Case Study

Cancellation Tool

Customer Support Cancellation Tool

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The Brief

As a vacation rental management company, Vacasa lists units across many popular sites like AirBnB and Vrbo. Cancellation policy on each of these sites can be vastly different. When a guest would call Vacasa to cancel, it was confusing for customer service agents to know the refund eligibility. I was tasked with building a tool that quickly made that clear and was the sole Product Designer on this project.

The Process

Context

My PM and I uncovered the need for this tool while doing discovery work for a larger initiative - the rebuilding the entire cancellation workflow.

Research

While conducting research with several customer service agents, I observed that they were referencing multiple sources of info in order to answer questions about refund eligibility. This often caused delays in the conversation and left them lacking confidence before responding.

Design & Development

First, I documented the different cancellation policies for each channel. Then, I identified the most extreme examples of each to develop layouts that worked for all scenarios. Working with my PM and engineering partners, I verified feasibility prior to testing.

Validation

There were many different elements that required validation, beginning with copy. I needed to use as few words as possible while making sure the meaning was unmistakeable. I put many different variants in front of agents to ensure they were intuitive and functional. Due to the complex nature of the build, we were unable to test these live, so we had to rely heavily on prototypes.

The Results

My PM and I hypothesized that if our cancellation tool provided agents the right information at the right moment, then call times related to cancellation would be shortened. We deemed this our primary success indicator, which proved to be true: