Self-service Cancellation Design
Context
SpotHero is an online parking reservation marketplace that offers hourly, monthly, airport, and event parking. This project explores SpotHero's monthly parking option.
Business Model of SpotHero
Goal
To evaluate the existing SpotHero monthly product offering and to design a solution that would provide the most value to the users.
Timeline
4 months (April 2022 - July 2022)
Steps
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Research and analysis
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Problem identification and prioritization
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Brainstorming
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User journey mapping
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Solution Design
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Impact Measurement
Research
Research methodologies
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Customer interviews
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Stakeholder interviews
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Customer support shadowing
Tools
Recruitment
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Existing users​
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Email campaign
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New users
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Respondent recruitment tool
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Internal stakeholders
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Internal referrals
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Research operations
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Existing users
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Mixpanel and Salesforce (user segmentation)
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New users
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Respondent (screening)
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All users
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Calendly (scheduling)
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Zoom (interview)
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Other tools
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Analysis
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FigJam
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Google sheets
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Deliverable
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Microsoft PowerPoint, Word
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Figma
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Respository
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EnjoyHQ
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Research and analysis
Research questions
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What motivates customers to choose SpotHero for their monthly parking needs?
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What is the value prop of monthly for customers as well as operators?
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How do the current users use the SpotHero monthly parking product?
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How do the internal stakeholders view the monthly parking offering?
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What issues do customer service representatives find with the monthly product?
Methodologies and sample
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User Interview
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Internal stakeholders (6)
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External users (10)
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Interview round 1
Stakeholder Interviews
Goal
To understand the business goals, vision, and issues with monthly as a product from the internal stakeholders with various backgrounds.
Research Sample
6 SpotHero Internal Stakeholders from business, supply, marketing and customer service
Research Synthesis
Affinity Mapping
Mapped the raw data from interviews into various buckets, such as pain points, insights, opportunities, and risk,s to find similar patterns of data.
Areas of opportunity
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​HMW standardize the language around the monthly product in a way that avoids jargon and articulates to the customers on various facets of the monthly parking?
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HMW differentiate between storage vs non-storage use cases?
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HMW help SpotHero own more of the post-purchase experience?
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HMW persuade the operators to give us more recurring monthly spots?
Interview round 2
Monthly Parking Customer Interviews
Based on the data from affinity mapping and statement starters, created an interview questionnaire
Goal
To understand the journey and behaviour of the current monthly users along with their needs, desires, goals, and pain points.
Research Sample
10 SpotHero users who are currently using monthly parking with SpotHero.
User pain points
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Having to call customer service just to cancel a reservation.
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If a garage doesn't prorate the parking, the users have to wait weeks before they can start parking.
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The communication gap between the garage and SpotHero.
Customer quotes
​"Booking the parking has been very easy, but then the tail end was surprisingly frustrating."​
"I literally called in like 60 seconds after I made the reservation. So it's like, you know, that quick, easy reservation. And then it ended up being an hour of time on hold to cancel it. And then it ended being a whole other hour of time to cancel it again. So like, that was a really frustrating experience."
​"When I reached the garage, I wasn’t sure if there was gonna be a spot assigned to me or not. And there was no one there to help me out. I parked the car at a spot, but was worried the whole time that it might get towed."​
Areas of opportunity
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HMW make the post-booking experience seamless for the users?​
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HMW add self-service cancellation for monthly reservations?​
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HMW clearly explain to the users what to expect after they reach the garage?​
Problem identification and prioritization
Monthly parking customer touch-points
Cancellation
After the research, with the help of the Product Manager and Engineering Manager, I mapped the discovered problem areas on the importance vs difficulty matrix.
Based on the importance/difficulty matrix, the issue of monthly cancellation had the highest importance and relatively low effort.
Ideation workshop
Goal of the workshop
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To create a user-centered solution that solves the problem of the customer having to call customer service for a monthly cancellation.
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To sketch out various solutions for the cancellation problem and select one solution to move forward into prototyping.
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To ultimately reduce the CPP (customer service contacts per park) for cancellation from 50% to 35%
Stakeholders involved
Business owner, product manager, engineering manager, customer service representatives, engineers
Day 1
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Understand the existing user journey
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Come up with statement starters based on the journey and group them
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Map the ideal user journey
Existing customer journey map
Proposed customer journey map
The proposed journey map allowed customers to cancel their reservation digitally from SpotHero website, m-site, or native app.
Day 2
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Finding inspiration
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Crazy 8s - draw 8 different ideas or at least more than 1 idea in 8 minutes
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Dot vote on the favorite solutions
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Determine the next steps
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Leave feedback on the workshop
Cancellation and refund use case mapping
Booking timeline
Non-recurring parking - the customer uses SpotHero to find the garage and book the first month of parking, but is acquired by the garage for the next month.​
Recurring parking - the customer uses SpotHero to find the garage and book the first month of parking, and then after their booking auto-renews until cancelled.
Cancellation and refund decision tree
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Recurring cancellation and refund customer journey map
UI Design
As a part of the retention strategy, the self-service cancellation was released on iOS before other platforms.
The self-service cancellation took customers only three steps instead of hours on the call with customer support.
Impact Measurement
Key metric
Contacts Per Park (CPP)
It's a metric to determine how often SpotHero customer service gets contacted for various issues. This metric determines the health of the SpotHero customer experience and is a cost driver for customer service. The number of contacts is divided by the number of rentals that were started during the same timeframe.
Due to the lack of self-service cancellations, all monthly cancellations had to go through customer service, which was the key driver of monthly CPP and accounted for 22% of the total monthly CPP.
Goal
To ultimately reduce the CPP for cancellation from 33% to 25%
Result (July 2023)
Average CPP reduced to 24.8% over the past 10 months.
Self-service cancellation released
