In-App Disputes

Timeline: Jan 2022 - Mar 2022
Team: 1 designer, 3 engineers, 1 product manager

My Role

Product Designer. Led user research, user interviews, wire-framing, prototyping, designs

What is Podium?

Podium is a user-friendly software that offers tools for local businesses to improve their online reputation, manage customer relationships, and collect payments to increase growth.

About this project

This project sought to create an entirely new in-app flow of resolving payment dispute cases for merchants. This would eliminate the many hours and confusion spent going back and forth via email for both the merchant and Podium’s customer support team.

Overview

 

The Problem

What is a payment dispute??

Customers can file a dispute on payments for any reason through their bank

  • Bank reverses the charge.

  • Money disappears from merchant's account

  • Only way to get the money back is to submit evidence (receipts, return policies, etc) and build a case

What does Podium have to do with it?

All dispute cases were handled via the customer support team (CST)

  • CST manually emails to the merchant that they have a payment dispute

  • Gathers information and submits on their behalf

Goal

Design a new flow that allows merchants to self-educate about disputes and manage their own payment disputes without the need to call customer support.

 

User research

  • We went through email records of the payment dispute cases being handled.

  • Interviewed both customers and customer support team members on their experiences.

  • The main goal was

    • Understand points of frustration by merchants (and the customer service team) while managing their disputes

    • Learn about what makes a successful dispute case

Discovery

Issues Discovered

 

Ideation

 

These designs went through several iterations.

Iterations

 

Features

Recieving a dispute from the payment home page.

Transaction page with dispute

 

Dispute case win percentage increased 10%!

  • Percentage of cases lost due to missed deadlines or insufficient documentation went down significantly.

  • This meant more merchants were able to build successful cases on their own and earned their hard earned money back. Less headache to deal with calling customer support

  • Number of customer support tickets went down by 80%.

  • Customer service agents were very excited about this and even messaged our team thanking them for saving time — so they could focus on other urgent matters.

Results