Marks & Spencer Bank
Evolution of Credit Card Rewards
Background
Turning Credit Card Rewards digital. The earn-and-burn style scheme is currently delivered via a quarterly paper mailer that rewards customers with M&S vouchers based on the points earned in the previous quarter. Despite this being the highest value loyalty reward across all of M&S, the scheme is rife with customer-facing problems driving queries, complaints and ultimately compensation!
That is not it, these customers happen to be big spenders! Their average spend is 7 times more than the usual M&S customer and 27 times more than the occasional M&S customers. It was time to give these customers a better experience in rewarding them for their loyalty. Driven by insights, using the M&S retail loyalty Sparks is an opportunity to do just that.
Understanding the project, product and people…
kicking off with a “who what why” session with my immediate team. This involved a brain dump of questions divided by business and customer, this is what formulated my self-brief and plan ahead.
studying all the documentation available, in particular the paper mailer that informed the high-level breakdown of requirements.
burying myself in the existing digital environment to understand the opportunities and/or limitations that the product will face.
journey-mapping the current experience enlightening me on what the key touch points are and problems that surround them.
holding stakeholder interviews to scrape as much knowledge as possible and gain an understanding of concern areas and other motivations
I summarised my learnings in this simplified document
Paper mailer side 1
Paper mailer side 2
End-to-end redemption journey map
Alpha
Before I knew it, there was a team of developers ready to execute.
To prevent downtime I blocked out assumed user flows to illustrate the core journeys.
User flows
Screens
In rapid time, this had to mature to a state that could be released to Alpha trial
Here was the tactical approach:
Focus efforts on what I considered the primary journey i.e. redemption over account settings
Re-use as much of the existing design patterns and logic that exist within the M&S system
Create variants if and where possible
Peer review to sense check for any blind spots
Throw into rapid user testing to highlight any pain points
Get a quick picture of technical constraints
Iterate and fill in gaps accordingly
Here is document that recorded the results.
Alpha variants
Rapid test results
Back to discovery
Bottleneck, temporarily unblocked, this was my chance to get the would-be users at the centre of the work. I didn’t want to just build on alpha - a development-centred output. I believed some untapped existing problems would merely be digitalised by doing this.
I started by raising what I considered critical questions that need answering before anything faces customers.
Getting those answers involved:
blocking out the existing environment in particular the IA and navigation
a hunt-and-gather mission around the business
secondary research: cross-referencing redemption analytics, customer service insights, market and user research pieces past and present
primary research: finding anything that hasn’t already been discovered by conducting surveys, card sorts, click tests, in-store observation, user interviews, first-hand functionality tests and usability testing
The results that informed many decisions going forward are viewable below:
From left: Map of Information Architecture, credit card behaviour survey, dendrograms from open and closed card sorts, navigation click test, redemption analytics
This helped create problem statements and form general understandings that can be backed up by a varying degree of evidence that can be used as a base and built on throughout the project.
Beta
With a greater understanding of the customer, the business and technical feasibility. I developed a prototype for the beta features for a session of unmoderated remote user testing. There were some useful insights however it became evident that this method alone couldn’t meet all of the research objectives, (in fact, some were countered in later studies). The more insightful activities came from a mixture of in-person user interviews, colleague interviews and re-enactments, functionality tests at the POS centre and moderated usability tests.
From top left: testing real voucher barcodes on an in-store SCOT till, user interview session around financial activity, in-store assisted till scanning experimentation, affinity mapping interviews, in-store colleague experience research, moderated remote usability testing for all core journeys
An illustrative view of the multi-channel experience including users phone, the store till and the card reader
Pain points uncovered
We couldn’t grasp if the users fully understood their points summary, however in the interview we could see that in an interview the design was even more confusing.
The carousel of vouchers was swiped through effortlessly in the comfort of one’s own home, however it is painful for customer and colleague with scanning in between. This could increase hand gestures by 10 x or worse: the phone has to be passed over to the M&S employee!!!
The scan gun, and the self check out are at an angle so due to the length of the most common device, and the barcodes being placed near the top of the screen, the phone will be bashing into the hardware to scan successfully if it can fit at all!
Revisions - current phase
The Beta solution is continuing to be refined. Some of the key iterations:
placing a more logical and immediate access point at the top area, particularly when in the environment of a busy supermarket
displaying all available vouchers vertically to lessen time and effort at the checkout in line with the dominant customer behaviour (opting for assisted checkouts)
removing the highlight of current points-to-pounds translation to remove the confusing and frustrating implication that it was immediately spendable
allowing customers to “apply” vouchers with a tap instead of manual code entry
This is where we are now with the project. These revisions with some other journeys are being prototyped and are due to be tested in the coming weeks. Here is a draft of the research document.
As the backend is being worked on and continues to evolve so will the experience. I’ve conceptualised some of the next stages of growth, incrementally addressing our problem statements more effectively in each phase.
MVP
Points are real-time balance by the day, you can convert points when you want
Checkout is payment method
Vouchers are merged into one
Future vision
Secure single-scan redemption
Real-time spend and earn updates
Points elimination with the introduction of a more tangible cashback concept
Sparks Cash - a currency of stored value
