Improved subscription collection by $3M/month
Stash, a start-up fintech company, worked on continual improvements to their app and website services to improve income while making experiences better for the customer.
Before our work together, the Stash platform — and not the customer — selected from which account customer subscription fees would be withdrawn. Rather than the customer having agency, Stash withdrew the customer’s fee by identifying which of the customer’s accounts thad the most assets. However, bypassing customer choice created a user environment that restricted customer freedom and privacy.
This unpredictable experience and the issues surrounding fee collection transparency in the UX created a customer retention issue, which directly affected profit margins.
Through our engagement, I helped improve fee collection transparency and predictability by giving users the ability to select a “preferred payment method” for paying subscription fees.
My work included accessibility implementation, content and UX auditing, and content testing. I worked very closely cross-functionally with product and UX design to implement the best solution for users.
Obstacles/Limitations
- Super tight deadline to work with UX, accessibility, research, and engineering to get this done
- We had to work within the existing component library to implement a simple solution. I aligned the team around a particular component and adapted content to deliver a high-performing user experience
Shifts in Thinking
I learned that a small company gives the UX team more control to make updates on an iterative basis if they keep an open communication channel with engineering. This improved my ability to work quickly and stay nimble as stakeholder requirements changed hourly and product often needed same-day delivery
Working closely with engineering saved a lot of time in terms of understanding technical limitations, and also talking them into stretching here and there where it would make a big difference for the customer.
Learnings
- My communication with engineering improved. Even though I began my career as a software engineer and spoke their language, my understanding of how engineering worked in an evolving UX environment expanded.
User problem
Who is impacted by this? All Subscribers
What are their pain points? Lack of transparency and predictability around subscription fee payment methods
Opportunity & impact
What is the opportunity?
Ease of use and greater transparency for customers
Decrease in support calls related to subscription fee collections
Increase in subscription fee collection success rate
Outcome
An uptick of up to 47.03% of PPM usage in the first month, increasing our subscription fee collection
A selection of screens
Entry points to preferred payment method
Manually set up your preferred payment method
Enter or replace your credit or debit card preferred payment method
Change payment method
Next steps
Usability exploration into the drop-offs
User interviews
Content and UX audits and reviews