I owned and delivered multiple order, delivery tracking, and RMA (returns, repairs) customer experience improvements. We launched multiple net-new customer signals (statuses, tracking, refund summaries, etc.) that contributed to Google Store’s NPS increase of 50+ points, and 57% decrease in customer support calls, in 2022.
INTRODUCTION
I was tasked with beginning an overhaul of the account/order self-service area of the gGtore experience, a set of domains that had not received enough focus since the original inception of Google Store in 2016. My team and I successfully laid a solid foundation of experience principles to guide the future development of a robust, self-serve and support-mediated customer support and retention UX, which is evident in 2022's stellar launch metrics. The Account Hub is flexible enough to support post-purchase growth and feature scaling in 2023 and beyond.
MY ROLE
| Design Lead/Manager Led a squad consisting of 4 UX Designers, 2 UX writers, and 1 UX program manager, in partnership with 4 PMs, 1 product director, UX research, and multiple frontend and backend engineering teams. |
OVERVIEW
In 2021 I was tasked to spin up a UX team for Google Store’s post purchase experience. What I inherited was far below industry standard: it was brittle from years of neglect, and suffered from critical failure points such as:
- Shipment tracking was often inaccurate (update lag, broken links)
- Several key user journeys - returns, repairs, trade-ins - lacked adequate status information
- Support calls had long wait times and inefficient agents, including several transfers and having to repeat information
- Customers had trouble finding and navigating to their account information, including tracking and repair information, on our site
- Customers were not promptly notified about various shipping exceptions (delays, cancellations, etc.) resulting in confusion and frustration.
I estimated it would take several years of feature launches to catch up this debt. This was time we did not have - so I knew it was critical to ruthlessly prioritize our feature roadmap, and ship the most important improvements by our fall launch (Q3 2022).
ROADMAP IDEATION WORKSHOP - REMOTE EDITION
To help the team identify the highest lifts and largest gaps, I organized a large, cross-functional design thinking workshop for 25+ colleagues across product, UX, and engineering.
Everyone was still working at home due to COVID, so I designed it to work remotely. Jamboard (a digital whiteboard built into Google Meet), pre-built activity templates in a Google Slide deck, and a detailed agenda (with extra time padding to allow for “digital file shuffling”) allowed me to effectively facilitate the workshop online.
"How are you?" was a simple but effective warm-up icebreaker. Pandemic isolation was top of mind, and people appreciated a venue to share their thoughts. This got everyone comfortable with speaking candidly through video chat.
Jobs to be Done forced PMs and engineers to take a break from worrying about prioritization and complexity, and think about features from a customer-centric lens instead. Using a "mad-lib" template, small groups established narratives for different jobs to be done, and the different personas doing them.
Crazy 8s is a fast sketching exercise, designed to help people push past their most conventional (and potentially least innovative) ideas, and giving everyone's creative impulses space to flourish. A follow-up vote established alignment and resonance behind the group's best ideas.
Decision matrices are a great way to have candid conversations about feature complexity vs. potential impact. Even quiet engineers can become animated during this exercise! Note: In a workshop with many participants, I use a “scatter plot” methodology to be more efficient. General consensus becomes easy to see; discussion can be reserved for outliers.
By the second day’s end, we had brainstormed and aligned on 2022's focus areas: Self-service and pre-emptive support, as well as several exciting idea sketches. This cross-functional alignment was key for my product and engineering partners to proceed with roadmap execution.
Customers who are able to discover and navigate to their order status can satisfy their own post-purchase anticipation; our data suggests this would eliminate 60% of our support call volume. While no one likes unpleasant surprises (e.g. shipping delays), prompt notification could lessen frustration. Research shows that customer churn can result from a single negative customer experience. Providing sensible options in these use cases - such as canceling delayed orders - potentially saves us from losing the customer forever.
-- Weiling, post-workshop analysis and summary
LEADING DESIGN
As UX lead, I made the following my key responsibilities:
- Be the UXer with the crystal ball. Being deeply embedded in product strategy gave me insight into what my product partners were pursuing over the next few years. I brought this context to every design review, and used it to provide informed guidance and direction.
- Optimize team efficiency by ensuring every designer builds (and contributes) toward a single, parsimonious design system. This was challenging for some junior designers at first, as they weren’t used to constantly evaluating whether their design could scale to accommodate future plans. But as time went on, much of our feature design work became faster and faster, as we started to view them through the lens of extending our existing framework.
- Be the post-purchase evangelist for my fellow UX leads. The post-purchase space is vast. Interactions and features being developed on sister squads - pre-purchase, conversion funnel, or brick-and-mortar experience - often had design implications in post-purchase. I consulted with these squads, participated in their design reviews, and taught them how to build the post-purchase experiences they needed, without having to commit my own team resources.
GUIDING DESIGN PRINCIPLES
I authored a set of design principles for my designers and my extended partners, to establish how the UX team makes design decisions.
- Clear. Focus on best guidance at every step. Clarity doesn’t mean ALL THE INFO - it means the RIGHT info.
- Predictable. Something that is predictable means it's intuitive and easy. This is especially important to a user who is potentially stressed, short on patience, and already unhappy with us. When something is NOT predictable, customer feels lost and frustrated.
- Customer-centric. Understand, empathize, offer real help options, and be prompt. Say what you'll do, and do what you say. Loyalty and retention are a long game, made up of the sum of many small, delightful experiences.
- Scalable. Great change comes in phases, so don't “build yourself into a closet.” Every first project is the start of a framework that must scale. This logic should be at the heart of every design proposal.
- Don't ask what you already know. How frustrating is it when you’re on your third transfer to a customer service agent, and they ask you AGAIN for your address? Utilize what you know. Manual input should be a last resort.
FEATURE LAUNCHES IN 2022
The goals and objectives from the ideation workshop guided the post-purchase squad's roadmaps. My product managers were responsible for the final stackrank of features; but because of our workshop alignment, none of the features came as a surprise. Each feature shipped in 2022 moved the needle for either self help, or pre-emptive support. Here's a partial list of features we launched in 2022 alone:
Detailed tracking
We evaluated, approved, and integrated Narvar’s forward logistics statuses with GStore. As a result, we were able to provide customers eight additional detailed order statuses, and an informational, branded tracking page.
New design for Order History and Order Details
We carried over our brand new signals to a completely revamped Order History and Order Details design framework. The new design didn’t just bring these pages up to par with the Google Store design system - it set up a foundational framework and a UX interaction patterns library that is predictable, intuitive, and extensible towards future features.
Transactional Transparency
We analyzed dozens of uses cases and structured our ledgers for refunds, purchases, and trade-ins to be short, sensible, skimmable and structured. Our primary goal was to ease customer anxiety about exactly where their money is. These ledgers would update after every major transactional event, so that Account Hub became the source of truth for customers wondering about their order status.
Clarifying, Actionable E-mails
We launched new emails to keep customers well informed during common happy path deviations, e.g. backorder delivery updates, payment hold notifications and re-validation flows, and detailed cancellation reasons (out of stock, address validation errors, fraud detected, unexpected transit exceptions)
Same-day, walk-in repairs
This was an extremely cross-collaborative project involving 10+ teams. When it became clear that people were struggling with keep track of every country’s feature nuances, I drew up meticulous flow diagrams for each region, to ensure every detail was documented clearly. We later won a product-area wide recognition award from our SVP for its successful launch!
Accurate EDD
Google store was giving estimated delivery date ("EDD") ranges up to 10 days long, in order to "not mislead the customer." But in doing so, we were unnecessarily dragging our reputation and losing customers by being uncompetitive. I worked side-by-side with our logistics and transportation teams to close the range gap for multiple shipping scenarios. Then, I led an 18-person workshop to align the content strategy and consistency of our EDD messaging. The result: GStore now messages more precise EDDs end-to-end with confidence, from checkout to delivery confirmation.
Signature optional
GStore used to require signatures for delivery, which caused complaints since some customers could not be present to sign for their package. In response, GStore lifted signature requirements, but this led to a rash of porch theft and mis-delivered packages. In order to give control back to the customers and not assume intent, we gave customers the choice to opt out of delivery signatures for certain shipment types.
CHALLENGES
“Rome wasn’t built in a day.” Similarly, bringing post-purchase completely up-to-date wouldn’t happen in just one year. Technical and resourcing constraints blocked us from launching the ideal experience for some particularly complex features. I recall one conversation during a product review, when my manager noted some inconsistent patterns in our flows. Right there, in front of engineering and product leadership, he suggested we were not thinking holistically enough.
I explained that outdated UI was a temporary setback I would accept, if it allowed me to “turn on the signals” needed to fix a critical customer journey this year. Given the results of our workshop, we firmly believed this would net us a greater reward come launch. I reminded the group that we were carefully weighing trade-offs and backlogging larger changes for later.
“Does that sound good?” I asked.
“It doesn’t just sound good,” he admitted after a moment. “...it sounds right.”
RESULTS
The post-purchase squad’s first year (2022) was action-packed and successful. By doubling down on self-help and pre-emptive support, we directly contributed to a whopping 57% decrease in support calls, exceeding our already ambitious goal of 50%. We also enjoyed a 5x rise in visits to Order History and tracking, as users successfully queried Google Store for their order information.
By doing our part to support users in the post-purchase journey, we also enjoyed a total-store 50+ point NPS increase - something that our SVP still calls out as a first-in-history record!
SCALING TEAM EFFICIENCY FOR 2023
By mid-2022, headcount investment in the post-purchase experience had grown four-fold. Three new PMs and one new director were onboarded into my group.
Now outnumbered 1 to 5, I knew I could not support roadmap ideation and planning in the same way as last year. Instead, I consulted 1:1 with each PM to understand their needs and desired brainstorming outcome. I drew up a design thinking workshop plan for each PM. I recruited design volunteers from adjacent orgs, and trained them to facilitate these workshops. I authored a workshop brief, guidance deck, exercise suggestions for each facilitator, and had them pair up with each other to facilitate note taking.
For my director, I designed and facilitated two workshops: a prioritization workshop for us and our key org partners (e.g. directors+ from transportation, logistics, hardware systems, help and support); and a 2-day feature brainstorm for the product managers.
The key to workshops - especially leadership workshops - is not just brainstorming features, but alignment building with critical collaborators in the room, openly conversing about conflicting priorities and complex dependencies.
My federated approach to workshops allowed me to facilitate a grand total of 8 ideation workshops (one in New York City, seven in Mountain View) with only one additional UX headcount. Our workshops have provided the baseline data that each PM used to construct their 2023 roadmaps and feature proposals.