Making parcel tracking more intuitive and reduce calls to the support team.
Everyday, hundreds of thousands of people track their delivers with Australia Post. When a portion of those people don't understand the tracking experience they will contact support team and ask "Where's my parcel?". At this scale the cost can become huge.
Our objective was to understand what's the nature of these support enquires, and what can we do to reduce them.
February - October 2018
Senior Product Designer
Researcher
Producer
Experience Manager
Development Team
After days of listening to support calls and reading cases, and user interviews I noticed patterns. Rarely were cases the result of a parcel being lost, stuck or delivered to the wrong address. They were the result of quirks in our delivery network, unclear language in our tracking updates, or a misunderstanding of where the parcel is in the journey.
Interviews with customers highlighted we can have a very strong emotional connection with certain deliveries. It might be a dress for a party on the weekend, it might be birthday present for a loved one. Our customers needed a clearer sense of progress in the experience, they needed reassurances that everything was ok with their parcel and they needed it all in a layout that made sense to them.
Co-design sessions with business, tech and design teams helped everyone align to the same objective - improve a sense of progress and understanding within our tracking experience. Allowing us to ideate on effective solutions quickly.
Call centre visits
User interviews
Card sorts
Co-design workshops
User interviews
Usability testing
Stakeholder playbacks
We spent several days listening to live calls and catergorising recordings. Identifying patterns in the nature of the calls.
Speaking with customers who had previously made a contacted support helped fill in details around the reason why they called.
I ran several ideation workshops with tech and business members to develop potential solutions.
User testing had validated which ideas were worth bringing into production. I worked with the business and tech teams to refine a strategy that would delivery value to users quickly and iteratively over three phases and released over several months.
This approach allowed us to measure and learn what was working and what wasn't. Informing the next phase before we commit to any decisions on the design. It also allowed us to roll back to a previous phase without a drastic shift in the user experience.
The header contains the most important information that most people care about - "When is my parcel due?" and "Is my parcel still on track?".
The next question people have in their minds is - "What's going to happen on delivery day?". This is where we outline what will happen if you're not home, and how you can avoid having to collect your parcel from a post office.
Sometimes you want to know all the details about a parcel, the tracking panel is designed to give you the information you care about most, but allow you to easily access more detail with one tap.
We started to see great improvements to our contact rates after the second release. The phased approach allowed us to learnt alot during the process and made several tweaks along the way.
For the business, we dropped contact rates for parcel tracking by 32%, a huge win with a big financial saving - and we still have plenty of improvements yet to be released.
For the team, we aligned and delivered a long term vision for parcel tracking - a desire that was burning within the team. And we developed and documented our approach for others to follow.