Urban Company's Partner Rewards Program

OVERVIEW

At UrbanCompany (UC), we noticed a puzzling gap between customer ratings and NPS scores. While service jobs frequently received 5-star ratings, the customer NPS remained lower than expected. Our hypothesis was that customers showed more empathy toward individual gig workers but were more critical of the company. However, jobs performed by Gold-level partners—top performers in UC’s rewards program—showed a correlation with higher NPS.

This project aimed to improve customer NPS by enhancing partner quality, achieved through a reimagined Gold rewards program for UC's service partners.

MY ROLE

User Research, Product Design,

Prototyping

TEAM

2 Product Designers and 1 PM

TIMELINE

May 2021 to June 2021

OVERVIEW OF THE REDESIGNED EXPERIENCE

OVERVIEW OF THE OLDER EXPERIENCE

We were already aware of a few problems with the existing experience, even before we went and did our research:

👆 Gold was just a small sub-section of the performance page. It didn't seem that important

✌️ We were asking them to maintain multiple metrics to become a Gold partner. This was a mess

PROCESS

We started the project by getting our hands dirty and talking to our partners across the country.

We ended up dividing our entire partner base into 4 cohorts

THE 4 PARTNER COHORTS & THEIR RANGE OF NEEDS

Partners who are Gold

This cohort is very aware of Gold

Motivation for continuity

Recognition

Feel of being the best

In and around the Gold criteria

Have been Gold previously. Aware of some of the aspects of Gold

Benefits improvement to make it more aspirational

Metric understanding

Last leg completion

Slightly far from Gold

Do not know much about Gold, but have the potential to improve. This is the needle moving segment.

Gold awareness

Metric understanding

Make Gold feel more achievable

Can't achieve Gold

Motivations not aligned with our ideal partner. In danger of being blocked from the platform

❌ We decided to not design for this cohort

THEMES FOR THE REDESIGN

We came up with a few themes for the redesign that caters to the needs of the different partner cohorts:

⭐️ Only one north star metric to maintain to get rewarded

🏆 Introduce a two tier reward program - Gold and Silver

💰 Benefits have to be more impactful

💡 Solve for passive touchpoints and nudges

🥇 Celebrate and give recognition to the best partners

VERSION 1: 🟠 FAILURE AND LEARNINGS

We designed a version of the redesign and tested it out with our users. It turned out to be a failure.

Our learnings were:

Did not match with partners’ mental model of performance metrics being priority 1, and rewards being something on top of it
The interaction was too complex for the user base
Partner visits this page multiple times a day, to check their rating. They take real pride in their ratings. This design was making that task tougher.

✌️ On hindsight, we were a bit too influenced by the older design of a single page for both Ratings and Gold and didn't break the design shackles enough.

*The UTs were not done by me