Design renewal experience for Amazon
How I scaled renewals for Amazon Fire TV Hotspot
using any device
at anytime
from anywhere!
Note: Because of the non-disclosure agreement, some of the information on this page has been replaced with fictitious ones or has been blurred out.
Process
Project at a glance
The big idea
Allow customers to renew their Fire TV Hotspot membership in one step from anywhere, at anytime.
Biggest benefits
Customer can renew anywhere, anytime
Assured renewal for business
Biggest challenge
Influencing different teams
Scalable: Enabling to use any method to renew
Sustaining the experience after implementing
Fire TV Hotspot?
Fire TV Hotspot allows customers to enjoy Amazon Prime membership while watching shows on Amazon Fire TV stick using Amazon WiFi!
Team composition
Our 2-pizza team
I was the only UX designer on the team (Guardian tells more about Amazon’s 2-pizza teams)
Amazon Fire TV Hotspot suffers a setback
… with COVID-19 lesser number of customers were renewing
Our customers were not renewing frequently because COVID-19 was officially declared in Jan 2020
There were no clear insights into the customer behaviour or how we can solve this.
The rate of customer renewal was dropping over quarter (representative graph)
Section 2
Research
What I knew
Started with what we were aware about and what steps were taken
Largest Market share:
20% market penetration in India source
Mode of payment:
Auto-renewals:
Enabled by default.
Reminders for renewal
3 reminders over email and SMS
2 reminders over phone
Pre-design methods of renewal
What were the methods that customers used for renewing?
FireTV Hotspot used same renewal system as Amazon Prime.
We did not have our own dedicated system for renewal.
What I needed to find out
Answers to these questions will help us solve the problem
Research outline
1. Who are the users?
Customer demographics
2. Customer stories
Use cases for (1) Renewal (2) Non-renewal
3. Problems faced
What is stopping renewals?
4. Motivations
What would drive the renewals?
Selecting and interviewing customers
Categories of customers for interviewing
Process of screening and interviewing
Process used to call and gather customer data. Gift card to incentivize participation.
Maintaining logs and synthesis
How do we keep and process raw data?
Excel sheets are still the best way to log data!
For all the customers we called, we maintained careful notes and logs in shared Excel sheet.
Analysis
Data synthesizing workshop
I ran a 4-hours long data synthesis workshop.
Photos from the data synthesis workshop and it’s outcome
Shocking Discoveries!
We were targeting wrong audience all along!
Retired people (60+) make up most of our viewers!
And about 50% times, young people purchased it for them!
Yet, the marketing target was the youth!
Other findings
Finding 2. Customers find existing process tedious and rigid
Renewal over app and website are insufficient to meet the customer demands
Customer quotes
Finding 3. Customers miss the notifications for renewal
Why customers miss our notifications?
Reasons why customers miss our notifications
Finding 4. About 10% customers turn off auto-renewals
Our customers want better control on money, so they turn off auto-renewal.
The number of videos on YouTube shows how intensely people want to turn off auto-renewal!
Finding 5: Customers renew because they like our Prime Videos and WiFi
Customers who renewed reported that they liked our WiFi and Content.
Section 3
Strategy
Customer journey map for consensus & prioritization
I facilitated a full day customer journey workshop to present my findings and decide the way ahead.
This helped me to build consensus within the team. And link business goals with user needs.
“As-is” customer journey map shows all the findings visually. “Would-be” map helped to identify opportunities and build consensus.
Measuring success
“You can’t improve what you don’t measure.” – Peter Drucker, Management Guru.
My responsibility: defining the UX measures for success
UX measures
Measured by
Business impact
Renew without any problems ≥ 90%
- Usability tests before launch
- User insights after launch
- Less expenditure on call-centre
- Increased retention
- Help customers serve themselves
Time for renewing < 30 seconds
- Usability tests before launch
- Amazon Quicksight data after launch
- Increased retention and revenue
Users satisfaction > 50%
- Asking and comparing ratings
- Early problem detection
- Increased loyalty
Vision statement
Anyone can renew,
using any device,
at anytime,
from anywhere!
Section 4
Implementation
How 60+ Year Olds pay?
Using a QR code for payments
Challenge: I needed to find out a simple way of paying which elderly customers dont need to learn from scratch.
Scan-and-Renew over TV
Showing renewal notifications and QR code for renewal payment on Fire TV
Fast renewal process
Creating concepts on Figma
Challenge: I needed to create an experience which notifies the customer, shows the QR code and is not annoying!
Concepts for renewing over TV!
I explored what would be best experience to allow customers to renew on their TVs
Concept evaluation
| Concept 1: Floating notification | Concept 2: Full screen notification | Concept 3: Featured rotator | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Task completion rate | 80% | 100% | 100% |
| Time-to-task : Lower percentile | 50 second | 20 seconds | 24 seconds |
| Satisfaction rating | 3.5 stars | 4 stars | 4.5 stars |
Evaluation
Using the parameters, I evaluated the concepts. The featured rotator was finalized.
Usability testing
Testing
Here, it shows the feature rotator option and “Expt 3” refers to iteration so that in the recording we know what was tested.
Interaction design
Interactions for self-service and help on-screen
I created all the interactions and that the users can use to self service.
Out-of-scope: Improving Overall CX
Pushing business to improve overall customer experience (CX)
What other methods of payment do elderly prefer?
Preferred payment method for elderly users
Cash + Mobile payment = 75%
Non-Digital: pay by cash!
Elderly who dont have a smartphone can call us and pay with cash!
Customer can use a simple phone call to schedule cash pick up!
I wanted to make renewals easy for customers who dont use smart phones. Hence I influenced the Amazon Last Mile (who deliver parcels to doorstep) to allow picking of cash
Cash on delivery workflow
I influenced Amazon Last Mile team (who deliver parcels to doorsteps). They finally agreed on using their cash-on-delivery system.
Easily find our number
Customers can find our number easily!
Renewal number sticker on Fire TV remote
Sticker pasted on Fire TV remote so that our customer can quickly call our helpline for any problems … and renewals.
Bonus!
Simply Ask Alexa to renew!
Influencing Amazon Alexa to build the command to renew
Using Alexa for renewal
This workflow shows that Alexa checks if customer has an Alexa device and knows who is asking for renewal.
Influencing Alexa Skills team was the biggest challenge.
Are our users happy?
Simplifying feedback collecting UX
Asking to rate and get paid on renewal!
This is what I designed for gathering customer’s feedback more effectively. We enticed them with a gift card.
For Service Agents: Faster fault finding
Help network engineers solve problems faster for happier customers
Improved the visualization of fault so that fault is highlighted in red.
Worked with engineering team for implementation in AWS.
Supporting marketing
I worked with marketing to create flyers and ad campaign
To convey a good customer experience, I helped marketing create promo material.
I worked with a design agency to help maintain the quality bar of the customer kit.
Section 5
Sustaining
Dashboard: Catching customers before they churn!
Getting rid of problems is one step,
next I needed to make sure that the solutions are sustained.
Solution
Renewals dashboard
I helped create this AWS QuickSight dashboard to help our business track and sustain the solutions
Getting feedback from field agents
Field agents can tell what was their experience using the Field App (on Fire Tablet) and get rewards for that!
Continuous improvement: Give incentive to field-agents to provide feedback
Field engineers are not fluent in English hence local language was necessary.
Section 6
Results
Comparison of old and new experience
The new design definitely improved the CX
Based on the pre- and post-launch usability tests and QuickSight data, I quantified the improvement for our business
UX success
Task completion rate ≥ 90%
90% of users were able to renew without any problems
Time-to-task < 30 seconds
Renewals take no more than 30 seconds.
Increased satisfaction > 50%
50% more user satisfaction than what it was
Business success
Renewals are up by 25%
By January 2021, the renewals were up by 25%
More than 70% are renewing by themselves
Self-driven renewals are up! Customers can easily renew by themselves!
Marketing success
90% churn prediction accuracy
QuickSight dashboard alerted accurately 90% of times which customers are at risk of churn. Marketing team addressed them quickly.
50% more acquisitions
New customers were acquired at a rate of 50% more than what was expected!
Renewals are up!
The renewals were up again and back to normal inspite of COVID!
What could’ve been done differently?
One user with multiple emails
When one user has multiple email addresses, the system should be able to see it as one user.
Zero call-centre calls
With a great CX, I'd target complete self-serve without needing to call the call centre.
Making systems seamless
The user should be able to leave one system and continue on the other system.
Improve accessibility
The systems could be more accessible to people requiring assistive technology.
Shut down!
Unfortunately this division of Amazon was shutdown in September 2022
They displayed this on their website.