Recently I was asked to integrate a loyalty program into Telstra’s digital retail.
I needed to reconsider the customer experience for rewards to introduce points redemption processes for both outright purchase and ongoing repayment plans. I also needed to introduce member authentication to the flow, to enable personalisation and rewards membership functions.
The challenge
Strengthen value propositions and customer engagement by adding points redemption to retail
Migrate sales and support services to Salesforce and Adobe Experience Manager
Introduce personalisation and authentication to an anonymous retail journey
The problem to solve
To design feasible and desirable personalisation, I needed to redesign the customer flow
When was the earliest that an influential and viable personalised price could be shown?
How to balance additional complexity of points currency with the desirability of rewards pricing?
How to design an engaging experience that had a viable backstage process?
The work done
Analyse competitor strengths and weaknesses with heuristic evaluation
Synthesise customer experience principles to influence decisions
Co-create the experience to understand the best fit within constraints
Test the customer experience with an iterative prototype
Monitor engagement, conversions and feedback after launch
Strengths, weaknesses and opportunities
To answer the question, “why buy from Telstra?”, we needed to synthesise design principles for our rewards program so that we could evaluate our design ideas against a ‘north star’.
I used a heuristic analysis to evaluate 12 competitor rewards programs. For each key experience, noting moments of joy, integrations, touchpoints, frustrations, trust and transparency, and the ease of use including constraints of how and when rewards currencies could be used.
I synthesised the following rules of thumb from what was working, and what wasn’t.
Key findings
Based on key findings from my research, I synthesised the following rewards customer experience principles to inform service design.
Drive rewards program engagement
Motivate sign-in with message placements
Progressively personalise via authentication states
Demonstrate rewards value, early
Make rewards easy to join and use
Maintain trust and keep the ‘price promise’
Make clear the terms of repayment plans
Raise awareness before points expire
Take the complexity out of eligibility rules
Maintain visibility of points across channels
Ensure viability and sustainability
Design for compatibility with future products
Join customer flows for membership and shop websites
Prioritise opportunities that are within constraints
Balance friction and rewards functions
Evaluate customer feedback early on mobile and desktop prototypes
Plan for consistent process across consumer and business and across outright and ongoing plans
Preparing for usability testing
After facilitating co-design sessions with key stakeholders from product, design, technology, legal, and customer service, I evaluated 4 options for flows against each of the 4 customer experience principles.
I prepared an interactive prototype of the proposed solution for message placements, progressive personalisation and authentication, rewards redemption, and discounted price.
I facilitated evaluative qualitative usability testing to gather early customer feedback on the design.
We learned
How message placements could influence sign-in behaviour
The extent that the features and functions for redemption had met expectations
The extent that membership and shop journeys were joined and seamless
What the friction points were and where customers needed support
