After a year of development (and a year after Donald Trump was banned from multiple social media networks), his new unapologetic clone of Twitter went live this week. With that launch there are lots of bugs, an inability to onboard new users, a long waitlist, and of course promises about how things will get better soon.
Everyone knows that the truth hurts. But the launch of Truth Social didn’t have to be this painful. What went wrong and what does the Telecommunications industry need to learn from their mistakes?
“Something went wrong. Please try again”
And ironically since there was no support available on the app, users flooded rival Twitter with requests for help.
So, test your links before and after you go live.
4. Ensure your terms and content usage are clear and understandable
For Truth Social, there also seems to be a conflict in what Data is and is not linked to you. It is becoming more important to users to have control over how their information is used and if the Terms scare them off, they will not complete their onboarding.
5. Most Importantly: You cannot overestimate the value of a great onboarding experience. Get it right.
The onboarding process is the first impression your audience will have, so you need to ensure that your users have a positive first experience. Customers’ expectations of what constitutes an excellent customer experience have shifted radically in the past years. For example, digital services like Netflix and Spotify have trained us to expect a smooth customer journey with fully digital onboarding and quick sign-up that offers easy-to-understand subscription-based pricing to fit our needs. This is something most digitalized Telco brands are still failing to get right. Your onboarding process must be easy, painless, and able to be completed.
The basic thing Trump Media & Technology Group needed to actually get right, to get their audience in the door, they couldn’t get right.
This includes simple email verification.
One user who came to a roadblock near the end of his onboarding reported, "Every time I try to create an account, I don’t receive the email to confirm my email address. No, it’s not in junk mail either. The one time I received the email many hours later and it was already expired.”
Add to that the unexpected surprise of a user actually finishing the onboarding journey after multiple failed attempts, then being told they cannot access the app and have been put on a waiting list hundreds of thousands of names long is an unforgivable sin.
Another onboarding failure? Truth Social cannot be downloaded by anyone using Android, which controls nearly 70% of the global operating system market and 42% of the domestic market. Truth Social is inaccessible to Android users because it has yet to file the required paperwork seeking approval for its listing on the Play Store, Rolling Stone reported.
As Carrie Fischer once famously said, “Instant gratification still takes too long.” Don't make your users wait needlessly.
For Telcos, it helps to have partners who have deep experience with proper onboarding (along with expertise in UX/UI and customer journeys) and to ensure your platform and tools are able to handle the happy problem of getting a high volume of new users.
6. Oh, and make sure your logo design isn’t copied from another company.
Jimmy Kimmel recently chimed in on the disastrous launch of Trump's app saying, "Truth Social has been such a disappointment so far, Trump may have to rename it to 'Don Jr'."
With the revelation that the Truth Social logo is almost identical to another company who is considering legal action, changing the name as well as the logo might be a wise idea.
Your legal department would like to have a word.
With all of that said, Digital Telco apps (or "Digital Attacker Brands") are highly recommended by boardroom thought leaders McKinsey as critical differentiators for Telcos who want the advantages of being first-mover and usually contribute approximately 25% of the overall gross additional subscribers to incumbent telcos within four quarters following their launch.
CSPs also benefit from this success by creating a digital foundation for their business that is future-proof and free from legacy dependencies.
Just be sure to work with a better partner with more experience than Trump's team did.
ABOUT MOFLIX
Moflix gives CSPs a next-generation digital service experience out of the box. Our customer journeys have been built from first principles to deliver what today’s consumers require from their digital service providers. With mobile-first simplicity, our intuitive app lets users sign up and onboard themselves in minutes.
Click Here to Contact Us to learn more about how to do onboarding right.