Intact / Belairdirect billing redesign

Company
Intact
Belairdirect (Subsidiary)

Role
UX/UI Designer

Duration
6 months
Fall and Winter 2019

Collaborated with
Business Analysts (1)
UX Designer (1)
QA (2)
Development team (3)
PM (1)
Other teams

Summary 

This is a project that was completed while I was working at Intact / Belairdirect, a large insurance and financial services provider in Canada.

I worked with another designer, developers, and multiple cross-functional teams to redesign a billing system used by millions of customers. I was responsible for redesigning the billing experience on desktop, and worked with another designer to add a new billing experience to the Android and iOS applications.

The problem 

Intact serves an extremely large and diverse set of customers, all with slightly different needs from their insurance provider. One of those needs is how they pay online. I was tasked with redesigning the online billing and payment experience on the website. I worked with another designer on the mobile experience. At the beginning of the project, the Intact / Belairdirect iOS and Android applications had no billing or payment functionality.

Existing system

There were multiple reasons to update the billing experience: 

📞

Reduce call volume to call centers about billing

Call centers are expensive. Enough said!

💳

Offer new ways to pay (e.g. Google Pay)

We were aware that many customers used new payment methods, and we wanted to offer this flexibility

📅

Increase the clarity of online payment schedules. 

Insurance payment schedules can get complicated, and were a frequent source of contention.

App reviews highlighted that our current billing features weren’t meeting customer expectations.

Research

I worked with different teams and colleagues to collect as much information about the existing system before proceeding to any design. 

Internal Research

As part of our internal research, we dove deep into what currently existed and existing issues.
We:

  • Worked with Business Analysts to map out existing payment workflows, including many, many edge cases 
  • Ran a focus group with Call Center agents to discuss pain points in terms of billing 
  • Collected statistics on the different payment plans and methods our customers were currently using. 
  • Analyzed app reviews 
  • Read previous interviews conducted with our customers 
Conducting research with call center agents, who helped us understand the frustrations customers have in regards to billing. Timbits are always a welcome form of compentsation!

Competitive Analysis

I worked with one of our user researchers to get a sense of what features our competitors were offering. We examined 10 direct competitors (Insurance companies) in depth, across both the Canadian and U.S. markets. We also examined the billing systems of over 40 different services from different industries, such as personal finance and telecommunications.

Our competitive analysis revealed that the Canadian market is behind in terms of payment options, and there were lots of opportunities for us to improve our offerings.
We spent a lot of time looking at both mobile and web billing experiences.

The research gave us several key insights into the billing experience. 

💸

Our customers expect to pay how they want

Customers had changing expectations of how they should be able to pay their bills online. As more payment methods are adopted such as Google Pay and Apple Pay, our customer expect us to support these methods.

😧

Billing is emotionally sensitive 

Money is important. With our system, it was important to make sure that customers felt safe and confident that our system was secure. Adoption would heavily depend on how designs felt on an emotional level. 

💻

Customers often prefer do-it-yourself options

One of the themes that emerged very strongly from our customers is the importance of self-serve options. If customers can handle administrative details themselves, it’s perceived as a convenient and flexible option. 

Redesign 

Usability testing 

This project involved lots of usability testing as we experiment with different designs. I was responsible for all testing on the web version, and my colleague conducted mobile tests. We used both moderated and unmoderated testing. 

Unmoderated usability testing was an especially useful way to gather insights from a large number of customers.

Some usability issues were discovered, and a few design choices were changed based on testing. 

The new online billing system

The new billing homepage was designed to offer a better view of outstanding contracts.
The credit card was redesigned to be much more flexible, allowing for custom payment amounts and dates.
Clear system feedback is important to let users know payments were successfully processed.
We added a significant amount of features to the mobile application, which reduced the strain on our support teams.

Measuring outcomes 

  • Within the first month, we received over 7,500 payments using the new system. 
  • Completion rates on payment forms were increased by over 20% to 81%. 
  • Call volume to our call centers in regards to billing was significantly decreased. Unfortunately I don’t have the statistics for this one!