Help center: one place for Clube Hurb affiliates to learn how to sell · drevasconcellos

In short

• Client: Clube Hurb, Hurb’s affiliate program
• When: March 2023, in 2 sprints
• My role: sole designer, from research to handoff
• Team: one PM and two developers
• Result: an average 4.5 out of 5 ease-of-use score (CES) in the first month, and fewer affiliate tickets in Hurb’s customer service.

Context

Clube Hurb is Hurb’s free affiliate program: affiliates promote Hurb’s products and earn a share of every approved sale that comes from their referral. Launched in 2020, the Club passed 200,000 active members in early 2023 and accounted for up to 20% of the company’s revenue in the first quarter.

One of the Club’s goals for the first half of 2023 was to increase affiliate engagement. There was a big imbalance: one group sold a lot, and another, much larger, had never sold or had made a single sale.

Earlier studies from the research team already pointed to the reason: this group did not understand the business model and did not know how to sell well online.

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The problem

Talking with the customer service team about affiliates’ main pain points, we landed on two causes:

1. Scattered content. To learn about the product and the business, affiliates had to search social media, jumping from one platform to another for every question.
2. No channel of their own. The only way to reach the Club was Hurb’s general customer service, the same one travel customers use. Testimonials showed this was discouraging: affiliates needed a space of their own.

My role

I was the only designer on the project, on the same team as the My earnings dashboard: one PM and two developers. Everything, from research to handoff, fit into 2 sprints.

Process

1. Discovery: what makes a good help center

To understand what a help center needs, we ran desk research on competitors and well-rated products, in three groups:

• Online travel agencies: Hurb’s direct competitors, such as Decolar, Hotels.com, CVC, Booking and 123 Milhas.
• Affiliate programs, in travel or not: Amazon Associates, Priceline Partner Solutions, Shopify and Hotmart.
• Technology platforms that lead their fields: Airbnb, Coda, Streamline, Hotjar and Hurb itself.

Before comparing, we defined 8 criteria a good help center usually covers: contact, FAQ, policies, support, feedback, live chat, learning and search. That kept the competitor analysis objective: every reference was judged on the same points.

2. Definition: who it is for, and what goes in

With the research in hand, we designed two personas, one on each side of the imbalance: Ana, an affiliate for 2 years with more than 100 sales, who wants quick answers and more sales; and Lucas, 6 months in the Club with 2 sales, who wants to learn how to sell. The help center had to serve both.

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Then we organized the article architecture: what content goes in, and under which category.

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3. Ideation: three sections, one place

The help center was split into three sections:

• Main: a keyword search and articles organized by category, in cards that lead to the Club’s content site. Tabs separate what belongs to Hurb from what belongs to the Club. Suggested popular articles stayed as an idea for later.
• FAQ: the 4 or 5 most common questions, gathered with the Business team.
• Contact: simple but essential. It would replace empty pages on the platform and bring the Club’s channels together: support e-mail, call scheduling and live chat, planned to start with 150 affiliates.

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4. Handoff

The developer handoff was documented in Figma, with the user flows for every path in the help center.

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Results

After launch, we checked the page every week during the first month: rage clicks, dead clicks, scrolling and a CES (Customer Effort Score) survey, to learn whether affiliates found what they needed without effort.

• Average score of 4.5 out of 5 on the CES survey, where 0 means a lot of effort and 5 means minimal effort to find the information.
• Fewer affiliate tickets opened in Hurb’s customer service.
• Heatmaps showed more interaction with the content on the platform.

What I learned

Sometimes what holds engagement back is not a missing feature, it is a missing place: bringing content and contact together solved both pain points at once.