Billing, an impersonal, internally focused mechanism with no delight

The state of the subscription and billing experience at the outset of this project was one of outdated, siloed, and utilitarian touchpoints. There was nothing that unified the experience to ensure consistency and logic, and there was no customer experience standard of quality.

To further complicate the project, each touchpoint and process was owned by a different internal team: the team who did emails, the team who did the account management, the team who did the marketing, the team who did the sign-up, etc, etc.

As seen below, the experience lacked cohesion, but more than that it lacked any sense of value to the customer. It was your bill, an unpleasant but necessary part of using a monthly cloud product.

Taking the customer-backed lens to the experience

Before diving into fixing the touchpoints, I suggested we take a step back and evaluate the current state with active and potential customers.

This was done through on-site invitations to watch small business owners who were not customers try and sign up and subscribe to QuickBooks, and by meeting with existing customers in their workplaces to have them show us how the billing and subscription relationship.

We gathered the expectations, pains, and sentiments about steps along the journey for potential and existing customers, and used those qualitative datapoints as inputs for the next phase of analysis: our internal structure and how it supports the subscription and billing experience.

The architecture of the relationship between customer and company

We had customer input, but we needed company input. The system that created this experience was spread across the whole company, not only QuickBooks, but central technology used by other products like TurboTax and Mint, and both product owners and marketing owners.

Taking a page out of Conway's Law (a system will represent its organization), I visualized the subscription and billing relationship, capturing the following "current state" of how we delivered this experience. It consisted of:

1. The customer experience stages and their objective in each (aware, interest, buy...)
2. The counterpart stages and Intuit's responsibility in each (attract, help decide, sell...)
3. The events, touchpoints, policies, technology systems, and internal stake holders for each stage

Creating guiding principles

With the relationship mapped and defined, each stage was given a guiding principle, as was the entire relationship. They were:

1. Overall: The customer's subscription experience should be transparent, simple, and self-managed throughout the entire duration of the relationship.
2. Awareness phase: Clarity, simplicity, and stability of offering and product pricing. The product lineup is the same across every channel.
3. Purchase phase: The customer needs to understand exactly what they're getting
4. Onboarding phase: Disruption in the customer's understanding of what they are getting should be kept to a minimum. Upselling offers should be triggered by customer action or profile, not a generic email schedule.
5. Ongoing use: Customers should never have to call in to understand or manage their subscription. Communication through the relationship should be as succinct, simple, and timely as possible.

With this slice of our organization and the customer experience codified, blueprinting the end-to-end, surface-to-core of the individual use cases that made up the bulk of painful customer experience and support calls was next.

Turning empathy and analysis into actionable insights with the service blueprint

Stakeholders who represented the stages from the relationship were gathered for a holistic blueprinting workshop. Using a portable, high-definition projector, I led this cross-functional team through the blueprinting process.

Capturing the end-to-end, surface-to-core view required more than just product design. To complete the holistic picture, I gathered representatives from:

1. Online advertising
2. QuickBooks.com marketing
3. First-use and core product team
4. Intuit central technology
5. Intuit customer account management
6. Customer support
7. Finance

End-to-end, surface-to-core

This shared, tribal knowledge gave us the first concrete view into the subscription and billing experience across all of Intuit. Attempts at customer journey maps of this experience had been attempted in the past, but it lacked the nuance of the silos and the "backstage" the customer didn't see. Journey maps are incomplete since they do not include what is outside of the customer's journey.

The outcome of the research and blueprinting sessions resulted in the comprehensive end-to-end, surface-to-core views of the billing and subscription experience, the first of its kind across all of Intuit.

Turning empathy and analysis into actionable insights

Through the blueprinting process, I led the team through blueprinting the scenario, and in identifying 3 overarching themes:

1. Customer price confusion
2. Understanding which offering they signed up for
3. User experience and interface shortcomings
   

These insights were further broken down into two categories:

1. Strategic insights which needed a vision and alignment across leadership
2. Tactical fixes which were "just go do" items teams could implement

We now had a quantified, concrete view of opportunities, and a comprehensive understanding of the experience that combined customer-backed research with the holistic view of our organizations frontstage and backstage.

Next was turning insight into action.

Holistic, coordinated improvements to cumulatively elevate the customer subscription experience

Using a simple "future state vision" version of the blueprint, we created a new, aspirational experienced based on the guiding principles, customer research, and mountain of opportunities identified both tactical and strategic.

This was the guiding rubric for what would be built to create an impact and start the customer sentiment and support call volume moving in the right directions: sentiment goes up, call volume goes down.

In the vision, we intentionally identified two things as part of the visioning process:

1. Where a promise was being made by the brand, process, or product
2. Where the promise was subsequently kept by the brand, process, or product

This let us keep track of how expectations were being set up. Too few and there was nothing QuickBooks to "make good on" downstream. Too many, and the likelihood of setting up an expectation we could not meet was increased.

Tactical fixes that could have immediate impact

With the future state vision in place and the expectations and promises mapped, the concrete touchpoints we knew could make an impact were selected.

As we were working with a large, multi-team ecosystem, several factors had to be considered:

1. The roadmap and capacity of each silo to deliver a touchpoint, or allow for outside help
2. The current resourcing and ownership of a touchpoint and if anyone even worked on it
3. How altering a touchpoint for tactical gains might impact or harm other, higher-priority initiatives

With these considerations, we chose from the touchpoints and opportunities five different areas that we felt met customer expectations, adhered to our guiding principles, and were possible given the 3 constraints above. The interventions were:

1. Clarity of messaging on the product lineup marketing page
2. Simplifying the view of what the customer was "getting" on the checkout page with an emphasis on price and term of any potential discounts
3. Structuring the "my subscription" page in QuickBooks for active users to clearly delineate what they have, how they are charged, and when any discounts will end and their price will change
4. Simplifying the email that is sent that describes the subscription upon purchase and renewal
5. Rewriting the self-help article about the QuickBooks subscriptions.

Touchpoint revisions

For a cross-ecosystem effort like this, there were many cooks in the kitchen when it came to UX, visual, and interaction design. Me and my direct strategic stakeholders in this effort worked directly with the designers, product managers, and engineers across these touchpoints to bring the new versions to life.

Each touchpoint revision followed the QuickBooks Design System patterns at the time, and each laddred up to the guiding principles and opportunities identified. Overall, the unified new subscription and billing experience was a cohesive, clear, and effective series of touchpoints that looked to be designed and coordinated by a single team, covering up the seams that Conway's Law warns against (a system will represent its organization).

Results across the journey

The improvements led to material increases over time to customer NPS about the billing and subscription experience, as well as a quantitative decrease in customer support cases. Moving the entire journey across an ecosystem is like nudging an iceberg, there's a lot of mass and inertia to overcome and most of it is underwater. But, with enough steady pressure across multiple touchpoints, you can make it move in the right direction.