PROJECT SUMMARY
Wayfair’s customer support experience was fragmented—professional customers relied on manual phone and email interactions, while B2C app users had no in-app Help option at all. I led the design of Wayfair’s first in-app Help Center for Wayfair Professional and a modernized experience for the core Wayfair app, giving customers faster access to self-service tools, featured articles, and chat support. The launch not only reduced reliance on agents but also drove measurable business impact, including an estimated $2.5M in annual revenue gains.
Goal
Wayfair Professional: Deliver the first in-app Help Center, giving professional customers a faster and simpler method to resolve issues without relying on agents.
Core Wayfair App (B2C): Update and modernize the existing help experience in app, creating parity with web and aligning with evolving customer expectations.
Contributions
User research
Information architecture
Wireframes
Visual design
Prototyping
Competitive analysis
Before defining the solution, I conducted a review of leading in-app support experiences across retail, travel, and B2B platforms. A few clear themes emerged:
Prominent Entry Points: Best-in-class apps made Help accessible directly from key account and order pages.
Self-Service First: Featured articles and FAQs were used to deflect common issues before connecting to an agent.
Integrated Chat: Real-time support, often with chatbot triage, was considered essential to a modern help experience.
Visual Clarity: The most effective designs avoided burying options in menus, instead surfacing Help in a clear, centralized hub.
Explorations and User Testing
I explored two design directions
Lobby experience: A central hub showing all support options with featured articles.
Triage flow: A question-and-answer approach guiding users to the right path.
Both tested well for ease of use, but three factors drove the decision to move forward with the triage experience:
User feedback: Customers valued having featured articles available upfront, saying it gave them confidence to resolve issues quickly without talking to an agent.
Competitive analysis: Industry leaders were already leaning toward hub-style help experiences with prominent self-service options, reinforcing that this was becoming the expected standard.
Business impact: A centralized lobby created clearer pathways to self-service, reducing reliance on manual support channels and provided our team additional ways to integrate and scale the experience in the future.
Lobby experience combined sales support, order support and common FAQs into a single page, allowing users to choose from the menu of options.
Triage experience offered a question-and-answer approach that guided users to the right path, offering a limited subset of the available help options.
Final Deliverable
The new in-app Global Help experience offered customers a place where they could access all available support options in one place. Key features included:
Featured articles to resolve common issues without contacting support.
Direct access to support channels (phone and email) for more complex needs.
A clear, centralized hub for both Wayfair Professional and B2C customers, improving parity across the app ecosystem.
Results
Our initial test for this updated experience was a success for both B2B and B2C customers. Based on the results below, we decided to rollout the update the month following the test.
1-hour contact rate after visiting the My Account page decreased by 2.04% overall (-1.31% for B2C, -7.06% for B2B).
Revenue increased by 0.29%, driven by a reduction in calls to agents and translating to an estimated $2.5M in annual incremental revenue.