Here is how we launched Donation module at Western Union- A solution evolved from Product Hackathon at WU
This is the story about how we enabled customers to donate small amounts to Western Union Foundation (WUF) while sending money to their loved ones. On the face of it, it seems very simple, right? Just provide a check box on the payment page. It will remain selected by default. Customer can un-mark it if he doesn’t want to donate. Simple, isn’t it?
That’s the beauty of simple things. They are much more complex behind the scenes as compared to what they appear at the front end. So, now let me take you behind the curtains.
Personalized connection: We wanted to set up a connection with users in order to invoke altruist inside them. So, we shown war veterans image to US users while Indian got a girl child student and Africans got a happy African child on the splash page.
Nudge customers to donate: We wanted to nudge customers and make them feel they are losing on doing something good if they deny donating. Hence instead of check box we kept 3 radio buttons on the review page before checkout. Having explicit option of clicking on “No, I don’t wish to donate” made people feel bad about not donating for a noble cause. Again, this page was personalized per customer persona.
Engage customers with brand and purpose: The ‘Learn more’ link provides specific details about WU Foundation. Who they are and how they have helped million of lives so far?
Solutioning: Now comes the most complex part that is solutioning. Our solution evolved in 3 phases. We iterated and improved on the previous versions.
Version 1.0: Western Union Foundation (WUF) was already listed as a biller on wu.com. Our Biller platform which is aggregator for billers all across the USA had WUF also one of the biller. The simple solution was to call Biller API from Money Transfer flow. Almost all of the teams in competition went for this easy solution. But there were some constraints with Biller API. It was available in USA wu.com only. Meaning customers from other countries will not be able to donate. Biller API accepts just credit cards as funds-in method. Meaning, people will not be able to donate via bank account, wire transfer or other payment methods. We had to solve for these challenges also.
Version 2.0: We decided to use Money Transfer (MT) rails and send money directly to WUF bank account. If customer wants to donate, WUF was selected default receiver in the back end and amount is debited from customer’s original funds-in method. But this version was also not full proof because MT rails charge fees on each transaction and we can’t charge fees to customer for donation. Hence, we had to find a way out for this. We applied a default zero fee promo code from system to all the donation transactions. This solved our purpose.
Version 3.0: Using zero fee promo code solved our purpose but the problem was not completely solved yet. The promo code was applied from front end. Hence it could have been visible to anyone using developer tools. Also, so far, we had all the logic on front end which was making the entire code base more complex. So, we thought of moving all the logic to backend and created DonateWU API. This API was the real winning point of our solution.
Solution Summary:
One of the key requirements was to keep Donation as separate transaction from customer’s money transfers. So that donations could be traced separately, and refunds could be issued easily in case of cancellations. We generated separate tracking number for donations. Also, Donation was initiated only after making sure that customers’ original Money Transfer transaction is successful. Because there was no use of taking donation if customer’s original transaction itself failed. This would have resulted in bad customer experience. So, we initiated donations only when original Money Transfer was successful. All in all, we were able to provide following benefits from our solution:
Legal and Compliance considerations: The story didn’t end here; we had to comply with legal and compliance requirements also before launch on production. Apparently according to Dodd-Frank (DF) law in US there are regulations even on font size, placement of content and color of the text also. Couldn’t even set default option to donate. We had to set ‘No, I don’t wish to donate’ as initial default. We had to revise the look and feel, UI of our solution. This is how we had designed earlier and how we ended up finally with legal and compliance approval.
Post launch: So, finally we were ready to roll out Donation module on production for our users. We did phase roll out and initially released to just 10% of the traffic. We used launched it as an A/B test on WU Android and iOS apps, as we wanted to make sure that introduction of this additional widget on Money Transfer review page doesn’t hurt our conversions from review to receipt. Finally, its encouraging to see analytics, a lot many people are opting to donate even if the initial default selection is “No, I don’t wish to donate”. People are donating in plenty. What a pleasure to realize that small product can make so big contribution to a good cause.
Key Learnings: Personalization is the key, go beyond one size fits all approach, tailor made the product for each of your customer. Look for behavioral dynamics also- how users think and how do they take decision in a specific situation? Keep it simple for your users. Don’t overburden them with too many details or choices. Think about how you can make your product reusable with least effort. Make it configurable, plug & play. Think about APIs the way to go so that your functionality could be easily exposed to any other partner also in future. Finally, measure, learn and improvise.
Thanking my team at Western Union which made this possible — Team Avengers: @ninad dalvi, @aqib mapari, @ajay kumar, @udayavanan methivanan, @ankur saini
