Kohl's Pay
SAVE + PAY With Just One Scan
In 2016, mobile payments were exploding onto the market.
With 65 million members and 35 million Kohl’s Card holders, we were always looking for opportunities to build features that would cater directly towards them.
the challenge
Shoppers love their discounts from Kohl’s; Offers, Kohl’s cash, loyalty points. If you pay using the Kohl’s card even more discounts could be gained and multiple times a year, Offers could be stacked.
The problem was, discounts were in paper form. Even if a customer used the Wallet, they would bring in the paper version also to scan. In the end, customers relied upon the Associate checking them out to guide them on what was valid, leading to added time while checking out.
65 million loyalty customers
35 million Konhl's Card holders
goals + metrics
When this program was first created, revenue KPIs were only tracked, this was to justify the expense of creating the feature. There was one reasons other metrics weren’t tracked, the app wasn’t tagged enough to truly track in-depth metrics.
goals
Integrate Offers, Kohl’s Cash, gift cards, and loyalty ID into a single scan payment option
Smart system to help customers apply only available discounts.
Ultimately, the way Kohl’s operated led to lots of missed opportunities; below are a few I would have liked to have seen track.
missed opportunities
Reduce time-in-line: Reducing time-in-line would have increased customer satisfaction and saved the company money.
Customer satisfaction: Even though KP did have a better than 90% customer satisfaction rating, engaging with the VOC team more could have helped with collecting deeper, engaging feedback to point to future fixes or updates.
Touch paths: Seeing how a customer interacted with KP would have given the team insightful information on how to adjust the experience to help increase customer satisfaction and efficiency.
Kohl's Pay checkout line only: Having a KP checkout line only would have given the team great insights. Could have been used as a marketing tool to get more customers in KP.
Throughout the program, I asked Product what we could track for metrics and often got "we don't track that" as an answer, so I addressed this here to share why I didn't talk about metrics later.
my role
Worked to create a partnership with my Product and Engineering partners.
Introduced Zeplin and Sketch as the tools for the team.
Coordinated with Product partner to implement new processes to be more efficient and lean.
Coordinated with research to provide support for the team.
Worked with Product, Business and 3rd party vendor to help define the product.
Gave presentation to leadership on future vision of Kohl’s pay and how it could be combined with Wallet.
Led white-board sessions and built prototypes for user testing.
TELLING THE STORY
THE PROCESS
WATERFALL TO LEAN
From the start, the team wanted to operate in a more lean approach. To do this, prior processes needed to change. Working with my product partner, we formed into a product team and approached it from a beginners' mindset.
Two changes I helped implement:
Introduce Zeplin to streamline the developer hand-off. Engineering did all the specs, which led to completely inconsistent final product.
Using Kohl’s Pay as the test project, we worked with the team to create a completely new process. From this success, Zeplin become the standard for all projects. This helped reduce developer time and led to more consistent designs.
Documentation also drastically changed. The team no longer produced decks of annotations, but worked hand-in-hand with developers which broke down the silos that had existed before.
scoping + delivery
Because this was a completely new feature, and we’d be using a 3rd party solution, the team was part of several scoping session with the vendor. These became very productive as the vendor shared with us how other companies had implemented their solutions.
Apple pay was the standard, but Walmart Pay (WP) had recently launched and Kohl’s Pay flow would mirror WP so the team went shopping to experience WP.
framing
Another opportunity to bridge the gap between design, product and engineering, I introduced a Design Studio session. This not only brought the team together, but it allowed for some collective goals, such as: 1. Keep the design simple and clean and 2. lets push the bounds on brand design beyond where Kohl’s brand was at the time.
concepts
Utilizing Sketch, concepts were created using some of the new branding the team would ultimately use within the final designs.
NOTE: due to unfortunate circumstances, the earlier files from the program were lost; these were the only screens I could find.
validating designs
Digital in-store testing had never been done before at Kohl’s so I worked with my research partners to help solve for this.
Validating would take several phases to ensure we gathered as much feedback as possible ending with an MVP delivery.
IN THE LAB
Using a mock register, over two days we brought 12 users in-lab for testing. We did rapid updates as clear issues were discovered.
IN THE STORE
Went into the stores and talk to associates to learn what the process was like at the register. We then came back with a prototype on the phone, we got the designs in front of customers for feedback.
MVP
Went into the stores and talk to associates to learn what the process was like at the register. We then came back with a prototype on the phone, we got the designs in front of customers for feedback.
final solutions
Working with the brand team, we finalized designs to meet the MVP deadline. Interns of 2022 standards, these designs don’t look fantastic, but for 2016 Kohl’s brand, these really pushed the bounds and this team would continue to push brand limits for the remainder of my time at Kohl’s.
Not all use-cases are represented.
2018 update
The team continued to tract customer feedback and in 2018 made some significant updates to Kohl’s Pay.
QR code moved from the register to the phone. This aligned with how customers were experiencing scanning QR codes, like airports check-ins
Flow change The selection of the discounts was moved up-front. This allowed customers the ability to do their selections while waiting in line; which ultimately led to faster checkout times.
Auto provisioning For customers that met certain security criteria, they were automatically setup for Kohl’s Pay.
Product was cautious with auto provisioning, taking the stand that we should still ask the customer "is it ok". This is where I influenced the direction. I felt that we should setup auto provisioning, but give customers an out. I brought up example of Walmart doing this and since this was for our most committed shoppers, it felt like we're giving them something special. There was feedback that customers didn't want to have to take the extra step "why no just make it work".
Product saw the value and agreed with our approach; this increased usage by 8%.
conclusion
The team designed this completely cloud based payment feature that allows customers to apply all their discounts and pay for their in-store purchases.
Over the following years the team would expand upon this with Insta-buy and strategy work for mobile self-checkout.
The following are some key metrics the team created met. One surprise we discovered while tracking sale at an individual level, we noticed the basket sales was @ 10% more than non-Kohl’s Pay customer.
Increase in basket size
Positive customer experience rating
Increase year-over-year provisioned users