Account page redesign
Problem:
Avalara’s sales-tax compliance software uses a complicated pricing model, and customers generally had trouble connecting their usage activity to the total on their bill. As a result, questions about billing, usage, and overages were a top reason for support calls.
Solution:
After a lengthy discovery process, my team opted for a complete overhaul of Avalara’s customer account experience. The main goal was to help customers reconcile how they use Avalara’s products and services with their monthly bill. In addition to freeing up support agents, these changes would increase transparency and build trust.
To accomplish this, we presented billing information both in plain language and visually, and we built contextual billing notifications to help keep customers up to date.
Research and discovery
We first briefly analyzed the account and billing pages for companies Xfinity, Premera, and Verizon. This helped us identify some general principles about how a modern billing experience might look. I also audited the content on the legacy billing and account pages to get a big-picture view of our content needs, as well as to plan for how this content might fit into our design system and meet style guidelines.
The more substantial part of the discovery process involved interviewing customer support agents to learn what questions customers asked about their bills and how agents tended to answer. A few findings in particular shaped the approach I took writing for this project:
Agents frequently sent customers the billing terms and conditions in response to billing questions. While this information was factually correct, it was dense and difficult to parse. I needed to simplify this information for a general audience and present it in the product in a digestible way.
Avalara’s usage and billing model was so complex, a written explanation often wasn’t sufficient for customers. This information needed to be presented visually as well as in writing.
Customers often didn’t know when they had gone over their plan limit until they received a bill. Working closely with product management and engineering, I needed to write alerts so customers could stay informed about their bill.
We also followed up with the same group of support agents a few months later to get feedback on our initial designs for this project.
The work
These are the three most important and impactful components of this project.
In-product explanation of a customer’s bill
Product overviews and contextual billing alerts
Data dashboards for product usage
The outcome
In the first several months after launch, we saw a marked reduction in support calls from customers who were over their plan limit. Overages were previously a top driver of support calls even though relatively few customers had them. In general, calls about billing and payment also decreased.