Hilton Customer Support
Problem
Hilton’s Customer Support site was dated in both design and content. Its design was inconsistent internally and with Hilton’s brand standards. The help content was sparse, largely obsolete, and difficult to navigate.
There were separate support sites for the brands and the Honors loyalty program—each with very different experiences.
The site was not mobile-friendly while Hilton’s web traffic was becoming more mobile.
There were multiple contact forms and phone numbers which made it confusing for users to know which channel to use for their issue. This led to many calls to call centers for questions or issues that could have been resolved without an agent contact. The dated content on the site caused confusion when call center agents gave guests different information.
Solution
A single website was created to provide a consistent experience for all web-based customer support. The design was updated and brought into alignment with Hilton’s enterprise design guidelines. All content was reviewed, and a new content structure and navigation scheme were created.
Design
The new design used Hilton’s enterprise brand color palette and fonts to make it consistent with the rest of Hilton’s web presence. Common elements such as headers and footers were also incorporated into the new design.
Usability
Content was organized into broad categories based on past search queries on the existing support sites and frequency of questions to customer support agents. The site search was prominently located on every content page throughout the site reflecting users’ preference for search over browsing for content. A new chat feature was added that integrated a chatbot with handoff to a live chat agent if the chatbot couldn’t resolve the guest’s question.
The early wireframe at right shows the prominent search field and topical categories. In later iterations the Top Questions and other sidebar content was removed to simplify the interface.
Information Architecture
The categories that were initially identified were further refined with card-sorting exercises and surveys. Analytics were not available on the existing support sites, but the new site was set up with extensive analytics to drive content modification and reorganization. The content structure and site navigation were built with flexibility to enable changes based on new insights into users’ information needs.
Each topic category has a tile on the Customer Support homepage with links to the top questions for that category and a link to the topic page. Topic pages list all questions for the topic. The site search is also prominently featured, and links to other topic pages are included in a sidebar.
Question/Answer pages are populated with information from the same content management system used by Customer Support agents, so information remains current and accurate, and agents know exactly what information the guest sees on the site without having to keep a separate browser window open to the support site. Like the topic pages, answer pages include the search and links to other topic pages.
Content Search and Discovery
Based on user behavior on Hilton’s Customer Support sites as well as research into general web users’ preferences for finding similar types of information, we determined that the search would be users’ preferred method of finding support information. The site search was prominently located throughout the site, and a great deal of attention was given to the search functionality.
An incremental search – or “search-as-you-type” – was implemented. As soon as the user enters three characters into the search field, search results begin displaying, including meta data for each result indicating its popularity and latest update. Clicking a result takes the user directly to that answer page.
The Search Results page displays a list view of questions and answers related to the user’s search term(s). Each list entry shows the search term highlighted in context and the entry’s latest modified date.
The site is also largely accessible to WCAG AA standards. The primary app used by Customer Service agents (see GEM) is also largely compliant. There is an on-going effort to comply completely with the standard.
Mobile Experience
The entire Customer Support site was built to be fully responsive, with all content and functionality available on any size device.
Final Product
Hilton’s new Customer Support experience is an intuitive website coupled with
A single website was created to provide a consistent experience for all web-based customer support. The design was updated and brought into alignment with Hilton’s enterprise design guidelines. All content was reviewed, and a new content structure and navigation scheme were created.
Take a look at the current site: Hilton Customer Support
(Note that changes may have occurred after the project I worked described above.)