Koodo

Making Billing Understandable

Context

Billing is an important part of the customer experience. Every time when customers pay their bill, they expect no surprises. For Koodo customers, it was a little different — billing was roughly a decade old. Systems and experience was outdated to the point where we had a lot of opportunities for improvements.

In 2019, it cost almost $7M in billing related calls. With this billing redesign, we wanted to create a billing experience where the customer no longer needs to call.

My Role

  • Understand why the bill is unclear to customers

  • Gather insights from stakeholders and cross-functional teams

  • Create wireframes, mockups, and prototypes

  • Conduct usability testing

Success Metrics

  • Reduce the number of billing related calls

  • Reduce confusion in navigating the bill

  • Increase customer satisfaction and understanding of their bill

Discovery

Before getting to solutions — we needed to find out what caused the problems. What are the key pain-points? What do customers struggle with? What do they mostly call about? This was done through conversations with the stakeholders, billing team, customer reps, as well as the Product owners.

Design Approach

Key Themes

Bill Breakdown

Based on our research, customers didn’t care if their bill is what they expected — only when it’s a surprise. Customers found it unclear how the charges were broken down. Monthly charges, partial charges, usage charges, add-ons were few of the things that were consistently questioned. And it makes sense, because, the existing bill does not give context within each charge. Nor does it provide additional help to find out what caused the charge.

Throughout research with various sources like VOC, focus groups, help article feedback, Koodo Assist, community feedback, mobile masters team, and customer emails, we found out additional insights that were documented to provide actionable changes in the redesign.

Breakdown of the existing Koodo billing page

Ideation

Once we had a clearer understanding of the problem, I set up conversations with stakeholders to envision how the redesigned bill may look. We started off with the layout as that seemed to be the number one issue with the existing bill.

We wanted to highlight and priortize certain elements that would help customers understand their bill easier.

  1. Highlight important changes to their account

  2. Amount owing + CTA

  3. Other charges + credits

  4. Bill breakdown

  5. Total

  6. Sticky footer (on scroll)

  7. Transaction history

  8. Bill notifications

  9. PDF bills

New billing layout

Building

At this point, I had a clear understanding of the problem, as well as alignment with the stakeholders. I put together various scenarios in wireframes. To validate — tested them using guerrilla and usability testing.

Some of the early wireframes

After many iterations, considering different edge cases and error states, we were ready to move to hi-fidelity mockups.

Hi-Fidelity Mock-ups

Results

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.

Learnings

  • User test throughout the project to get early feedback from customers

  • Customers don’t like surprises when it comes to bills

  • Think about customer’s existing mental models