Enhancing Self-serve subscription enablement
The Challenge
My role and responsibilities
- I guided the team in defining a shared long-term goal
- I gathered valuable insights from a wide range of stakeholders across the organisation
- I facilitated a prioritisation workshop to align on key focus areas
- I led an Opportunity Solution Tree workshop to explore potential solutions
- I ensured ongoing alignment with relevant stakeholders throughout the process.
- I collected feedback through multiple quick iterations to refine the solution.
During the problem discovery phase with the Business Systems team at Planday, I focused on understanding the tasks an employer persona would handle within account management, specifically exploring the core fundamentals and Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) in that area.
Understanding the user journey
Looking at the Customer Service Blueprint, I identified that the subscription journey can be divided into three primary phases, with three additional phases that can occur in any order after the user commits to becoming a paying customer.
Three main phases:
Evaluate Planday - Activate a trial - Adopt Planday
Three additional phases:
Manage and adjusting - Cancelation - Reactivation
Finding the right problems
Following this, I set up a meeting with my PM and one of our user researchers to connect user-facing problems, user experience JTBD, and product experience, linking them to their potential impact on the business.
This helped me set clear goals when reaching out to stakeholders- I sought out alignment with our marketing team
- I analysed our competitive landscape
- I sought out the problems we face in Zoura (Our billing system)
- I collected relevant metrics from our data team
- I got insights into relevant Salesforce reports from our sales team
- I browsed through relevant customer related issues in Intercom
Opportunity solution tree
The insights revealed 8 distinct problem areas within the subscription process. I gathered my team—Backend Developers, Systems Architect, Frontend Developer, PM, and QA—to workshop opportunities and hypotheses for each problem space.
In the first workshop we established a long-term vision for the team as well as voted for the two most urgent issues to solve from a impact effort point of view
In one year we want to enable our users to self serve when it comes to everything related to subscription
All 8 problemspaces could be closely linked to our goal 👆
- Lack of clarity in packages (TOP VOTED UX focus)
- Lack of understanding of the role of the Account Admin
- Lack of transparency in prices (TOP VOTED UX focus)
- Lack of self serve for users to be able to downgrade
- Lack of self serve for users to be able to upgrade
- Lack of incentives to subscribe
- Inability to pause subscription (eg. due to seasonality)
- Inability to reactivate a subscription
Lack of clarity in packages
Challenge: Users often struggle to understand and differentiate between Planday's offerings. When ready to purchase a package, they don't clearly see the value of the 'Plus' package, to help them in understanding which best suits their needs. As a result, they are more likely to either churn or downgrade to the 'Starter' package.
This highlights the pain points: Lack of clarity, missed value recognition, and the tendency to churn or downgrade.
Opportunity
How might we help users effectively compare features across different packages while increasing their awareness of value and feature differences, rather than focusing solely on price?
Hypothesis
If we inform them more granularly of what features belongs in the different plans Then more trialists will pick the plan benefiting their business from first purchase
Outcome
Decrease the percentage of users who decide to change plans within the first two month of their subscription by 50%
Increase unassisted conversion rate from 7,59 % to 30%
Second top voted problem
Lack of transparency in pricing
Challenge:
The pricing is not transparent, with hidden fees and undisclosed promotion opportunities, making it difficult for users to fully understand the costs. As a result, users may feel frustrated and distrustful, leading to higher drop off, churn, and lower satisfaction.
This highlights the pain points: Lack of transparency, hidden costs, and potential frustration or distrust.
Opportunity
How might we reduce confusion on the Plans and Checkout page by providing a clear, transparent overview of the purchase details and monthly price, while building trust with users through a straightforward price breakdown?
Hypothesis
If we provide customers with a personalized overview based on their business needs (e.g., number of employees, departments, third-party integrations), then we can help them choose the right package and highlight the risks of selecting an unsuitable one.
Outcome
- We aim to increase the percentage of trialists who access the plans tab and subsequently choose to purchase a subscription by 35%
- We aim to decrease number of invoice queries by 50%
Solution sketching and inspiration hunting
In order for us to address these key issues, I followed up on our first workshop by leading a solution sketching workshop based on our hypothesis
Problems with current design
- No clear Call to Action CTA
- Static price that is set pr. user
- Unclear feature comparison
- No calculated total price (lack of transparency)
- No recommendation based on needs
My solutions
Low effort content improvement
As a first step I decided to reach out to our Content Design team and see if we could test out some minor content improvements only focusing on smaller content tweaks while I started working on the designs.
A/B testing
Then I implemented the content improvement in my new designs and went through several rounds of internal iterations with various stakeholders to discover a key point that people had very different opinions about:
should we display three options (Good, Better, Best) or just two highlighted options?
I decided to test both approaches to gauge users' perceptions.
I've added the ability to view the price based on inputs like feature requirements, the number of employees, and recommendations.
My assumption is that users will have increased confidence if they have the ability to see the price change based on their inputs.
I added the ability to make more granular comparisons and also explore relatable case stories.
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