Invoice reconciliation
Understanding and improving the user experience is at the forefront of all of my work. One of my first lead roles was taking over content design for all things cloud billing and account. I integrated quickly with the IBM Cloud Account and Billing team and hit the ground running. The team had recently completed a “State of Billing” UX research initiative and identified many focus points. The goal of this project aimed to understand the Cloud billing users, their needs, and pain points.
Problem statement
At the time, there was a broken billing process in place on the platform. We needed an effective way to improve the Cloud Invoicing experience.
3/5 overarching billing pain point themes relate directly to the invoice experience.
22% of negative NPS comments from IBM IaaS products directly reference invoicing.
Support team fielding 1000-1600 billing-related of cases per month.
~1M/month in support costs related to billing issues.
Details
Identifying the gaps in the invoice experience united the billing squad with a common goal in mind - unifying the overall cloud billing system.
Directly related to identifying the invoice experience as a primary source of pain for users was a platform-wide technical effort to unify our different cloud billing systems; a direct result of a platform built on multiple acquisitions.
Publication
December 2021
Collaboration
Content
Design
Development
Research
Project Management
Team
IBM Cloud Account and Billing
Role
Lead content focal and strategist
Explorations
Content impact
My objectives when starting this project were straightforward:
Identify the problem: How can my influence improve the user experience?
Promote consistency and industry standards: Many pain points stemmed from inaccuracies and inconsistencies leaving customers frustrated with an abundance of support cases.
Strategize and design a solution: Teaming with design, I advocated for the importance of content. How the user navigates and understands our console is key!
We delivered an improved invoice page in the console to align with the design of our new invoice templates. The visuals, user flow, and verbiage was adjusted to provide quality improvements. In addition, our testing led us to many bug fixes we might have missed otherwise.
In addition, the new documentation outlines how to view and understand your invoice:
https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/account?topic=account-managing-invoices
https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/account?topic=account-understand-invoices
https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/account?topic=account-billusagefaqs#pay-invoice
Impact and outcome
Negative NPS feedback regarding invoicing reduced by 18%.
Support cases reduced by ~72% (From 1000-1600 cases per month to 250-450 cases per month).
Support costs related to invoicing reduced by ~70% (From ~1M/month to ~300k/month).
The new single template replaced the 10+ existing invoices across the IBM Cloud Platform.
Visits to the invoice console page and docs decreased by around 37%. Users understood the charges and details without having to search the docs or console.