A messaging feature to enhance the product's customer communication! 📥
Let’s start with some context
SPH Tablet is one of our flagship products, allowing users to purchase exclusive monthly subscriptions to a variety of newspapers and magazines for a period of two years. When we launched this product in 2019, there were only two newspapers, but within a year, we had onboarded all of our other newspapers and a few magazines (5 Newspapers and 3 Magazines), resulting in an increase in complexity and a rise in the number of questions from users.
Process
With the rapid growth of the SPH Tablet product line (X% increase in publications within 1 year), customer service inquiries (on payment, billing, and general queries) were growing at an unsustainable rate. In order to increase efficiencies within the organization we spearheaded this initiative to … drive down … by X% (amounting to $X in cost savings). Here’s how we did it.
Process
Solutions < Roadblocks X Solutions > Outcomes/Impact
As the product and its complexity increased, so did the number of challenges too and we have discovered 2 main challenges:
Customer service calls and email inquiries by 50 percent. Our customer service team was not large enough to handle an influx of customer inquiries, as they also support other products, and hiring more customer service representatives in Singapore would not have been a cost-effective solution.
Our business team has difficulty communicating with customers about payment failure, billing cycles, and promotions. Even after modifying email subject lines and employing other techniques, we discovered that emailers about these topics were being missed and unopened by users.
Some challenges I have learned from users and business stakeholders
60% of this product's users are seniors or the elderly with moderate digital literacy, and the majority of them do not frequently check their email, causing them to miss vital communications from us.
These challenges resulted in many dissatisfied users and negative reviews via email, which was demoralising for the entire team.
As there was a delay with their requests, some users demanded a refund and wished to cancel their subscription. In addition, the number of subscriptions began to decline. This resulted in cumulative losses of millions of dollars over time.