Direct-to-Consumer Billing Journey
A journey-mapping study that traced why streaming add-on charges kept disappearing from customers' cable bill, and reappearing somewhere else instead.
One bill, but not really
Customers who added a streaming bundle on top of their cable service ended up with charges split across two different places: their standard cable bill, and a separate statement just for the streaming add-on. Depending on how a customer had signed up or upgraded, that second charge might show up on the cable bill, the streaming statement, both, or neither in a way the customer could actually find. Nobody had mapped the full journey end to end to see exactly where that broke down.
Following the bill across every channel a customer might use to understand it
I built a phased journey map covering three real customer moments, ordering a service, receiving a bill statement, and trying to understand a specific charge, backed by 46 customer conversations tracing where people actually hit friction across self-service online, phone support, and live agents. The map compared the current experience against a near-term improved version already in progress, so the team could see exactly which steps were changing and which weren’t.
The charge was real. Finding it consistently was the problem.
- 01Streaming charges lived apart from the cable bill.
Depending on how a customer added or upgraded their streaming bundle, the charge could land only on the separate streaming statement, only on the cable bill, or split across both, with no single consistent rule a customer could learn and rely on.
- 02The one payment option that failed was also the only one allowed.
Customers on the streaming bundle could only pay by automatic payment, with no one-time payment option available. When an automatic payment failed, that same restriction was often the first thing a customer learned about, at the worst possible moment.
- 03Self-service explained the problem but rarely solved it.
Phone and chat support could tell a customer why an automatic payment failed, but getting it actually fixed usually still required reaching a live agent, turning a billing question into a multi-step support case.
The improved phase of the journey already showed the fix taking shape: the streaming bundle's statement was redesigned to mirror the cable bill statement directly, instead of reading as an entirely separate bill. That one change was the throughline for most of what customers said they actually wanted, one bill, one consistent story.
A shared map the team used to prioritize what to fix first
The journey map became the reference document for prioritizing billing fixes: consolidating streaming and cable charges into one consistent view, extending payment flexibility beyond automatic-only where possible, and shortening the path from “payment failed” to an actual resolution without requiring a live agent every time. It gave every team working on a piece of the billing experience the same picture of where customers were actually getting stuck.