Designing better billing experiences at the intersection of Product and CX

Overview

This case study is drawn from recurring patterns across my CX Billing work at Xero, with customer details anonymised.

Through cases involving pricing, credits, discounts, transfers, and partner cases, I saw that many billing problems were not isolated support issues. They were signs of deeper friction across product behaviour, policy, operations, and communication.

The Challenge

Customers usually arrived with a specific billing problem, but the real issue often sat across multiple parts of the journey. A charge could be technically correct and still feel wrong because the logic was unclear, the process was fragile, or the fix relied on specialist intervention.

The challenge was to resolve the immediate issue while recognising where the experience itself was creating avoidable friction.

Figure 1: Journey mapping exercise completed while shadowing product designers at Xero, making customer friction visible across a journey

My Approach

I treated complex billing cases as experience evidence rather than one-off transactions.

I looked for repeat patterns across high friction issues, translated billing logic into clearer customer and internal narratives, and surfaced recurring themes that pointed to wider journey gaps. This helped move the conversation beyond case closure and toward a bigger question: where is the billing experience too confusing, too fragile, or too dependent on CX to repair?

Figure 2: Mental model exercise from a product design shadowing task translating customer behaviour into experience thinking

Impact

This work helped strengthen the link between frontline insight and upstream improvement.

By seeing the same kinds of issues repeat across credits, pricing, transfers, discounts, and partner edge cases, I was able to show that some support demand was being created by the experience itself, not just by isolated mistakes.

That made it easier to frame billing cases as design signals: where product logic was hard to understand, where operational workarounds were carrying too much of the experience, and where CX was repeatedly stepping in to repair journeys that should have been clearer by design. Connecting customer pain, operational reality, and product behaviour to define better end-to-end experiences is the work.

Additional artefacts including research outputs and strategic frameworks available on request

Siobhan is a unique CX specialist who brings together customer empathy, strategic thinking, and a real passion for product design. What stands out most is her ability to look beyond customer experience as a standalone function and connect it meaningfully to UX and product design, always with the goal of creating more seamless, intuitive, and human experiences.

She is deeply passionate about designing with customers, not just for them, and have a strong instinct for translating customer pain points into opportunities to improve usability, reduce friction, and drive overall customer happiness. Siobhan’s holistic perspective and commitment to joining up CX, UX, and product thinking make them someone I would highly recommend to any team focused on building better products and stronger customer outcomes.

- Melanie Fischer, CX Director at Xero