James Molyneux-Birch | UX/UI Designer

MYCRS Redesigning A Payment Portal

UX/UI, Mobile, Finance

2019

Impacts & Results

Bounce Rate

-32% reduction

Single Payment Conversion Rate

+20% uplift

Token Payment Rate

+50% uplift in users making a token payment

Background

MYCRS is a payment portal allowing debtors to make payments on debts from other businesses. In 2013 the site was originally designed as a desktop first portal, with only secondary consideration for mobile. By late 2019, consumer behaviour had shifted dramatically, with 95% of traffic now coming from mobile devices.

To address this, I partnered with the development team to redesign the experience for mobile users and re establish MYCRS as a market leading platform. Our goals were to improve conversion rates, prioritise accessibility, improve customer satisfaction and ensure the system was scalable for future enhancements.

While CRS offers a range of services, the core business model follows a simple flow:

A customer purchases a product or service but cannot or does not pay.
The company attempts to collect the debt but is unsuccessful.
The debt is referred to CRS.
CRS engages with the customer, primarily through digital channels, to recover the balance, earning a commission on successful collections.

The Problem

By 2019, the customer portal had become outdated and ineffective. The last redesign in 2017 had overlooked accessibility standards and failed to prioritise user experience. The platform's heavy reliance on JavaScript caused frequent errors across devices, resulting in an inconsistent and frustrating user journey. Customers were often unable to complete essential tasks smoothly, leading to decreased trust, reduced satisfaction, and ultimately, a measurable decline in revenue.

I aimed to redesign the customer portal to deliver a consistent, accessible, and user friendly experience across devices, restoring customer trust, increasing satisfaction and driving revenue higher.

Research & Discovery

Research Methods:

Heat Mapping, User Personas, Analytics Review, Customer Feedback Analysis

Key Insights:

Customers did not immediately recognise the CRS brand and often dismissed it as unrelated to their debts. This led to confusion, mistrust and lower engagement with the service.
Most customer interactions took place via SMS and email, typically accessed on a customer's mobile device during the workday or shortly after. To support this behaviour, a quick and seamless login process is essential to ensure an efficient and frictionless user journey.
Frustrating experiences were leading to negative online reviews. Poor ratings then eroded trust, discourage new customers, and reinforce a cycle of low expectations and reduced engagement.
Technical issues were reducing customer trust, stopping users from completing payments even after login had been completed.
The homepage demanded too much personal information upfront, discouraging customers before they could explore.
Before login, customers were given just enough information to contact CRS, but not enough to build the trust needed to make payments directly, leading most to reach out by email or phone first.

Process

As the lead designer, I was responsible for a complete overhaul of the portal's design, ensuring it was secure, intuitive and aligned with business goals. Given the portal's role as a primary revenue channel, timelines were extremely tight. My process consisted of:

Implementing heat mapping to analyse behaviour and identify pain points.
Conducted interviews with stakeholders and customer support agents to get a better understanding of the business goals and customer behaviour.
Creating user personas to guide design decisions.
Conducted quick user testing sessions internally using prototypes and wireframes to get early feedback.
Restructuring user flows to be more intuitive.
Establishing a consistent design system, consolidating the existing style for clarity and coherence.

Outcomes

Throughout the project we had learned a lot about the user base and the niche use cases that users were running into whilst trying to use our platform. Whilst we couldn't implement all the functionality we wanted to at launch, we did manage to ship with a set of new features and some great performance improvements:

As we had to verify users identities with sensitive information, we changed some of the login questions to be hidden until a user had submitted a single piece of information, this played into the hands of commitment bias.
We developed some self-service tools inside the portal, including an interactive FAQ and account management features to reduce reliance on the call centre.
We design and developed an early example of CRS' white label capabilities to expand the platform's potential for future growth. The added white labelling of customers brands would later boost trust significantly.
We added much clearer interaction feedback to assist customers from the beginning to the end of the payment process, reassuring customers whenever possible.
We implemented a much more in-depth account dashboard that allowed customers to fully understand the length of their payment arrangement, how much they were paying and when.