Goals

• Identify drop off points and drop off pains

• Use data/analytics and customer research to make high quality decisions

• Improve overall metrics in on-boarding

Challenges

• 3-4 week deadline from start to finish 🤯

• No pre-documented persona

The analytics:

The first step was to audit their funnel and analytics. We worked with Bento to understand their problems. They were spending a lot of money on marketing, however, their signup and on-boarding funnel was leaking more than 82% of the total signup applications. This was causing a lot stress within Bento, which you can probably imagine.

Another problem that was identified was their landing page, but because of the budget, our role was to stick with solving the problems of the signup page and onwards.

UI/UX:

• Persona building

• Usability best practice audit

• Doing, thinking, feeling empathy workshops 

• Screen | Audio captured UX interviews

• Competitive Analysis

• Session video recording tool

Looking under
the hood.

There was a straight shot flow to user approval which took seconds through their Tier 1 & 2 Applications. The information inputted was authenticated by a third party service and sent back to be verified based on their score and correctly inputting basic company and personal info.

This was a big deal because…

if you didn’t get verified via Tier 1 & 2, you got funneled through the Tier 3 applications process. This was incredibly manual and required customer success reps and the uploading of documentation. Further more, the verification of new documents went through a different review process which would take days, sometimes weeks if the applicant had trouble finding their documents.

You can imagine that this was putting a large strain on the CS team and the applicants. However, verification was a must. Bento had been targeted by scam artists in the past.

Identifying the drop off points and triggers.

We worked with the Bento team to get more data on some of the major drop points.

We discovered that the major points of drop-off included:

• Applicants inputting basic information

• An outstanding 70% failed the Tier 1 & 2 instant verification process and were pushed into the Tier 3 funnel, which meant that they had to upload documents causing major drop-off in applicants.

• And only 50% of applications that completed the signup, verification funnel, and added their bank account actually ended up loading funds into their cards

Customer and persona research.

Bento customers were your average small business owners. They were avocado farmers, truck fleet owners, non profits, all looking for a way to expense their truckers and employees while wanting to make sure they could throttle the limits and the days the card could be used. They’ve experience theft and hidden expenses charges in the past.

A persona was starting to form.

Customer journey mapping

We now had an understanding of what the applicants were doing/thinking/feeling during the points of drop-off.

When inputting Tier 1 & 2 information, there were many applicants that weren’t the owners or had access to the information required. That was adding noise to the analytics which should have been filtered out earlier in the funnel. Business owners additionally wondered why personal information was asked before business. They also felt unsafe with how the UI looked and were worried about inputting their personal info and if it would impact their credit score (which it wouldn’t).

And From the 70% that did not get instantly approved and needed to upload documents, the majority of the reasons why was because information was being inputted incorrectly. The other small percentage was because they were scammers. This blew my mind because there was a huge percentage of applicants that were falling off during the documentation process that could have been easily avoided with better guardrails and copy and design choices.

Wireframes and
sacrificial concepts

One thing that we found out through testing the wireframes is that although people were concentrated on the current task, there was fatigue from not knowing how many more steps and how long the process would take.

Signup before
& after

We asked applicants to select a role in the company to act as a pre-filter. The overall look was improved to look trustworthy, which was a real concern to applicants who felt unsafe with providing sensitive information.

On-boarding
before & after

We pushed up the fun parts to the front of the flow and made the card editing experience fun and dynamic.

We created additional affordances where applicants normally make mistakes and added a Microsoft clippy like element to give additional context on key inputs.

Outcome

In three to four weeks we:

• Lowered the number of total applicants, but applicants who signed up were higher quality applicants which reduced noise on analytics

• Decreased the number of applicants requiring Tier 3 documentation upload by 70%+ which reduced strain on CS team and reduced drop-off rate heading into later stages of the funnel

• And overall increased conversion metrics of people adding cash by 40%+.