Design That Respects the Customer's Time

Every support email is a design failure we haven't fixed yet. Here are three changes that cut ours down to almost nothing.

Getting customer support emails just feels wrong because it feels like we’ve wasted the customer’s time and that there’s some improvement we can make to avoid it. This post outlines a few things we’ve done to reduce customer service requests down to the bare minimum (and there’s more to be done)

Correct Email Format, Wrong Email

Customers often type the wrong email and email us that they never got their tickets. Emails like [email protected] and [email protected] are the key culprits here. Both pass email format validation but are wrong, so we’ve implemented this screen when we detect a possible typo:

Checkout screen warning the customer that their email address looks like a typo

This simple feature has saved us about 5 customer support emails a week. The alternative would’ve been to not allow guest checkout but we hate getting people to sign up to things for no reason, because we hate doing that as well.

Double Buys

People kept buying double quantities because they forgot that they already had something in their cart, so we ended up getting a lot of “i meant to buy 1 but bought 2” type emails. Solution - warn them what’s already in cart and change the add button to include the word “more” to be more explicit:

Product page showing what is already in the cart, with the button relabelled to add more

And then as they’re about to hit pay, add another message showing how many items they’re about to buy:

Checkout confirmation message stating how many items the customer is about to buy

This brought down these kind of support emails to zero.

SMS Delivery as Fallback

Emails, especially to corporate accounts administered by Microsoft, are hit-and-miss, with most users not knowing how to even fish an email out of their Spam folder because they can’t even find said folder. Despite our email server’s 100% SendGrid reputation, emails do get sent to spam. SMS is much more reliable, but every text costs money.

So right after order completion, we present this option to users:

Post-order screen offering to text the customer's tickets to their phone

Even though we present ticket info to download right then and there, people like having a record of things on their phone to feel comfortable. It reduces anxiety, much like how seeing your gate at an airport before you go eat something gives you a sense of calm.

These are some of the ways we keep our ear to the ground to ensure a great customer experience.