Rogers Billing and Payments

Billing and Payments brought together four high-volume touchpoints that customers experienced as one financial journey: billing notifications, the account overview, the digital bill and payment flows. Internally, those surfaces were planned by separate product teams with their own product managers, backlogs and delivery pressures.

I identified the strategy gap through customer research and led five designers as one programme across the fragmented product structure. The work established a shared journey frame, clarified the role of each touchpoint and coordinated design decisions toward a more understandable path from notification to explanation to payment.

All five designers were my direct reports. Some focused on the end-to-end UX and service logic, while others concentrated on interaction detail and visual polish within specific surfaces. Each stream had its own product manager. I controlled UX intake, distributed work, maintained collaboration across the group and approved design decisions against the shared journey vision.

I partnered with UX Research and used earlier studies to show that the product structure did not match customer behaviour. The product teams reported to one senior director, which gave me an opportunity to present the connected problem and secure support for a coordinated design response. I did not own the individual product roadmaps or funding. I orchestrated the work by connecting existing priorities and giving the designers a common strategy.

Each product team saw its surface as the primary moment in the journey. Notifications optimized message delivery, the account overview optimized summary information, the bill optimized detailed explanation and payments optimized completion. Those local priorities were reasonable, but customers moved through the touchpoints with one question: what changed, why did it change and what do I need to do?

When the surfaces used different hierarchies, terminology or assumptions, customers had to reconstruct the relationship between them. A notification could prompt concern without offering enough context. The account overview could show an amount without explaining the variance. The bill could provide detail without guiding attention. Payment access could arrive before the customer felt confident in the charge.

The fragmentation had service consequences. Billing issues were a significant source of calls, and every avoidable contact represented customer effort and operational cost. The strategic opportunity was to help customers build confidence across the full sequence, while allowing each product team to continue delivering within its own mandate.

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Use the journey as the common product frame

I combined findings from previous research into a journey map that connected the four touchpoints. The map showed customer questions, emotional states, system events and channel transitions. It gave the product teams a shared artifact for discussing responsibilities and made gaps between surfaces visible.

Align ambition through a 10-star workshop

I facilitated a 10-star workshop to move the group beyond incremental screen improvements. Participants described increasingly valuable versions of the journey, then examined which ideas addressed evidence-backed customer needs. The exercise helped the teams agree on a north star while keeping near-term decisions grounded in delivery constraints.

Operate design as one programme

I directed the designers as a connected group even though their product partners remained distributed. Shared reviews, common journey artifacts and centralized design approval allowed us to manage dependencies and maintain coherence. I monitored intake and output so urgent work in one stream did not undermine the broader experience.

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The most useful insight concerned how customers assessed a bill. They compared the current amount with the previous cycle. When the amount felt consistent, they were ready to pay. When it changed, they investigated. That behaviour provided a simple organizing principle for the entire journey.

Variance created the need for explanation

A bill total had limited meaning without a reference point. Showing the previous cycle and making meaningful differences visible helped customers orient themselves before reviewing line-item detail.

Each touchpoint had a distinct job

The notification should create awareness without unnecessary alarm. The account overview should establish the current status and expose variance. The digital bill should explain the change in a scannable hierarchy. The payment flow should support confident completion. Clarifying those roles reduced duplication and gave each team a more precise design brief.

Trust accumulated across the sequence

Customers judged the journey through consistency. Terminology, amounts, dates and actions needed to remain stable as they moved between channels. A clear handoff between touchpoints reduced the cognitive load of reinterpreting the account at every step.

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We redesigned the connected journey around comparison and explanation. Notifications provided enough context to prepare customers for the next step. The account overview made the current balance, due date and change from the previous cycle easier to scan. The digital bill prioritized the reasons behind a variance. Payment access remained prominent once the customer understood the amount.

I used cross-stream reviews to resolve dependencies and approve decisions against the complete journey. The designers could make day-to-day decisions within their areas, while I intervened when terminology, hierarchy, timing or interaction patterns affected adjacent touchpoints.

This governance model also helped balance designers with different strengths. Team members focused on overall UX structure could establish the journey logic, while designers working closer to visual execution refined hierarchy and polish. Shared critique kept those contributions integrated and prevented the work from becoming a sequence of disconnected handoffs.

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The outcomes accumulated across releases from September 2019 through Q3 2021. They show improvements in usability, customer satisfaction, digital channel adoption and service demand. Some measures directly evaluated redesigned experiences; others reflect the broader programme and operating context.

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The reduction in payment-related calls is the strongest business signal for the connected journey. Rogers' public reporting associates that result with automated notifications and increased auto-pay adoption. I present it as a programme-level outcome supported by coordinated digital work, without assigning sole causality to UX.

The case established a practical model for journey strategy inside a fragmented product organization. Customer evidence and journey mapping supplied the common frame. Shared reviews and design approval translated that frame into coordinated decisions. Product teams retained their roadmaps while the design group operated with a unified view of the experience.

For my leadership practice, the work demonstrated how to influence strategy without formal ownership of every dependency. I surfaced the gap, created the alignment mechanism and directed designers across organizational boundaries. The resulting outcomes came from orchestration: clarifying what each touchpoint needed to accomplish and ensuring the parts reinforced one another.

Usability and CSAT measures come from Rogers UX research and the March 2021 Digital Billing and Payments KPI report. The Q3 2021 call reduction comes from Rogers public investor reporting, which cites automated notifications and increased auto-pay adoption. Company-level results are presented as programme context unless a study directly evaluated the redesigned experience.