2degrees Website transformation

2degrees arrived on the scene in 2009, transforming the New Zealand telco market, breaking a duopoly and driving prices down for consumers by giving Kiwis the mobile phone company they deserved.

As their customer base rapidly grew past one million, they embarked on a digital transformation, which included a new customer-facing website and self-service portal ('Your 2degrees'). As their trusted digital partner since soon after launch, Catch Design was tasked with designing and building a brand new customer-centric, mobile responsive website for existing and future customers that delivered a world-class user experience for the upfront learn and explore, end-to-end online purchase, customer engagement and loyalty, and self-service journeys.

The 2degrees Digital Marketing Manager explains, “We began life as a start-up. Our investment went heavily into building network infrastructure. We created an online presence using a patchwork of web and social tools, but it was time to invest in delivering a seamless experience that equally serves mobile and desktop visitors”.

For the customer-facing website, 2degrees needed a robust and future-proofed solution for growth and new technology.

The 2degrees new website was redesigned and built from the ground up through a customer-centric, outcome-focused lens. The Discovery phase involved multiple stakeholder engagement, ideation and prioritisation workshops, with a clear view of what nirvana could look like.

A new IA was created and tested with real users in parallel with brand-new customer journeys for exploring, purchasing, self-service and customer engagement.

We also worked closely with their creative agency to bring the refreshed 2degrees brand to life in digital. We created a new mobile-first, component-driven digital design system.

We built the public-facing website on SilverStripe. We also built the front-end layer for the online shop and self-service portal, which was built on Oracle's ATG platform.

Numerous integrations with 2degrees core backend systems enabled a seamless user experience for existing customers, roaming rates lookup tool, base marketing engagement campaigns, help and support and coverage maps.

The result was an award-winning new digital experience for 2degrees' current and future customers. We launched 2degrees' new public-facing website in July 2015, on time and budget. Mobile traffic grew three-fold, and the bounce rate for these visitors was halved. Overall, the bounce rate on the site dropped by 9%, and time spent on the site by desktop visitors increased. The new design was also awarded a Best Award for Interactive Design.

With the site better serving mobile visitors with support queries, 2degrees also saw a 1,000% increase in Help and Support page views. This reduced the cost of supporting existing customers, as more chose to access support information online rather than through Customer Care.

With its previous web platform, 2degrees utilised multiple microsites to get tactical campaigns to market quickly. The new website build improved their internal marketing team's control over content management (including content approval workflows and scheduled publishing), resulting in faster, cheaper go-to-market campaigns and comms. For larger product launches, such as iPhone and Samsung handset announcements, we consistently enabled 2degrees to be the quickest to market over their larger competitors.

“Moving away from microsites is a positive move for our brand and eliminates disruption to the user journey.” Digital Marketing Manager, 2degrees.

2degrees was the first telco in the world to launch a mobile-first responsive website and was voted Best Digital Experience in the Telco industry across Australasia.