Overstock Self-Service Journey Map
Conducting a journey map on customer self-service tools to discover new opportunities to improve customer experiences.
Overview
Overstock Customer Service (CS) became aware of a significant problem in which customer cancellations submitted through their My Account were still being shipped, even if the supplier was unable to cancel the order.
Team:
UX Product Designer (ME! 😉)
Project Manager
Customer Success Manager
Customer Service Manager
Tools i used:
FigJam
Zoom
Asana
JIRA
Impact
- Identify a process with self-service returns that saved Overstock $2 million in cost savings. Benefiting Overstock as well as improving the user experience for customers
- Craft user stories to begin improving experience with self-service returns and cancellations.
- Found opportunities to streamline the customer experience by building a consistent process for the self-service and call-in service experience for cancellations.
Problem
Although orders were confirmed as canceled, customers were receiving the product without any notification that it was on its way.
This resulted in Overstock sending free products and incurring a significant loss of revenue due to both lost products and expensive return fees.
Our findings confirmed this was only happening when customers submitted the cancellation through their My Account Self Service Tools.
Primary objectives:
- Identify any gaps in the cancellation process and explore opportunities to prevent customers from receiving free products unintentionally.
- Reduce costs for Overstock by implementing either policies or processes that would prevent free product from being received by customers.
- By implementing the opportunities identified, improve the customer experience with self-service cancellations.
Research & Understand
To start off this project, I began by researching to understand the problems from the business as well as the customers.
Research Involved:
- Reviewing Net-Promoter Score Surveys and written feedback from customers.
- Analyzed current cancellation user flow
- I heard firsthand from one of our Customer Service Managers about their experiences and how their team handles these customer cases.
Identifying Touch-Points
Customer & CS Agent Touch-Points:
Our team spent several sessions identifying the customer touch-points and at what point do our customer service agents get involved.
Goal:
We wanted to understand the different paths that could occur during the process and pinpoint the stages in the flow where cancellations may happen on the customer's side but not on the partner's side.
*Documented actions, steps, and feelings seen below.
Capturing Emotions & Pain Points
As a team, we carefully analyzed the user data and experiences from our service teams to document the pain points we found.
PRIMAry Findings:
- We discovered significant gaps between customer service and the reporting of these cases. For instance, we realized that the self-service flow was intended to be fully automated, eliminating the need for service agents to handle these specific cases. This led us to identify an opportunity to understand why service agents are involved and how to address it.
- We identified features that enhance the customer experience and benefit Overstock. For instance, we closely examined the reasons and common types of cancellations in this flow, and we discovered that a significant majority were due to price changes. This insight led us to recognize an opportunity to enhance the price match process, potentially reducing cancellations.
- We also discovered that our cancellation messaging is unclear and identified opportunities to improve the copy in areas of the flow, including the self-service tool and email communications. This prompted us to closely examine these touch-points and explore ways to enhance our communication.
*Documented emotions & pain points seen below.
Opportunity Areas
Visualizing and analyzing our findings through this journey map enabled us to identify solutions to user problems that would enhance customer satisfaction, benefit internal customer service teams, and result in annual cost savings of approximately $2 million for Overstock.
This led us to be able to do the following:
- Crafted user stories to improve service experiences.
- Find cancellation policies and processes that need more looking into and potentially incorporate changes too.
- Streamlining customer experiences by building a consistent process for the self-service and the customer service cancellation process.
Conclusion & Actionable Steps
I learned a lot during this project. Not only did the journey map reveal the revenue losses Overstock was experiencing, but it also identified numerous opportunities to enhance the customer experience, both on the website and in our business processes, which could ultimately benefit Overstock and help retain customers.
This project demanded extensive collaboration as we worked with multiple departments, highlighting the importance of staying organized to make sense of all our findings and achieve success.
Next Steps:
- Conducting user interviews & intercept surveys to further validate our findings.
- Build a tool to bridge gap between customer service and engineers to report one off self-service cancellation cases.
- Present to stakeholders with the purpose of getting stakeholder buy in by implementing important updates that would save Overstock lost revenue.
- Streamlining the self-service cancellation flow to be in line with standard service flows.
Thank you for visiting!
Have questions, comments, or feedback? Feel free to reach out and contact me.