03 · HelloFresh · 2026
Customer Care Compensation
Unifying how customer compensation is decided, explained, and delivered.
CurrentThis project is in development. The case study documents the work and decisions to date.
Rules embedded in a separate flow
Context rebuilt across tools and guidance interpreted manually
Impact and amounts calculated through an operational process
The problem
The difficult part was not issuing credit. It was deciding what was fair, consistent, and explainable.
Compensation had evolved across separate products and operational processes. Agents could resolve an individual case, customers could receive an offer through self-service, and operations could compensate thousands of people after an incident. Each path carried only part of the context needed to make a confident decision.
Design Lead
Discovery · Synthesis · Experience definition
I lead the design work with product, engineering, customer-care operations, and compensation stakeholders. Together, we identify the highest-impact breakdowns and separate interface problems from policy, process, and system problems.
They moved between tools to understand what happened, what the customer had already received, and which details they could trust.
Policies did not always translate cleanly into a resolution, leaving experience and judgement to bridge the gap.
Operational teams calculated and issued compensation outside the individual case flow, limiting reuse and consistency.
Research → product direction
We started with error reporting. The research pointed to a bigger problem.
We shadowed first- and second-line customer-care agents as they moved from a reported issue to a resolution. The recurring problem was not simply categorising the error. Agents reconstructed customer context across tools, verified information they did not always trust, interpreted guidance, and sometimes made manual judgement calls.
How might we improve error reporting?
How might the system determine the appropriate resolution while giving agents enough context to communicate it confidently?
Emerging system direction
Reframing compensation as a system, not a screen.
The emerging direction uses a shared policy layer as the source of truth across the different ways compensation is issued. A common decision model can connect customer context and compensation rules while allowing each channel to support its own workflow.
Design principle
The system can be complex. The agent experience should not be.
Understand the customer’s situation
Capture the relevant information
Receive the appropriate resolution
Understand enough to explain it
Communicate it confidently
Current · Work in progress
Where we are now.
The system direction is being developed and validated across three connected workstreams.
Policy configuration
Refining how compensation stakeholders configure the rules that govern compensation across channels.
Agent resolution
Working backwards from frequent customer scenarios to define what agents need to know, capture, and explain.
Bulk compensation
Mapping incident workflows and identifying where manual calculation can be replaced by the shared compensation model.
Validate policy configuration, define the highest-value agent scenarios, and understand the upstream bulk-compensation workflow.