Case Study - Paperless Enrollment

BACKGROUND

Each year, Alliance Data Card Services works on new ways to increase enrollment in paperless billing and account management. From April, 2018 through October 23, 2018, enrollments at Account Center registration with this experience were between 50-55%. We did not default their selection. The screenshot to the right is of the experience up to Oct 24, 2018.


As you can see, there's a lot to read before you even get to the choice. On first view, neither options is checked. This screen shot shows the Terms of Service that appear when you select the Enroll in Paperless button.

Solution

I spent time thinking through the experience, the requirements and what it would take to finally move the needle on paperless registrations.

Working with my awesome IxD, we came up with a "low friction" solution - meaning less reading and a simpler interface. I looked at competitive examples and found that some companies require a user to provide additional information in order to register for paperless billing, while others had a simple opt-in feature.

Suspecting users were most often registering on the site to pay a bill and didn't want that process interrupted, we created an experience that took as little thought and action as possible instead of making them take extra time to register separately for paperless billing.

Our solution was to tell them we were registering them for paperless, with the ability to opt out if they didn't want to.

Results

The results were immediate and significant. The enrollment percentage rose from 52% to 71%. Most importantly, there were no calls to customer service with reports that they didn't know they were being enrolled. In fact, 29% of users unchecked the "Stay Enrolled" button, preferring to be removed from paperless instead.

Financial Impact

The cost savings of higher paperless enrollment were realized in significantly lowering the amount of paper bills printed and mailed to customers, equating to a savings of $6.5 million - just from improving the UX. This needle had never been moved before, even though they revisited it pretty much every year. Boom!