XD / Sprint
Sprint Pitch
Experience Design — Ethnographic Fieldwork & Customer Journey Mapping
Opening an account and going undercover to win the pitch — first-hand retail research that helped Figliulo & Partners land Sprint as its founding client.
The Challenge
Add original ecommerce experience
Figliulo & Partners was a brand-new agency competing against established shops for Sprint's business. The pitch needed a strategic point of view grounded in the reality of Sprint's customers — not assumptions about them. The question I set out to answer: what does it actually feel like to become a Sprint customer?
The Process
Instead of relying on secondhand data, I went into a Sprint retail store and became the customer. I opened an account myself, documenting every step of the journey with timestamps and photographs — from the moment I entered at 6:45 PM to the moment I walked out at 8:00 PM.
While waiting, I turned downtime into research time, interviewing customers on the retail floor: two men in their twenties from Brooklyn, a 35-year-old from Manhattan who had been a Sprint customer for 15 years, and a concierge still in training. Their unprompted quotes — "I had Sprint since I was 13," "I like to come and pay my bill at the store" — became primary evidence in the pitch.
The Solution
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I synthesized the fieldwork into a timestamped customer journey map, pairing photographs, direct quotes, and timing data into a single visual narrative of the account creation experience. The key findings:
75 minutes to open an account. Five minutes to reach the concierge, 50 minutes waiting, and 20 minutes with an agent to capture info, run a credit report, and discuss plans and phones.
No visibility into wait times. The concierge's system couldn't provide customers with any estimate of how long they'd wait.
The plan was a means to the phone. For younger customers, getting a Sprint plan was simply the only way to get an iPhone 5.
The store was the payment channel. Customers without online payment options came in specifically to pay their bills — at the teller or the kiosk — and valued that face-to-face interaction.
The Impact
The research directly informed one of the pitch's creative concepts: a "Switch" app that let customers quickly transfer their existing phone number to Sprint. My fieldwork had documented the exact friction the app was designed to relieve — becoming a Sprint customer took 75 minutes in-store, with no visibility into the wait. The journey map gave the pitch team ground-truth evidence that the agency understood the in-store experience firsthand, and that insight-driven approach helped set Figliulo & Partners apart in the competitive review.
Sprint — then the 24th-largest ad spender in the US — became the agency's founding client, awarding it the above-the-line creative work previously held by Leo Burnett. The agency's first major campaign, "Framily," launched in March 2014.
Role: UX Research, Customer Journey Mapping Client: Sprint Year: 2013 Agency: Figliulo & Partners