Vertu makes the world’s best luxury mobile phones which come with carefully selected exclusive experiences, offers, and assistance to enhance the Vertu customer’s lifestyle. However, in a product-focussed culture services were yet to be considered as a strategic offering to increase stickiness.

Reliance on generic market research data & negligible usage data from devices meant offering on Vertu Life was almost identical for every customer & CRM initiatives were not targeted.

In the hands of private equity investors, there was a renewed emphasis on services as a key offering. 

1. Significant investment was made into targetted market research inivitives
2. Set-up of a robust analytics platform and a workflow to cater to internal consumers - design, marketing & CRM teams
3. Sync data across systems for one-view of a user across the organisation

The onus was on UX to 
1. Improve barriers to registration (and thereby usage of services)
2. Contextual data capture by persuasive UI design & copy
3. Add highly-visible personalization tools to increase stickiness

The on-device registration experience was plagued by a number of issues:

- Cumbersome process with several steps 
- Low discovery post initial skip
- Zero contextual data capture
- Inconsistency in description & usage of terms
- Disconnect between software, customer services & marketing initiatives

So it was back to the drawing board to understand user goals & business goals in the context of personas available. The key user journey was charted and the different methods of information gathering were agreed upon by all stakeholders. 

To cater to the needs of different systems (between which the user data is shared) & operational teams within the organisation, an information audit was done. Information elements were grouped, their triggers listed and capture scenarios were documented. 

Contextual & topical capture of information across different customer touch points  - including customer services & Concierge was listed down. And a plan to implement this in several phases was drawn. 

For the very first stage, an app called Account was created to make it easy for the users to manage the information they choose to share with Vertu. Entry points from all the other services were created to drive home the point that it was a common information pool that was utilised for delivering a personalized service. 

A few other things that I convinced others to do

1. Create a user friendly query interface on analytics
2. Set-up regular sessions between analytics, software, design & marketing