Status Tracking Experience
My Role
Senior Product Designer
Team
1 Product Owner, 1 Business Analyst, 1 Tech Lead, 2 Operation Managers, 1 Compliance Manager, and 6 Developers
Timeline
4 months, kickoff to launch
Impact
22% drop in status-related calls · 82% Ease-of-Doing-Business score
The Problem
Prudential customers and financial advisors made over 2 million service calls a year. 13% (260,000) of those calls were from customers with no way to check status on their own—the only option was to call in. And when a transaction was rejected as not-in-good-order (NIGO), resolving it meant mailing documents back and forth.
Research → Direction
Operations assumed customers aged 50+ prefer phone over digital, and that advisors avoid self-service to protect client relationships. Research told a different story:
Customers in their 60s and 70s said they'd rather self-serve than wait on hold
60% of advisors already recommend self-service when it's easy to use
I used this research to convince Operations to make the experience digital-first. Competitor analysis also showed other financial institutions proactively notify customers by email and text. Prudential already had consent to use both channels, so proactive messaging didn't require building a new consent flow.
Interviews with customer service representatives surfaced what people actually call about — current status, estimated completion date, missing documentation — and directly shaped what the status page prioritizes.
Designing the Experience
We scoped this first release to customers — the same patterns extend to advisor-facing tools in a later phase.
Keep customers informed without making them ask. Email and text updates fire automatically at submission and at every status change, with a link back to the full status page.
Give customers one place to check anytime. Status, completion date, and confirmation number lead the page. Compliance flagged that adding a completion date to Action-Required cases would set a promise we couldn't keep — so we pulled it there, since resolution time depends on how quickly the customer responds.
Let customers resolve NIGO cases without mailing anything. Compliance still requires a digital version of the NIGO letter, and building it natively into the product was too large a lift for this phase, so it links out to a PDF. From there, customers resolve the request directly — through an open text box or a document upload — instead of mailing a response back.
Validating with Users
I tested the text messages and status page with 10 Prudential customers before launch. 60% said the information was trustworthy and sufficient that they wouldn't need to call. The other 40% were wary of the link in the text message, given rising scam messages — but still felt comfortable logging in directly instead of calling. Both groups confirmed the core bet: give customers a trustworthy way to self-serve, and they stop calling.
Based on that finding, I changed the link text from "View more details on the status tracker" to "Log in to your online account for more details" — signaling to customers skeptical of the link that they could get the same information by logging into their account directly, without needing to trust it. Time constraints meant we didn't retest the updated copy before launch.
Results
22% drop in status-related calls in the six months following the June 2025 launch, compared to the same period in 2024
82% Ease-of-Doing-Business score. At Prudential, 80% or above is considered a top-tier experience.
What I'd Do Differently
NIGO resolution today asks customers to read a PDF letter and guess what to provide. I considered having case processors select from the 100+ standard reasons instead, so customers see exactly what's needed — that workflow required more development resources than the MVP had. I'd build it next, along with moving the letter natively into the product.
I'd also set up impact tracking independent of any one team: a reorg a year after launch meant we never fully measured savings.
