Overview & Business Case

Operating within the competitive landscape of government-subsidized lifeline space, Truconnect, a prominent MVNO telecom company, navigates the challenge of acquiring unbanked customers amidst a complex web of manual onboarding processes burdened by extensive government paperwork.

Recognizing this friction as a critical barrier to growth, I joined Truconnect in 2015 with the mission to streamline customer acquisition through automation. My overarching goal was to drive customer expansion across online and offline channels, while maximizing customer lifetime value and operational efficiency through a revamped website.

Task & Solution

Creating a functional website. My objective was to turn the Truconnect web site from a mostly manual ‘brochureware’ site to something functional where customers could engage through purchasing data plans and devices, as well as sign up for the primary lifeline services.

Automating manual forms.  At the core of the needs for Truconnect was the desire to allow users to sign up for the California lifeline service. This is the affordable care act that provides unbanked low-income residents a way to receive free internet and cell phone services, while Truconnect would receive a reimbursement back from the state. For this to happen, users would have to sign up through a manual form. The task at hand was to automate this by allowing users to sign up online and flow the request to a back-end fulfillment channel.

Creating new acquisition channels. As the growth product manager, my role was to not only create a working viable web site, but to bring in qualified traffic at a reasonable price. To do this, created a user acquisition budget, raising money internally, and opened up several paid and organic channels including Google adwords, Facebook ads, SEO and display ads.

Results

After 18 months of the new web site running with the new paid and organic growth channels we almost 3x’d our user base, going from 150k lifeline customers to almost 500k, while increasing our one year CLTV from $80 to $125. Our top line revenue grew from ~$20M to ~60M, which was an enormous success.