Tommy Rayburn

THE TEAM

One operations manager (my manager), one lead UX Designer (me), two interns (focusing on Gift Cards), one Content Strategist, five Product Owners, and 8 full-stack tech teams.

THE CHALLENGE: invigorate the potential of capital one rewards

With this new effort there were four things the product team and I needed to accomplish:

• First, I had to re-platform Card Rewards’ existing experience from the older online service platform to our new servicing platform including all sub-experiences before the older experience expired leaving customers greatly impacted. To complete this multi-task effort I: created new experiences for all the rewards redemption options (getting account credit, redeeming for gift cards, etc) over multiple phases, designed new redemption options to transfer Capital One miles to the rewards programs of travel partners like JetBlue Airways, and rebrand Capital One’s travel booking portal to match the new look and feel.

• Second, the business and design team wanted to change the focus of Rewards for both the customer and internal mindset from being simply a transactional experience to a greater experience that focused on customer-enhanced value.

• Third, we were moving the focused demographic from the “every man” to higher-income customers, which meant to elevating the servicing experience to a more affluent look and feel.

• Fourth, we weren't content being an experience people wanted to experience more than once or twice a year. We wanted to give value to them daily or monthly, so customers would engage with their rewards more often—daily, weekly or monthly.

THE APPROACH: full collaboration … all the time

I believe that design’s job is to build the bridge between the product teams and the customer, but I also believe that to properly build that bridge all parties must be included from initial strategy through the release. For Rewards, I ran a very cyclical and iterative process that included:

• Talking to customers through empathy interviews, priority sorting exercise, and usability research to continually keep the customer’s needs on the forefront.

• Facilitating design-focused workshops for business analyst, tech leads, product partners, researchers, and fellow designers to give each specialty a voice in the co-creation of the experience. These workshops ranged from intent prioritization, to customer-focused prioritization, to workflow and visual design sketching.

• Iterative designs with the product and tech partners to learn constraints. Additionally, to guide my partners into pushing tech boundaries if it made strong impacts, which they also pushed me to follow as well.

• Co-presenting the work as completed as an alliance to gain stakeholder buy in.

• Lastly, I worked closely with the development teams where I pair programmed with the individuals and ran weekly review sessions on a continual cadence through the release.

THE INSIGHT: in competitive markets, we must evolve continuously

For 3 years Capital One Rewards were stagnant, while competitors like Chase were moving ahead of us with new tactics and new redemption options.

The challenge was to reframe rewards from a functional tool to an interaction that fosters a meaningful and valued connection with high-end customers. Marketing and internal data enlightened the team that though Capital One's branded cards offered a better dollar-for-dollar value over our competitors, Capital One customers’ perception of the value toward their card was low.

In talking to customers, it was clear that Capital One had an opportunity to deepen their emotional connection to rewards by reinforcing positive behaviors. We also needed to increase the salience of rewards and ensure that customers fully understand how the program works. This gave the product team a clearly defined, measurable goal when making decisions on the new rewards re-platforming work I was leading.

THE ACTION: push the platform to be better

The most difficult task was not getting stakeholder or customer buy-in for the rewards effort, but getting that same enthusiasm from the existing internal servicing platform team. The customer intent from Capital One’s web and mobile servicing platforms was viewed as just momentary transaction-focused touch points. In most cases this is entirely the correct methodology. How often do you pay your credit card bill? But, data and customer feedback told us this was not the same for rewards.

To fix this I worked with designers in several lines of business (consumer card, consumer bank, small business card, servicing core, servicing mobile, and auto loans) to review a variety of new patterns within the servicing platform to build a greater use case that such patterns would benefit everyone site-wide. By working with my product team as well as the other designers, we were able to push for a multitude of platform improvements from marketing and cross-sell spaces, to deeper navigation patterns, and new navigation methods.

THE RESULT: WE BOOSTED CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT, INCREASED SALES AND MADE THE NEWS.

The immediate benefits were quite impressive:

• Having new navigation for common redemption options showed great promise, with an increase of engagement in those redemption options that gave the customer greater value. In addition, customer feedback was positive including a 7-9 point NPS score increase for customers looking to redeem their existing Capital One points.

• The design for the rebranded travel portal gave customers a cleaner experience that reduced unnecessary calls and increased in sales for customers.

• The successful launch of the new transfer points experience opened to 6 million customers,who transferred 18 million points in the first week. Capital One also received very positive press from 46 articles written with 560M+ in potential reach including a great review from The Points Guy, a prominent credit card reviewer/blogger. “The ability to transfer Capital One miles from cards like the Capital One Venture Rewards Credit Card was a terrific enhancement to an already solid card.”

The success I was most proud of was a transformed product team that spoke with increasing passion about giving quality and transparent experiences to the customer over merely meeting business goals.

To comply with non-disclosure agreements and client confidentiality, some information in these case studies are modified or omitted.