Making it easier for customers to leave NOW TV

Context

NOW TV is a no contract dip in - dip out service. However, dipping out was more difficult than dipping in, mainly because customers were not able to cancel their subscription on any of the viewing devices. To make matters worse, the web interface was not mobile optimised (and 60% of cancellations journeys happened on mobile!). Add to that a series of generic pages to encourage the customer to change their minds, customers were constantly frustrated by the difficulty of cancelling their NOW TV pass. The Sales team commissioned the UX team to redesign the cancellation journey and simplify it. Traditionally, the Sales team have been heavily driven by business KPIs especially since Sky is a growth company that relies on new subscriptions as an indicator of business performance. Awareness of and appreciation for user experience and design thinking were generally lower than other teams within NOW TV.

My role

I led the UX design alongside a UX designer and UI designer, collaborating with the Project Manager, Product Manager, business stakeholders and engineers.

Challenges

• Lack of awareness of design thinking in the Sales team
• Lack of user research and insights
• Cultural fear of customers leaving

Process

The kick off

The Product Manager provided us with the following key requirements:

• Make it mobile optimised
• Make it personalised

The old cancellation journey

We reviewed the legacy cancellation journey and besides the screens being not mobile-friendly, we identified some major usability issues.

Quick wins: Mobile optimisation of existing journey

As a quick win to provide a mobile optimised journey for the 60% of customers who were cancelling on mobile, the UI designer mocked up a mobile optimised version of the existing cancellation journey, which was rolled out first. 

While the tactical mobile optimised version was being built, we also kicked off a strategic redesign of the journey in parallel.

Collaborative design workshop

I organised and led a couple of collaborative design workshops with designers, developers and product managers. These workshops were aimed to make the process more inclusive for non-designers and enable rapid idea generation and cross-pollination of ideas.

The key themes that came out of these workshops included:

Attempt resolution:

• Try to resolve the customer's issues first

Reiterate value:

• Remind the customer of their past usage activity
  
• Reiterate the value they are getting for the amount they are paying 

Content discovery:

• Suggest content to watch before they leave 
  
• Entice them with relevant personalised content coming up 
• Help the customer discover relevant content based on their behaviour 

Others:

• Offer ability to pause subscription and auto-renew
• Surprise and delight with offers and other unexpected incentives (free pizza, laundry, charity donation, Smartbox, etc)

Competitive reviews

We reviewed the cancellation journeys of competitors (Netflix and Amazon Prime) and other brands. A few of the cancellation journeys we reviewed had 1-click cancellations. Whilst these were the simplest to use for the user, they ended the relationship abruptly without any attempts to resolve possible issues. We wanted to strike a balance between enabling simple cancellation and gentle persuasion to stay.

Paper sketches

A fellow UX Designer and I collated the sketches from the workshops and further iterated them into more detailed sketches. 

And some more paper iterations!

Stakeholder reviews

We continuously involved the stakeholders by inviting them into regular reviews of the designs. Some of the more playful interactions (e.g. 'spin to win' and rewarding customers for staying) were axed after feedback from several different stakeholders on their viability and operational challenges.

Digital wireframes

The UX Designer in the team created digital wireframes in Axure.

Hallway / guerrilla testing

Since we did not have research resource available for this project, we decided to go lean and conducted some hallway / guerrilla testing with randomly chosen Sky employees in a coffee shop in the Sky campus. We tested the different variations of the journey based on the price and content.

Key findings from user testing

Price comparison needs to be relevant

Participants generally liked the idea of price comparisons with the value of other items but also mentioned that the items compared with needed to be relevant to the user. E.g. one participant said she didn’t drink and comparing the cost of NOW TV pass with the price of beer was not relevant to her. We used this insight to keep the items common and generic to start off with. 

TV viewing metrics can be perceived negatively

Showing the usage metrics (how many hours the user has watched NOW TV and how much value they got out of it) was perceived negatively as the participants said it would make them feel bad about watching too much TV. Or if they hadn’t used NOW TV much, then it would further reinforce their reason to cancel.

Relevant content recommendation is useful

Showing content relevant to the user’s preferences and watching habits was considered useful to most participants and some also said it might change their mind from cancelling.

Complex calculations to determine better value are off-putting

We also found that the Offers page was too complex for the user to understand easily. As customers, they would be constantly seeking better value and would make calculations in their heads to figure out which option would be better value. This added cognitive load was considered frustrating. 

Overall, the participants felt that the cancellation journey was not too long and the elements designed to persuade them to stay were not too annoying, especially the content-based recommendations which was considered useful. Although some said they would still cancel, they also added that the journeys made them aware of the value they were getting from NOW TV and the content and the features they didn’t know about.

We presented these findings back to the stakeholders with the caveat that these were randomly chosen Sky staff and not real NOW TV customers.

Outcomes

We knew that the journey wasn’t perfect and customers still had to go through multiple steps to cancel their pass. However, the new journey was a major step towards a simpler and more personalised cancellation process and more customer-centric ways of working within the Sales team. Based on the metrics that the team was monitoring and measuring during the first 3 months of launch, we saw that the new cancellation journey had a significantly positive impact:

• 17% increase in overall save rate (people changing their minds and not cancelling)
• 24% increase in paid save rate (people taking up an offer and not cancelling)
• 13% decrease in paid saves (the offers that were costing the business)

We also received positive feedback from some customers on the simplicity of the cancellation process. 

As expected, some customers deliberately used the cancellation feature to receive better offers for the passes. :)