Adapting a quarantine-made feature for post-ban travel
Travel company eDreams ODIGEO sells flights and hotels across 45 countries.
Summary
I re-designed a feature for requesting automatic refunds on behalf of customers with cancelled flights that was released in eDreams channels in the peak of the covid-19 pandemic, and that lost it's value as the travel restrictions were lifted.
My role
As the product designer for the web-based and the native apps teams for customer service, my role was to understand the problem, facilitate the cross-team collaboration to find the right solution, and execute designs for it.
Previous experience
We had in place an experience designed in the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, where refunds requests would be trigger automatically on behalf of customers.
The native apps experience for a cancelled flight with automatic refund.
The challenge
Towards the summer of 2021, as travel restrictions started to be lifted, customer service noticed and flagged a trend of increasing contacts regarding refunds. So the self-service product leads decided to target this problem in order to reduce the cost per booking.
Understanding the problem
My team and i leveraged the existing database of phone contacts and discovered that most customers called to find out if they could stop the refund and get more options such as alternative flights or vouchers.
Competitors review
I did a benchmark and found that some of the competitors were already allowing customers to select alternative flights.
Team ideation session
With these insights we defined the hypothesis that customers wanted to keep their trip instead of getting a cash refund. I then ran a team session to brainstorm, discuss and weight possible solutions.
¿How might we help people keep their trip when they have a cancelled flight?
After brainstorming and estimating effort and impact, we decided our approach for the project in two steps:
Phase 1 (MVP): Making the refunds optional through an alternative flights smoke test in order to validate our hypothesis and reduce the main pain point: having to call to stop the refund.
Phase 2: Make alternative flights available.
MVP design
I relied on collaborative sketching for moving on faster with low-fi explorations.
Impact
<70% less refund requests
Validated alternative flight hypothesis
Got an estimation of the number of customers who were in direct contact with airlines, which later on would help us to craft a different solution for them.
Phase 2: Full scope designs
After validating our hypothesis, i continued working on the full flow for offering flight alternatives.
Learnings
What i found most valuable about this project is that i got to witness a radical and rapid change in customer needs, and i was able to experience how cross-team collaboration facilitated and equally rapid response. I learned that a solution can be very far from perfect but when released timely, can greatly impact the business and ease some of the customer's pain points.