Scaling a Loyalty Platform Breaking Under Its Own Growth
TELUS Rewards is a loyalty program for customers with bundled services (Internet, Mobility, TV, Security), allowing members to earn and redeem points through an online portal. Adoption had grown fast, but the experience was fracturing underneath: inconsistent flows between activation and redemption, system-triggered errors eroding trust, and rising support inquiries signaling the UX wasn't keeping pace with the program's momentum.
The Problem
Rapid growth exposed structural gaps that couldn't be patched with incremental fixes. Activation, onboarding, and redemption flows were inconsistent — users encountered different patterns depending on how they entered the portal and what they were trying to do. Personalization and gamification logic was limited, so the experience felt generic regardless of a member's tenure or engagement level. Error states were frequent enough to drive meaningful support volume, and many of those errors were system-triggered rather than user-caused — meaning the platform was actively undermining trust. This wasn't a visual refresh. The UX framework needed to be rebuilt to support the scale the program had already reached and the growth it was heading toward.
The Approach
I led the experience strategy by first mapping friction through customer support data and qualitative research with marketing, customer care, and technical teams. I facilitated workshops to align these groups on which problems were experience-driven versus platform-driven — a distinction that mattered because the fixes lived in different backlogs with different owners.
Rather than prioritizing by design preference, I ranked interventions by business impact. The key insight was that the highest-leverage fixes weren't new features — they were structural: simplifying activation so new members didn't stall before they ever engaged, reducing triggered error pages that were silently breaking journeys, and introducing clearer personalization logic that made the portal feel responsive to individual users rather than generic. I also redesigned the gamification mechanics to create clearer progression signals, giving members a reason to return beyond transactional redemption.
I partnered with engineering to improve flow resilience — identifying where the system generated errors and working through which could be eliminated versus gracefully handled. I leveraged the TELUS Design System to standardize patterns across the experience, which reduced inconsistency while making future iteration faster for the team.
Impact
31% increase in overall portal traffic
72% increase in Wishlist engagement
35% reduction in triggered error pages
14% decrease in portal-related support inquiries — the metric the business cared about most, as it directly reduced operational cost and freed the customer care team to handle higher-complexity issues
This project demonstrates systems-level UX thinking — aligning multiple departments around a unified experience strategy, improving operational efficiency, and creating a scalable engagement platform.