Product Design
2019
Airtel Thanks Loyalty Program
In May 2019, Airtel had 95M customers eligible for its
loyalty
program, yet only 16% claimed a benefit. I led the redesign of the benefit discovery to redemption journey,
using product analytics and field research to identify drop-offs across home and partner redemption flows.
Benefit activation reached 43% within three months, while upgrade pathways connected engagement to
higher-value plans, supporting Airtel’s broader ARPU growth from ₹123 to ₹166 over the following year.
The Problem
Benefit Claim % of Thanks Loyalty Program was only 16% (15.2M users out of 95M till May 2019)
My role
I played a role of a Senior Product Designer running workshops, market research, creating conceptual framework, defining metrics, designing MVP flows, functional prototypes and usability testing.
I collaborated closely with PMs, designers, engineers, marketing team and data analysts. We were able to publicly launch 2 high impact projects in a rapid timeline of under 4 months, from idea to implementation.
The main initiatives & projects I worked on:
Airtel Thanks Loyalty Program
Fully owned as Senior Product Designer from discovery, research, and decision architecture through to implementation and launch.
Airtel Home Integration
Collaborated with the Airtel Home team designer & PM to deliver the dedicated loyalty program section on the primary home screen.
Recharge Flow Integration
Cross-functional collaboration with the Recharge team to deliver contextual benefits introduction during the recharge journey.
Why Thanks Program mattered to Airtel?
Airtel needed more than a better telecom plan.
By 2019, Airtel was competing in an increasingly aggressive telecom market, with Reliance Jio putting pressure on pricing and average revenue per user. Airtel launched Airtel Thanks as a tiered loyalty program for smartphone users differentiate itself from competitors and reward customers for choosing and staying with Airtel. The more valuable your Airtel relationship, the more valuable your benefits. With Thanks Program Airtel wante to
Retain
Give customers stronger reasons to stay with Airtel.
Grow Value
Encourage customers toward higher-value plans and increase ARPU.
Drive Digital Engagement
Drive adoption of Airtel's digital services and create deeper relationships through partners such as Amazon, ZEE5 and Netflix.
A program designed to serve millions of customers across three value tiers
But scale introduced another problem. Airtel was bringing together more users, more benefits and more partners. For experience to be meaningful, it had to feel curated, relevant and easy to navigate & users had to answer three basic questions:
The question was whether the experience was turning that investment into customer action.
The value was there. But users weren't consistently getting to it.
Airtel had built a growing ecosystem of benefits across Silver, Gold and Platinum. The challenge was no longer simply creating benefits, it was helping users discover and use them. Analyzing the total customer base revealed that while 95.17M were eligible for Airtel Thanks rewards, only 15.6M (16%) of total eligible users actively completed activation leaving an 84% unclaimed value gap.
But the scale of users coming to the platform was significant:
Funnel data May 2019 • Data provided by the product & data science team
Customers were already coming into the Airtel app. The problem was what happened after they arrived. A large
audience entered the Airtel ecosystem, but only a small proportion progressed far enough to activate a
benefit.
That raised a more important question What was preventing customers from turning benefit discovery
into actual value?
The numbers showed a significant behavioral gap. They didn't tell us what was the problem: Is it a
discovery
problem, understanding problem, value perception problem or activation/partner journeys problem?
The funnel showed us where to look. Research showed us why.
Users were entering Airtel at scale, but only a small proportion were progressing to benefit activation.
I first asked: What needs to happen between a user knowing they have a benefit and actually getting value from it?
I looked at the experience as a chain of value
A customer had to move through several moments before a benefit could become meaningful:
Value pyramid visualised
The question changed
The initial business problem looked like: “Benefit activation is low.”
But activation was only the symptom. The deeper design question became:
How might we help customers move from knowing what they're entitled to → understanding its value → finding something relevant → successfully using it?
This became the lens for our investigation. As the only designer on the project, I collaborated with product managers to understand what was happening inside that gap. I looked at three sources of evidence:
User Research
Understand what customers expected, understood and struggled with.
Customer Support Data
Analyzed support conversations and queries around reward activation, Amazon Prime, and benefit claims.
Stakeholder + Engineering
Understand the constraints created by tiers, benefits and partner integrations.
Key Insights & Discovery Friction
Field interviews across Airtel retail stores and customer support telemetry revealed a critical pattern: users weren't ignoring rewards intentionally—they simply couldn't distinguish core plan entitlements from promotional ads.
“I thought it was an ad related to Thanks.”
“I usually recharge through another app.”
“They told me I get Amazon Prime, but where do I get it?”
“I thought Amazon Prime was already included.”
“I got the code, but I didn't know where to put it.”
“Wow, really? You're giving us Amazon for free?”
“I thought it was an ad related to Thanks.”
“I usually recharge through another app.”
“They told me I get Amazon Prime, but where do I get it?”
“I thought Amazon Prime was already included.”
“I got the code, but I didn't know where to put it.”
“Wow, really? You're giving us Amazon for free?”
Users didn't recognize that a benefit was waiting behind “Explore.”
Users often interpreted the Thanks surface as promotional content rather than an entry point to benefits. The visual language blurred the line between core rewards and external ads.
The value wasn't obvious at the point of entry.
Eligibility didn't guarantee discovery.
Thanks lived inside a utility-first app. Users primarily came to check data, view their plan or recharge. Users who didn't actively use the Airtel app had even fewer opportunities to discover their benefits.
Being eligible for a benefit didn't mean users knew they had one.
Users weren't always clear about what they were entitled to.
Customer-support conversations showed users asking whether they qualified for popular benefits such as Amazon Prime, Netflix and ZEE5, and how they could access them.
The promise could reach users before the product clearly explained their eligibility and entitlement.
Users confused having a benefit with activating it.
Users who discovered benefits often assumed the partner benefit was already active. Some went directly to Amazon to try using Prime before realizing they needed to activate it through Airtel first. After that failed, they returned to Airtel and discovered the activation process.
Users didn't clearly understand the difference between having a benefit and activating a benefit.
The activation journey exposed Airtel's system complexity.
For some partners, there was no direct API integration. Users had to obtain a claim code, find the relevant activation link, leave the Airtel experience and manually enter the code.
The technical gap between Airtel and its partners became a UX problem for users.
When users understood the value, Thanks created a genuine “wow” moment.
Not every conversation was negative. Once users understood what they were entitled to, benefits such as free Amazon Prime were perceived as meaningful value beyond Airtel's core service.
The problem wasn't the value proposition. The problem was getting users to the value.
Constraints I Designed Within
4 Months, Design & Dev
Launch date was fixed to a marketing spend commitment, giving us just 4 months for both design and development. Parallelized assumption testing with core home screen build.
UX STRATEGY: Parallelized design & testing to ship in 2 months.
7 Partners, 7 Auth Models
No unified partner API existed across Amazon Prime, Hotstar, Wynk, etc. Auth varied between phone numbers, emails, and direct app handoffs.
UX STRATEGY: Standardized 7 APIs into 2 UX archetypes.
Design System in Flux
A brand-new Airtel design language was announced midway through development. Shipped on the stable, tested component library rather than unreleased tokens.
UX STRATEGY: Shipped on stable component library for QA.
Rejected Ideas & Early Explorations
Before landing on the final designs, we evaluated several alternative concepts. Testing showed why these initial approaches failed to move the needle.
More discovery. More content. More
real estate.
The first concept gave loyalty section a prominent position on Home, alongside other promotional content.
WHY REJECTED: Utility came first. Recharge, balance and validity were the dominant reasons for visiting.
“Discover #airtelThanks”
was ambiguous.
In a usability test with 8 users, only 2 found the benefits through the original CTA, while 4 found them when the CTA explicitly surfaced the Silver / Gold / Platinum benefits.
WHY REJECTED: Users were more responsive to what they could get than to the name of the program
Home: Making Value Visible
Airtel Thanks wasn't lacking benefits. It lacked visibility. Users primarily opened the app to recharge, pay bills, or check their balance, while premium rewards remained buried behind secondary navigation. We redesigned the home experience to make benefit discovery a natural part of every visit, surfacing premium rewards, and timely claim opportunities directly within the user's primary journey.
A pattern that lasted beyond the project
Some design decisions disappear with the next product iteration. This one didn't. The benefit discovery pattern introduced through this work became part of the longer-term Airtel app experience, where benefits continue to be surfaced alongside the app's core utility journeys.
New Home: Scroll inside to view the full page
Proactive Benefit Notifications
Connected Brand to Product
- By extending the campaign identity into the product, users experienced a seamless transition from Airtel's advertisements to the app. This strengthened brand recognition.
- Changing the CTA from "Explore" to "Explore Gold Benefits" reduced ambiguity by clearly communicating the value behind the interaction.
- Replacing the ambiguous "Explore" CTA with "Explore Gold Benefits" drove CTR from 4% to 12% (a 3× lift).
- Aligning in-app entry points with TV campaign branding eliminated visual disconnect for incoming users.
From Hidden Benefits to One-Tap Discovery
Premium benefits became visible on the home screen with one-tap "Claim Now" actions, making them easier to discover and activate directly during routine utility tasks.
- 68% of all benefit claims traffic occurred directly through this single home screen card.
- Surfacing inline one-tap "Claim Now" actions drove total program activation from 16% to 43%.
Driving Benefit Discovery Through Proactive Awareness
Instead of relying on users to explore the app, we surfaced high-value, personalized benefits as an app-opening experience. This reduced the effort required to discover rewards and encouraged faster redemption of premium subscriptions like Amazon Prime.
- The Proactive popup became a key discovery channel, driving 15% of all traffic to the claim page.
Benefit Activation Journey
We redesigned the home screen around progressive discovery and content-driven engagement.
Loyalty program only creates value when people experience it. While Airtel Thanks bundled premium benefits with eligible plans, many users never discovered them. We redesigned the experience to reduce the distance between eligibility and activation, making every benefit easier to discover, understand, and redeem.
Discover Benefit
View Benefits
Claim
Claim Progress
In App Partner Reward Activation
In App Partner Reward Confirmation
- Led experience design for Airtel Thanks benefit discovery and redemption.
- Defined the end-to-end activation journey across Airtel and partner touchpoints.
- Collaborated with product managers, stakeholders & engineering teams to integrate partner activation into the app experience.
Converging Multiple Partner Journeys into One Experience
- Phone number based activation: Users could activate their membership with a single tap. We completed the activation in the background and seamlessly deep-linked them into the partner app, or redirected them to the Play Store if the app wasn't installed.
- Email based activation: For partners requiring an email account/phone number, we embedded the registration flow directly within the Airtel app. This allowed users to complete account creation and activate their membership without leaving the experience.
- The primary challenge wasn't designing a single activation flow, it was creating a consistent user experience across multiple partner ecosystems, each with its own technical constraints, authentication model, and activation process.
- Claim % increased from 16% to 43%
- Bounce rate was minimum for phone number based activation
Enable Informed Redemption
Helped users evaluate each benefit before committing by clearly communicating its value proposition and providing a direct path to activation.
Recharge: Connect the action that earned the value with the value itself
We discovered that the loyalty journey actually began at recharge but the experience treated recharge as a transaction, not a loyalty moment. Every recharge contributed to determining a user's Thanks tier, yet users weren't shown what that meant for them. We presented this gap to stakeholders and proposed bringing tier and benefit information directly into the recharge journey.
- Colloborated with Recharge team in the discovery and ideation phase to showcase benefits directly within the recharge flow.
Outcomes
The business-metric column reflects overall company performance across multiple concurrent initiatives (pricing, network, marketing), not this redesign in isolation. It is shown for strategic context rather than a direct-attribution claim.
From a Hidden Tab to the Entire App
This shift wasn't cosmetic, it was architectural. We moved loyalty from a feature users had to find to the foundational identity of the entire product. Every screen, every interaction, and every touchpoint was redesigned to communicate one clear message: "You're valued, and Airtel thanks you."
Loyalty Needed to Become the Core Experience
Instead of "telecom app + rewards section," the product vision shifted to a value-driven ecosystem app. Loyalty is not a feature you visit, it's a feeling you experience throughout the product.
Perceived Value Drives Retention
Telecom markets are extremely competitive, and users switch networks easily if they perceive better value elsewhere. The goal was to constantly remind users that they get more with Airtel.
Branding Reinforces Emotional Loyalty
A loyalty program inside an app often feels like a marketing feature. Branding the entire app around "Thanks" creates an emotional signal. Instead of opening "my Airtel account," users feel "Airtel thanks me for being a customer."
Marketing Power
A single brand message is much easier to communicate. Instead of explaining a complex rewards program hidden inside the app, marketing could simply say: download the Airtel Thanks app. Simple, memorable, and consistent.