about the company

Which? is the UK’s consumer champion. Their vision is to tackle consumer harm by making life simpler, fairer and safer for everyone by giving them trusted everyday advice when, where and how they need it.

my role

Product designer

challenge

The only method to cancel a Which? subscription was to contact the advice services team via live chat, over the phone or over email. Not only was this expensive to run for the contact team but it also served a highly frictional journey to leave, discouraging members to return.

The company was also undergoing a backend migration, which meant any changes had to be sliced minimally and released iteratively. Furthermore, members with multiple and/or legacy subscriptions would require a more complex user experience. As a result, we could only release changes to a select cohort of users initially.

goal

To provide members the ability to accept a save offer and cancel their subscription online.

prior cancellation method

design process

For each step of the journey we analysed existing statistical data, advice service data and feedback to understand the current landscape of the journey. This helped us prioritise opportunities we wanted to explore against business priorities. I facilitated squad ideation sessions, converting our opportunities to HMW statements, then into concepts for user testing. After successful testing, we finalised our MVP for release.

what do we already know?

We kicked off by looking at what the data could tell us about how our users interacted with the cancellation journey. We found that it was the most frequently used journey on the "My Account" section, with low drop-off rates. Next, we interviewed advice service agents to understand their experiences with members contacting us to cancel. As expected, people felt frustrated by this. I presented the data and feedback to the squad in order to prioritise the insight themes we wanted to tackle.

ideation

As a squad, we converted our prioritised insight themes into HMW statements. This helped us re-frame problems into opportunities. Since cancellation journeys are not revolutionary, so I wanted the squad to seek inspiration from other companies to find compelling ideas that could help us with our solution. We dot voted on the best ideas and prioritised them based its impact x effort. Although it was clear we needed to provide members the capability to accept offers and cancel online, we also found other opportunities to save members earlier in the journey, such as showing them their benefits and providing loss aversion content to encourage members to stay. This provided us with new hypotheses to test in the future.

user flows

As we faced the challenge of releasing our solution to a select cohort of members, it was crucial this complication was outlined. To achieve this, we needed to visualise the journey in a flow to ensure our user stories catered for this.

prototyping and user testing

After ironing out the user flows, I created a prototype for us to test the journey.

Key findings

All participants found it intuitive to both cancel their subscription and take up the save offer. Nearly all participants mentioned it was "straightforward".
A lot of participants recalled their previous experiences with cancellation of other subscriptions services and mentioned it was similar, if not better as "it was a lot simpler than other websites when you have to find a hidden link". Some called out their appreciation to cancel online - "I hate it when I have to phone up as I know I'm going to be guilt tripped and that frustrates me".
Most people expect companies to try to save them from cancelling completely and "can accept that's part of the process to retain their subscription to the service" although some did complain about the number of steps it took.

post-launch analysis

After one month, the company saw a 166% increase in overall saves among eligible members, with 84% using the new save and cancel journey online. Surprisingly, cancellations remained steady (we predicted a small hike with it being easier to do). This was a significant win for the company, as it not only reduced phone contacts for cancellations but also prevented a large number of members from cancelling.

saving members and reducing friction to cancel online