Chatso's Coupon Feature

Enabled chat agents to offer product-recommended coupons for more effective upselling.

Product designer / Breadstack Tech / 2023

The Overview

About Chatso

Chatso is a live chat platform developed by Breadstack Technologies for e-commerce businesses, allowing agents to engage with customers in real-time while they shop online. Beyond conversations, Chatso also acts as a sales-driving tool, equipping agents with features that guide purchasing decisions and surface upselling opportunities.

Project Summary

As part of Chatso’s sales-driving capabilities, the platform offers features like product recommendations and coupon generation. Initially, these features operated independently, so agents who wanted to upsell a recommended product with a coupon had to create the coupon separately, adding friction when speed and momentum were crucial.

To address this, we expanded the coupon feature so agents could generate coupons directly from recommended products, preserving conversational flow and enabling more seamless upselling.

My Deliverables

Interaction & UI Design, Workflow Optimization, Design System Alignment, Prototyping & Iteration, Stakeholder Collaboration, Edge Case Documentation, Design Handoff

How it Started

The Problem Slowing Agents Down

Agents often recommend products in Chatso to guide customers toward a purchase. When customers hesitated, offering a coupon was a common next step to encourage conversion.

However, since coupon generation existed outside the recommendation workflow, agents had to switch contexts and manually configure a coupon, disrupting the flow of conversation during time-sensitive sales interactions.

This highlighted an opportunity to reduce friction by enabling agents to create coupons directly from product recommendations, helping them act faster and keep momentum in the chat.

Outlining the Strategy

Core Objectives

This project was positioned as a feature expansion, building on existing systems and components rather than creating something entirely new.

With the high-level strategy and direction already defined by our team's Design Lead, my role was to translate that vision into a clear interaction and interface that fit within the current product experience.

Scope & Constraints

Given the groundwork was mostly set, I worked within a tight timeline while navigating the following constraints:

The solution needed to reside within the Product Recommendation component.
The existing design system and visual language needed to be maintained.
Coupon logic had to align with the existing coupon generation flow.

Designing & Iterating

Starting with the Flow

To minimize risk and maintain familiarity, the interaction flow closely followed the existing Coupon Generator experience, with subtle adjustments to better integrate it within the Product Recommendation component.

Visual Exploration

With the flow defined, the main design challenge was surfacing the coupon action within the Product Recommendations component without adding visual clutter or distracting from the chat experience. I explored three interaction patterns:

Inline Action: Hover-based approach with inline actions.
Dropdown: A dropdown that revealed additional actions per product.
Card Layout: An expandable card interaction using elevation and shadow.

Each option was evaluated by the team for clarity and alignment with the existing design system.

Final Refinements

After reviewing the options with the team, the “Dropdown” approach was chosen as the strongest solution. The team valued how it kept the interface compact while signaling supplementary actions for each product.

The pattern also aligned with existing interaction behaviors elsewhere in the product, supporting consistency across the platform.

The Solution

Launching the Expanded Coupon Feature

Once the interaction pattern was finalized, I refined UI details, documented edge cases, and handed off final designs to development. The result was a unified workflow that enables agents to generate coupons directly from recommended products.

Direct Coupon Generation: Agents can access a coupon action directly from any recommended product, creating product-specific incentives quickly and seamlessly.

Configure Discounts on the Spot: Selecting the action opens the configuration form with the product preselected and the coupon code auto-generated, enabling agents to set discount details in seconds.

Instant Sharing with Customers: Once configured, the coupon and product link are sent together in chat, giving customers both the product page and the discount code, ready for checkout.

The Results

Greater Usage, Redemption & Conversion

After launching the expanded coupon feature, clients saw strong and measurable results:

30% increase in coupon sent
Within the first 90 days of launch, product-specific coupon usage grew by 30%, showing consistent adoption and a more efficient workflow for agents.

25% coupon redemption rate
About 1 in 4 product-specific coupons sent were redeemed, directly contributing to conversion.

$118 average order value
Orders including a product-specific coupon averaged $118, nearly 3x higher than the $44 average for orders without coupons, supporting higher-value transactions.

Reflections & Takeaways

Building this feature reinforced that subtle, intentional improvements can have significant impact. Meaningful results don’t always require extensive effort or major feature launches. Sometimes incremental changes are enough to drive real value for users.

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