Product Replacement Experience

Design Lead | Research | User Testing | UX/UI Design

This is a rare project where I took on the lead product designer role multiple times, in 2017, 2019 and again in 2021.

In 2017 Asurion was the partner in providing extended warranties for electronics to many of the big-box retailers. At the time, the replacement experience for the TV category claim was a manual process that would take weeks of back and forth communication between the customer and the claims agent. With this process, the company had to pay the customers to go to buy their own replacement TV. This cost the company more, created a bad customer experience and reduced potential repeat customers.

We saw an opportunity to create a better product replacement experience and an agile team was put together to do just that.

ReplacementHero.png

Exploration and ideation

These are some of the questions that the team brainstormed:

  • A customer wants their replacement TV, how might we get this to them quickly?

  • How might we reduce the claim payout rate and get the customer a newer TV with better technology?

  • How can we automate the process to reduce the turnaround time and drive first time conversion?

To answer all these questions, we needed to align on the goal and define our new experience. The agile team came together with stakeholders, subject matter experts to pursue a multi-day design sprint (based on the google venture design sprint).

1. Align on our goal

All of us agreed to this goal: “Increase the conversion rate for the customer who accepts a replacement TV to 95% and ensure each customer feels they received value from their extended warranty plan”. This meant a new replacement experience needed to help get customer the replacement TV they wanted easily and quickly.

2. Assemble our ideas

Once we had our goal we went to work by assembling our ideas. To make sure every idea was heard, we individually generated HMW (how might we) notes to capture ideas on how to create this new experience. We sorted and voted on the top ones.

3. Sketch our ideas & decide

From the tops ideas, we individually brainstormed the solution and sketched out what the new experience could be. We shared, voted and decided on the solution and experience we wanted to create.

4. Prototype & user testing

We quickly created a simple prototype of the experience we decided on. We tested this new flow with users at the end of this design sprint. We captured all of the user feedback and their reactions to the experience.

Coming out from this design sprint, we had our goal, the initial idea, a plan for building this experience for the customers and a plan to test it.

Bringing it all together and the result

The TV replacement experience agile team was made up of a product lead, an engineer lead, a design lead (me) and 5 engineers. Our team worked together for the next 4 months to release our first version (MVP) of the TV replacement experience. We conducted 5 rounds of user testing and iterated on our experience along the way. The final result was a simple 4-step flow that allowed the customer to choose and order their replacement TV in one interaction. The replacement TV then arrived just a few days later at the customer’s door.

This first version of our TV replacement experience saw 85% conversion of customers chose to get a replacement over getting a payout. This new experience led to an overall 7-digit annual savings for the company. It was a win win scenario.

Our MVP design of the TV replacement experience

Product replacement experience design timeline

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2017

  • Creating a shopping like experience that show value of the replacement 

  • Easy side by side TV specs comparison

  • Automated replacement options match

  • Automated ordering for customers

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2019

  • Quicker & simpler replacement selection 

  • Intuitive comparison and filter features 

  • Enhanced TV specifications & images

  • Quick & secured authentication

  • Full design system adoption

2019 TV replacement experience video

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2021

  • New product category offer (Tablet)

  • Pay for upgrade option

  • Payment processing

  • Full integration with the claim experience

  • Replacement as an option in addition of a repair

2021 Tablet replacement experience video

The iterative journey

From the success of the first version of the TV replacement experience in 2017, further efforts were made to iterate on the original idea to improve the customer experience and optimize the conversion rate. More research, testing, design and development were done with each of the iterations and releases to improve on the initial concept.  In 2021, the tablet replacement program was identified as the next product category that could be offered to the customers. 

The roadmap for the future replacement experiences will include laptop, gaming console and smart home electronic categories.

Coming soon to Asurion Home+ product protection

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Ubreakifix by Asurion