Cancellation Compensation

Results

65% MoM decrease in support tickets around cancellation compensation requests.

What problem were we solving?

📉 Business problem

When drivers are on their way to pick a passenger, passengers will often cancel for a variety of reasons. Our support team has found that 1/3 of all passenger cancellations reasons was “Driver was too far away.” This translates into a feeling of time, money and effort wasted for our drivers.

When passengers cancel 3 minutes after the driver started the approach, we are providing compensation with a fee corresponding to the service type (see below and spreadsheet), but this is what they see:

Click image to expand

In previous UXR studies, drivers mentioned that Free Now doesn’t show the compensation fee they would receive during these crucial moments. They only get notified this information on their invoices, making it difficult to know from which trip is that specific fee associated with.

How did we better understand this problem?

🎙 User interviews

We interviewed 7 drivers who work in various markets throughout Europe to better understand their pain points around passenger cancellations. Here are a few notable quotes:

“Customers in Paris don’t want to wait, they’re too busy and cancel. It would be nice to instantly show that we receive cancellation fees.”
“I would like to see integrated cancellation fees in the driver app so I know which rides are eligible to have a fee.”
“How come you don't charge customers who cancel their rides? Daily I have at least 1 cancelled ride, in which I get to the address or travel 50% of the route.”

🗣 Customer support interviews

After speaking with the FN customer support team, I learned that passenger cancellation compensation is the 4th reason drivers contact support, with 10,599 tickets created on August 2021, with a total time spent of 138 hours, and with a really low % of Satisfaction (69,7%) .

🗺 Journey Mapping

To better understand the complexities of cancellations during the driver experience, I created this map. I made sure to loop in various teams around this map - engineering, product, operations, customer support, and more.

⚙️ Understanding backend logic

I also worked with the engineering team to better understand the backend logic that was in place that triggered a.) passenger cancellations b.) cancellation compensation.

How did we solve this problem?

📱 Design

I designed several screens to communicate passenger cancellation compensation during various moments in the driver experience: on approach, arrival + waiting for passenger, etc. I worked closely with the UX Writer on the team to create a tailored message for each of these unique moments. Here is an example screen:

🎙 User interviews

I then interviewed 6 drivers from the UK and Germany. The aim of the interviews was to learn more about their frustrations around passenger cancellations, and present them with our new solutions. We were very pleased that all of our participants said these new compensation screens would help reduce their frustrations, and lead to less inquiries to our customer support team.

💪🏽 Results

We then a/b tested these new cancellation compensation improvements to several markets. We saw a 65% MoM decrease in support tickets around cancellation compensation requests.