Domestic & General
- Digital service transformation
Domestic & General recognised the need to transform its digital offering. This specifically meant the need to make customers aware of their online services, such as booking a repair, and also improve the current experience to help customers self-serve more, rather than have to interact with someone.
Objective
My role was to lead a team of designers to improve the experience of online services in order to help users complete self-service tasks more easily.
At the time, to access Domestic & General’s online services, customers needed to register for My Account. This involved them providing the right details to verify who they are before they could register.
Approach
Historically, the way customers registered for My Account was to provide their name, email address, home address and contact details, as well as create a password. Once logged in, in order to be able to see their plans online, customers then had to manually import each plan one by one by providing the plan number.
We began by reviewing analytics data where we found the success rate of customers importing their plan was lower than expected. Error rates were also high here, which suggested customers were having issues matching the plan number they were entering with the details they had provided at registration.
Next, I reviewed session recordings where I observed users consistently seeing the error message that the plan number was not recognised. This suggested that these users were potentially struggling to correctly locate and enter the correct plan number.
In order to really achieve the main objectives set out, we knew this part of the journey was a key area to improve. Simply, if users were not able to successfully view their plans within My Account, it meant they would not be able to access the self-service journeys at all.
Based on this, I decided to review what information we needed to capture from the customer at the point of registration, to then verify against the plan number. Working with teams from different areas of the business, specifically information security, we realised we could simplify the registration process by removing certain fields that were not essential. As part of this review, we also decided to ask for the plan number upfront so users could address any errors earlier on in the registration process. By doing this it also meant that when the user then logged into My Account, the plan would already be there, removing the need to import and therefore reduce the steps involved in the journey.
Previous user flow (happy path)
Proposed user flow (happy path)
After launching the new registration journey, the number of customers who successfully signed up to My Account and could see their plans increased significantly. This also led to an improvement in online customer satisfaction score.
This was the first stage in a big programme of work to improve the experience within My Account. Once we’d successfully been able to improve the My Account registration success rate, we were then able to focus on the high traffic self-serve journeys, such as booking a repair or updating account details. This would provide better information throughout and help more customers to complete these tasks online.
Results
From analysing the feedback gathered through the online customer satisfaction survey, there were a number of comments from customers suggesting they were also struggling to locate their plan number, as this often could involve going back through old correspondence where it appeared. Therefore, another improvement to the registration process was to give more information to help the customer easily locate their plan number and its correct format.
We decided to add a tooltip next to the plan number field, which included more directional information, as well as a graphic of where on their bill they could locate the plan number.
As part of this piece of work, I also reviewed best practice across the registration form, such as including clear field labelling and form validation, so it would be easier for users to understand their progress.
