Cashrewards
Simplifying a manual and costly offers management process.
Background
Offers squad was tasked with simplifying Cashrewards offer management and promotion to reduce operational overhead, enable timely, targeted placements for merchants, and deliver relevant, engaging deals for members across channels.
Senior Product Designer / E2E product design / 2024
The challenge
The current cost to serve an offer to our platforms was unnecessarily high due to outdated processes, a lack of automation and legacy technology.
How might we streamline the end-to-end offers process (with an emphasis on improving efficiency and scalability) to reduce the cost to serve and increase the value of offers for members.
What we did
6 face-to-face interviews with internal staff members and teams including Sales, Finance and Revenue, Web Operations, Ad Operations, Retail Media, Marketing and Creative.
4 in-depth process walkthroughs including offers booking, offers creation, ad creation and banner creative production.
Mapped the current state process for offers management to identify pain points and opportunities.
Mapped current offers construct and known complexities.
Key insights
Lack of centralised systems meant there was no single source of truth for offers data and info was being input manually into multiple systems.
Servicing custom requests had created complexity in our offers and all featured banners were being created bespoke, regardless of offer or client value.
Web Ops teams was spending 2 to 5 hours each day manually reviewing, de-duplicating and editing offers from 5 different sources.
First step… automation!
The greatest business impact was to introduce automation to reduce the number of hours spent on bespoke banner designs and reduce hours spent on manual de-duplication, both of which were adding the most hours to the operational overhead. We set out to:
Automate ingestion of offers by de-duplicating and filtering out incomplete offers.
Reduce bespoke banner design hours by introducing an automated template to cover largest use case banners.
Add a decision matrix to the process to determine which banners would be automated and which would be designed bespoke by the creative team.
Automated banners
Automating our featured offer banners for the website and app was a huge task that involved discussions with all internal business teams to ensure legal compliance, align on new sales processes, maintain brand, implement new design system components, train ops teams and integrate the engineering solution with our existing systems.
Phase 1 implementation included:
Single colour banner background with brand colours shortlisted for phase 2.
Implementation of imgix for asset management plus automation of image sizing and optimisation.
75% coverage of banner variations.
Business impact
85% reduction in hours spent per week on bespoke banner designs.
55% reduction in hours per day spent de-duplicating the offers feed.
62% reduction in cost to serve a single offer to our platform.
What I did… process mapping / offers construct mapping / collab with PM for interviews / present findings to leadership team / banner concepts and designs / collab with design system designer for new components / legal reviews + approval for banner designs / collab with engineers for automated solution and CMS integration / training for ops team on new banner process / e2e testing for banners on web and app / create new banner specs for merchants / implement new decision making process for creative / identify phase 2 banners for automation…