Pitney Bowes + UserTesting

Challenge

Pitney Bowes has been helping businesses, including 90% of the Fortune 500, meet their mailing and shipping needs for the last 100 years. Its customers can pick from an array of small to enterprise-sized sending devices, renting and leasing them for a set number of years.

Recently, the company saw that client renewals had become sluggish, with the retention rate slowing. The business was looking for a new approach to revitalize its retention rate. They turned to its user experience team and UserTesting to redesign the experience.

Solution

The UX team began with open-ended testing of customers to create a benchmark of the user experience and highlight any problematic areas. Questions they asked included:

• What elements were confusing on the page?
• What elements were missing from the process?
• What elements needed to be emphasized more?
• What elements should be left alone?

The team used those customer insights to identify areas of focus and prioritize next steps. From there, the team began rapid prototyping, iteratively modifying the design based on comments from contributors. They continued to test new wireframes until the comments leveled out to a positive affirmation for the new design. This allowed the team to rapidly deliver a solution to the business.

Results

Pitney Bowes developed a new way to approach the renewal experience for their customers. Instead of a one-size-fits-all, they created segmented groups based on customer insights with UserTesting.

Creating renewal segments had two benefits: customers reported being happier with the experience; and Pitney Bowes reduced development time because they delivered different content now only when needed.

“Understanding our customers with empathy is critically important to experience design,” Sweeny said. “Being able to listen to customers and hear their actual thoughts and feelings as they're going through an experience is a really powerful thing. Without that, you won't fully understand why people feel frustrated with a feature, or why a certain thing works really well. When you're hearing and seeing customers in their environment actually talking through an experience, you gain a much richer understanding to help design better experiences”.

Pitney Bowes achieved a spectacular 133% increase in its customer lease renewal rate. This far out paced the predicted success rate of 20%. Additionally, “with UserTesting's human insight platform, we increased the lifetime value and loyalty of our existing customer base. That's because at any point in their journey, we can now get almost instant insights about what they need, want, or expect, and more importantly WHY,” said Sweeny.