familiar with the brand. We worked on the HelloJio tone of voice (the app’s voice assistant) as well as JioPay, touching on everything from how we speak about our products to our voice to how we use humour.
Designing content for a mobile-first country
We needed to prioritise a design system was imperative to Jio’s product scalability. We started by creating an external language system and a familiar, highly consistent design system to help employees understand and use over 30 of Jio’s products. Like most successful design systems, we set up a base structure with simple design templates that includes: Typography, Colors, Iconography, Components, Imagery, Spacing, Content Structure, etc.
These pages would also need to be translated into 12 different Indian scripts, so the language had to be simple and readable. Due to the tremendous market size of Jio we wanted to create a completely new user experience. We developed a modular and intuitive content structure to maintain consistency across the pages. Each page is functional and content-rich, with contextual support for all components and elements.
The POUR Framework
Using the POUR framework helped ensure the content was perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust.
Ready to stand out?
It all starts with a chat.