Boosting CSAT & driving self service with Review & Edit feature

TLDR:
I led design for a team that in ~3 months released a new review & edit feature that has led to over $100K in business savings, increased digital containment, reduced customer onboarding friction, and increased CSAT numbers.

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Role:
As the Design Lead, I oversaw design functions for our product vertical and helped to shape the vision & strategy for how we could continue to drive more value. I led a team of 3 designers, and closely collaborated with engineers, a data analyst, a project manager, a product owner, and many other business stakeholders.

Core Responsibilities:
Product Strategy · Visual Design · Usability Testing · Mockups · User Research · Process Design · Wireframing · Product Design · Design Thinking · Design Direction · User Experience (UX) · Leadership · Cross-functional Collaborations

Background:
Throughout 2020 my team had been working on a wholistic end to end product redesign, focused on improving our customers’ onboarding journey. After assessing our post release numbers, our redesign had a positive impact but we weren’t seeing the expected lift in metrics.

Impact:
To date this feature has led to:

• Over $100K in business savings

• An increase in self-service & reduction in call center traffic

• +12 increase in CSAT scores: 78 > 91 (measured via customer engagement surveys)

• Reduction in friction & increase in digital adoption

Design led discovery

To figure how how to improve, we needed to start with a deeper, more focused discovery. I led our teams discovery efforts to better understand the problem at hand.

Why were customers continuing to call into the care center regarding their recent service request rather than taking advantage of our digital platforms?

I conducted research and analyzed our existing data points and resources to quickly learn as much as possible during our short discovery window.

• Conducted research with Customer service reps (who are our front-line eyes & ears) who talk to our customers everyday.

• Collected qualitative feedback via existing customer research surveys (to learn from feedback our customers were providing us) and segmented findings into key themes.

• Analyzed end to end flow and other data sources to identify gaps & drop-offs which highlighted experience shortcomings & customer frustration points (quantitative).

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From discovery, one large gap we identified was:

Our customers could not easily manage their recently completed digital service request on their own time or in their preferred channels.

Hypothesis: we will reduce calls, increase digital retention, and improve CSAT if we enable our customers to self-serve in managing their recent requests.

Concept wireframing

To address that pain point we explored various concepts that focused on enabling customers to digitally review, edit and manage their recent request. As the design lead, I worked with another designer who helped with the wireframe process.

We started with low fidelity concepting around improving the web and mobile web platform experiences focused on enabling:

• Customers to easily view submission details

• Customer to edit those details

• Allow them to cancel (if needed)

We collaborated closely on the various options making sure they covered the scope of the work.

User Research

We conducted unmoderated research sessions with ~10 volunteers across 3 concepts. This was a task based prototype study where we asked users to edit certain request details and then gathered feedback and other sentiments.

Our testing strategy explored:

• ensuring we had clear and concise content to keep customers aware and informed.

• visual design iterations exploring the perception and value of various UI elements.

• ensuring we were meeting the functionality expectations of our customers when accomplishing the task at hand.

We learned:

• The optimal experience would combined various aspects from each concept.

• Customers appreciated the welcoming feeling & personalization, stating that it helps create a more engaging experience.

• The stacking of the horizontal cards tested better than the side by side layout.

• The more information & context that we could provide, the better the perceived value of the experience would be.

Leveraging our findings we validated our foundational hypothesis & assumptions.

We needed to:

• Make sure customers could easily review the information they submitted in their initial request.

• Create a way for customers to update the information that frequently needed to be changed.

• Allow a customer to easily cancel an existing request if needed.

MVP solution

Revisiting our wireframes

With web being our our most commonly used channel, I focused on designing a responsive web experience. Building on our on our research findings, I partnered with Product, Content and Engineering to define the foundational framework for our MVP experience.

Authentication Page

Our users needed to authenticate to access this feature. As customers logged in, I wanted to provide a moment of delight by leveraging big background imagery to welcome our customers. This imagery reflects the customer’s new space or city.

This large background image approach also created an opportunity for localization enabling each of our operating companies to personalize the experience to their companies location - without changing the overall structure of the page.

Review & Edit page

Next, I created a page where a customer could view details of their request and make updates as needed.

Within the Edit request page I focused on a few main pieces:

• Clear initial instructions card at the top of the page to keep customers informed of the process (mini illustration to add a bit of delight)

• Clear distinction between the information that the customer can edit and information they can just view (due to back-end limitations)

• Provide clear success/ error states, ensuring customer had a clear understanding after they made updates.

Customer Communications

I updated our customers ‘confirmation email‘ and designed a number of new email templates to allow customers to access this feature as well as to keep them informed.

Adding dedicated entry points

One of our post release learnings was that we needed to add more access points in order to ensure customers could easily find & engage with this new feature.

Bridge Page

I designed a new ‘bridge page’ focused on increasing the visibility of and engagement with this new feature. This new page acted as a handoff allowing customers to easily access this feature from our product landing page.

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