How we increased the conversion by 30% with a better onboarding experience

Before I start, let me give you a brief background. I am a Product Manager working in the staffing business at Aasaanjobs (now called Olx People, a part of Olx group). In staffing, we handle the onboarding, payroll and compliance of the employees who work directly for our clients. On the product side, we build features to deliver a great experience from onboarding to exit for our staffing employees.

The problem statement I will be talking about is related to the onboarding of the employees. Onboarding is a process which requires the employees to submit the required documents (Aadhar, Bank account, Address, PAN, Driving license, Photograph etc). We have a mobile app for document collection which helps us to manage the cumbersome process of document collection in a completely digitized manner

Problem and Impact:

While submitting the documents in the app, there were huge user drop-offs at each screen. There are mainly 5 screens to collect the documents and each screen had a significant drop. In result, there was a total 33% drop till the final screen. This had a major impact on the business:

• First, we required a big onboarding team who had to do a lot of manual follow ups with them to collect the documents.
• In absence of documents, the salary transfer and PF/ESIC payment used to get delayed and resulted in major client escalations.

To solve this problem, we decided to revamp the onboarding screens completely. Before I dwell into the details of the revamp, let me share the old conversion funnel (before revamp) and new conversion funnel (after revamp).

Onboarding conversion:

As you can see, the total drop has been reduced to 12% from 33% after the revamp.

How did we approach the problem

User Research:
A user research activity was conducted where a team of a designer, developer and myself interacted with about 50 employees and the internal onboarding team. We completed this activity in 15 days and gained more insights about our users and the way they interact with the app. Below are the major issues we found out, along with the solutions implemented.

Problem 1: Poor feedback system
Users were not getting proper feedback upon submitting the onboarding forms. Majorly, there were 4 underlying issues:

1. Error visibility: Upon clicking submit, validation errors were shown below the respective fields. If the fields were not in view on the screen (as is the case in long forms), the user did not understand why he was stuck here.
2. Errors not verbose: Error messages were too technical and the users did not understand them fully.
3. Poor handling of failure scenarios: If the document upload was taking a long time or it was failed because of the large file size, user did not get any feedback
4. No visibility on progress: While going through the onboarding forms, users did not know how much onboarding is done and how much is left. That made the user anxious.

Solution: To address these issues, we implemented the below solutions:

1. Whenever there was any error on submitting the form, user was taken to that field which the error belonged to
2. Redefined the errors in a way that any user with a basic english could understand the errors and take the necessary action. For eg, If the character length of the address was less than 10, then the error shown was “Invalid address”. It has been changed now to “Please enter your complete address”
3. Implemented a validation error on document size more than 5 MB. Also, to reduce the user anxiety, provided an intermediate feedback if it was taking more than 20 secs to upload - “File upload is taking longer than usual. Please wait”
4. Implemented a progress bar on the top which tells the user how much onboarding he has completed and how much is left.

Problem 2: Document upload speed was very slow
Most of our users use mobile internet to upload the documents. Also, most of them use a camera option to upload, resulting in document size being from 2 Mb to 7 Mb. It used to take 1– 4 mins to upload a single document and sometimes more if the mobile network was poor and file size was large. Because of that, many users got frustrated and dropped off from the app

Solution:
We Implemented file size compression algorithm to reduce the upload time, in a way that the large file size can be compressed without affecting the image quality much. Earlier, the average upload time was 27 secs which now has been reduced to 8 secs.

To reduce the waiting time, we also arranged the order of the fields in such a way that while the document was getting uploaded, the user can start filling other fields

Problem 3: Poor user control
In some instances, users were stuck and did not know what to do. For eg, submitting the bank account details was mandatory in the app for the employee’s salary transfer. In case the users didn’t have bank details, there was no way for them to move to the next screen. Because of this, users couldn’t upload other documents like address and photo even if they wanted

Solution:
Based on the user research and our compliance requirements, we identified what all documents we should keep mandatory and what all optional. For example, a good portion of the users didn’t have bank account details at the time of onboarding but we needed it mandatorily for their salary transfer, so we made it optional but gave a warning message if the user tries to go ahead without submitting the bank details

Problem 4: Trust factor
When the users landed on the app, we asked them to upload the document directly after the login. They were not given any context about why they needed to upload the documents and what will happen thereafter. Since there was no human touch between us and the employee and everything happened digitally, some users had trust issues and hesitated to upload their documents.

Solution:
To give the users a relevant context, we started showing an introduction video as soon as they landed on the app. This video entails a brief intro about Olx People, our role in the employee’s job journey and a brief understanding of onboarding process

Also, we showed the list of the documents he needed to upload in advance so that he can have all the documents ready before starting the onboarding.

Conclusion:

It took us 2 months to make these changes live and the results are phenomenal. Of course, this is not the perfect product and we will keep trying to deliver the best onboarding experience to our users.

Thanks for reading this article. Do clap if you liked it. In case of any questions, feedback or suggestions, feel free to comment or reach out to me directly.