Revising a rewards program to reach customers
Using content strategy, content design, and UX writing to improve the customer experience.
The challenge
I joined Verizon as its first, and only, customer experience content strategist in March 2018.
My focus was Verizon Up – the customer rewards program. Although the rewards program had only launched five months earlier and membership was growing steadily, reward use and satisfaction were under 60%. It wasn’t unusual for customers to not understand how to get or use their rewards during user testing.
Copy and content design were hampering the program.
The solution
Address major pain points in the experience and launch new rewards. In both cases, my goals were:
Give customers only the content they need, when they need it.
Write UX copy that is easy to understand and focused on the customer benefit.
Revising vendor content to follow tone and voice and content design best practices
The Verizon Up rewards program added localized coupons and offers provided by a third party. When the third-party vendor provided support copy that didn’t follow our tone and voice or use content design best practices, I revised the content to create a clearer customer experience.
Improving customer comprehension with content design
After Starbucks and Amazon gift cards, Verizon discounts, called Device Dollars, were the most popular customer reward. But, the discounts were complex and customers were often confused about when and how to use them.
The only explanatory content was a heavy paragraph of legal language. By adding scannable subheads, bulleted phrasing and clarifying details, I was able to improve customers’ understanding of the discount. In this case, this project went against the usual expectation of making content as concise as possible: adding to the content was necessary to improve clarity.
Although, the content design was easier than the development of this screen. The work was delayed multiple times because engineering had to build a new template to include bullet points.
The results
Membership increased from 2M to 9M customers, regular customer engagement increased 40%, and reward use improved month-over-month.