Self-Service Support Form

An updated support form for consumers to cancel or reschedule orders on their own.

Goal

Reduce customer support tickets to save the support team time.

Results (Spoiler alert)

The project was a huge success. Altogether it saved our customer support team an estimated 93 hours per month!

Tickets for order cancellation requests were reduced nearly 70% in the month after this feature’s release.
Tickets for order rescheduling requests were reduced nearly 95% in the month after this feature’s release.

The Problem

With the onset of Covid and quarantines, Drizly received a huge spike in orders. More orders meant more support tickets, and our consumer support team was not prepared to handle this sudden influx. So we looked at how we might reduce ticket volume.

Two of the biggest ticket reasons were cancellation and rescheduling of orders. Each of these required action from our support team.

Additionally, waiting on a response from our overwhelmed support team also made a more frustrating and time-consuming experience for our both our consumers and our retail partners. In some cases, the order was delivered before the consumer was able to cancel or reschedule.

Diagram of initial user flow with many points of contact between consumers, retailers, and suppliers, and pain points highlighted.

The Solution

Cancelling and rescheduling are simple actions that the consumer could easily accomplish without help from our support team or additional action from retailers, if they were given the option to do so. So we set out to make these functions self-serviceable.

Diagram of updated user flow, where consumers can easily cancel or reschedule orders on their own, while retailers and Drizly support have no action required.

Designs

The vast majority of users would experience the happy path for cancelling and rescheduling.

However, several complexities of our business created additional use cases we needed to account for:

logged out
method of delivery (on demand or shipping)
no active orders (edge case)
split cart (multiple stores in an order)
multiple active orders
gift orders (recipient-scheduled)
already en route

To reduce friction and frustration for consumers, I wanted to make sure there was clear messaging in any edge case where the consumer couldn’t complete the process themselves to tell them why not and how to move forward. So I documented any area where the experience would differ for these use cases.

User Testing and Microcopy

We were in a rush to get this out to alleviate the support ticket backlog due to Covid. However, some technical delays gave us some time for some scrappy user testing (a little is better than none!). We asked participants to try to cancel or reschedule with a prototype. Their feedback confirmed that the flow was helpful, but called out a few instances of confusing language. This allowed us to make some quick updates to the microcopy of the form for clarity.

Results and Next Steps

The project was a big reduction in ticket volume, which our customer support team was excited to see. It also gave our consumers more control over their orders, and created a more uniform experience for all Drizly customers.

In designing the form, I kept in mind how we might apply this model to other ticket reasons in the future. I made sure that the structure of the form made it easy to add more options for self-service down the road. There were some major technical hurdles to make this option easy to use and available across our apps and website, but investing in that paved the way to make more improvements like this more easily.

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