Website Creation Service Optimisation

The challenge

Boost the sales for a Website Creation Service while maintaining high customer satisfaction - without setting the wrong expectations for customers and without triggering early subscription cancellations.

This service helps customers go online fast with the support of professional web designers and copywriters. The web experts create a template-based website that includes some basic functionalities like contact form, map, appointment calendar and gallery.

Goals from user perspective

understand the possibilities and limitations of the service
make a decision whether the website creation service is appropriate for their goals
compare prices with other similar services

Goals from business perspective

boost sales
improve the conversion rate of the landing page
reduce the time on phone consultations
reduce the early churn of unsatisfied customers

My role

As the only designer on the project I was responsible for the coordination of the service optimisation efforts and for suggesting appropriate methods for measuring the customer satisfaction. I also partially redesigned the landing page which is the main selling channel of the service.

Design Approach

The design process was mainly focused on informing the decisions for long term development of the service and included the following steps:

interviews with potential customers
stakeholder interviews with product managers, web designers and customer support employees
user flow and user journey mapping
landing page and email communication optimisation
introduction of a survey

Step 1 → Research

I conducted remote semi-structured interviews with potential customers in order to better understands their motivation and expectations about using a website creation service, for a total of 7 hours of conversation.

Interviews with web designers and customer support employees introduced new information and supported the creation of a detailed user flow.

Step 2 → User Flow

In order to align all stakeholders and discuss potential improvements of the service I created a user flow as a basis for discussion and as possibility to identify most relevant for the customer touchpoints.

A simplified version of the flow is visualised in the graphic below:

Step 3 → User Journey Mapping

I organised remote User Journey Mapping sessions with several stakeholders, based on the existing user flow. The session was informed by the qualitative and quantitative data previously obtained in a survey with customers who already published their websites and also by data from the interviews with potential customers. User motivations, problems and fears emerged which gave us clues where we should direct our optimisation efforts.

Step 4 → Expectations Management

The possibilities of the service were not clearly communicated on marketing materials which sometimes led customers to disappointment and unrealistic expectations.

In collaboration with marketing I redesigned parts of the landing page. We communicated both benefits and limitations of this template-based solution in order to avoid disappointed customers. We focused on:

explaining that a template-based website has some limitations in comparison with a custom build website
communicating enough details about the website templates in order to reduce phone consultation time
including testimonials of satisfied customers and their websites
removing technical data which is not relevant for most customers

Step 5 → Continious User Feedback

We introduced the possibility for users to give feedback right after publishing their website. I created a short survey sent together with the confirmation mail. This survey gives users an anonymous way of sharing theirs thoughts about the service - both positive and negative.

A regular evaluation of the customer satisfaction through the 5-points Likert scale is a viable way of observing customer satisfaction month after month. This helps reduce risk when changing the service without previous research.

Before

no feedback channel for users
no standartised measurement of customer satisfaction

After

automated survey to get user feedback after publishing the website
continuous measurement of customer satisfacion
identification and documentation of user pain points

Project Outcome

Multiple touchpoints of the user journey were improved or simplified. The conversion rate of the service improved while customer satisfaction remained the same. A standartised way of measuring customer satisfaction was introduced.

Learnings

Service optimisation should be an ongoing project with clear KPIs in order to succeed. The involvement of all stakeholders and continious prioritisation of the tasks are extremely important for the success of a project.