Customer Member Education
Improving the overall experience by improving member behavior.
Zipcar
The goal
Decrease costs due to calls to Member Services, and improve overall member behavior.
The real Problem
“Zipcar is one of the easiest brands to know, but the hardest one to understand.”
Even though Zipcar is a household name, very few people—including Zipcar users—are familiar with the basic Zipcar process. Unfortunately, since a user’s experience depends on good behavior of its other Zipcar users, this lack of knowledge has a significant negative impact on the brand.
For example, a late return or a dirty car creates a negative experience for the next person to use that car, and drives up calls to Zipcar’s Member Services office.
The Solution
Working with the UX team at Zipcar, we created a new section to the Zipcar mobile application that solved two user-centered goals. We believed that solving these problems would significantly decrease costs associated with calls to Member Services.
User-Centered Goals
- Improving overall member education
- Providing reminders to reinforce those behaviors
Core Features
- Contextual notifications
- Checklists for the three main parts of a Zipcar reservation
- General help section
Discovery
In order to better understand our users, we did a series of interviews and contextual inquiries to understand their current Zipcar experience, as well as their expectations of a car-sharing business model. We also analyzed call-center data to get an accurate picture of what problems current Zipcar customers face on a regular basis.
Results
New Users
- overall confusion about the Zipcar process.
- validated the need for better member education as the frequent users had a much better overall experience.
All Users
- missed key steps in Zipcar process, including initial walk-around, and any steps needed at the end of the reservation
- difficulty getting gas on at least one occasion
Call Center Data
- significant proportion of calls are basic questions about the process and requirements
Overall, we discovered that
Zipsters are struggling to figure out exactly what they need to be doing.
Proposal
We mapped out the user journeys to determine where the significant pain points are. After comparing those pain points with the frequency of calls throughout the user journey, we decided to focus on three parts of the journey.
Key Journey Moments
- Start of the reservation
- Fueling up the car
- End of the reservation
Design
We ran through multiple iterations & tests, ranging from low-fidelity sketches, to higher fidelity mock-ups.
Early iterations from a Design Studio session.
First iteration paper prototype of fueling up section.
Later sketch iterations
Final mock-ups for the "Fuel Up" section.
Testing
We ran three rounds of usability testing focusing on two goals:
Member Education
Users asked to respond to each section’s notification & explain what they saw
- Many users learned new things about Zipcar, including frequent users
- Great appreciation for extending via lock-screen
Retention of Information
At the end of testing, users were asked what the steps were in each section WITHOUT looking at the app.
- Users in 3rd iteration testing recalled 91% of total steps