Chime Launches: Unemployment Assistant

The reality of unemployment is a daunting one. Not only is it stressful to lose your job, but it can spark feelings of fear, uncertainty, and disempowerment. And with the recent rise of unemployment due to the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of Americans are now jobless — making unemployment a daily reality for more people than ever before.

Thankfully, when someone becomes unemployed, there are some systems in place to support their livelihood while they navigate finding a new job or supplemental sources of income — unemployment benefits. But accessing such benefits can be complicated due to unclear eligibility requirements, daunting application systems, and multiple information sources. On top of it all, many are forced to navigate the depths of unemployment benefits without support — so it’s no surprise that only 29% of unemployed Americans received benefits in March of 2020.

This reality ignited a project at Chime, at the helm of which was Miguel Dergal, our Senior Director of Product Management for Growth. With a background in mobile and payments and an obsession with influencing the future of fintech, Miguel and his cross-functional team of engineers, legal experts, designers, marketers, and product managers were ripe for the challenge of helping our members access their unemployment benefits.

“The goal was to create a solution to help members understand and simplify access unemployment benefits,” says Miguel. So the team got to work.

Understanding the problem at hand

Miguel’s team first realized unemployment was on the rise when our member surveys indicated increasing unemployment. When the team dug deeper into their research, they realized that, due to COVID-19, more and more members would soon lose their jobs or be furloughed. All of a sudden, there was an increased need to help our members access unemployment benefits.

“When we looked at the data and better understood our members’ situations, we discovered that the fastest way to help them would be to accelerate their access to the available governmental programs,” explains Miguel. But government benefits are hard to grasp on the best of days — let alone when it’s a global pandemic and new relief programs are released. Instead of providing links and articles for our members to read, the team decided to digest and share the most relevant information to help members get their benefits, not get stuck in the application phase.

“A lot of our members are eligible, but find the benefits system too hard to navigate — that’s why we didn’t want to just link to government websites because that wouldn’t be helpful. We wanted to do something truly different and actually solve a problem for them.”

Through its research, the team discovered that many members were eligible for benefits but were not applying, and those who thought they might be eligible didn’t know where to start. What’s more, many people believed that unemployment benefits could only be paid out on prepaid debit cards, which take time to be shipped out and typically charge fees — not ideal for an individual depending on those funds (you know how we feel about fees).

Navigating the nuances

“The solution we picked had to be the right one,” says Miguel. He wanted to actually solve the problem at hand — how complicated and daunting unemployment benefits could be. And if the team’s hypothesis was right, many of our members might not even apply for unemployment benefits because of their misconceptions of the programs — so they needed to correct for that, too.

“We wanted to maximize the number of members who would access their benefits, even if they didn’t think they were eligible, because these are unprecedented times and our members in need deserve every bit of help they can get,” explains Miguel.

Adding to misconceptions about unemployment benefits, unemployment is also just a tough spot to be in. The feelings that accompany being unemployed mean that whatever solution the team built, it would need to be human. “People who are unemployed don’t want a robot, they want a financial advisor — this was an opportunity for Chime’s personality to shine through the solution we built,” Miguel says. “After all, approaching the problem from our Be Human value was the best way we’d get members to engage with the solution and harness their benefits.”

Unemployment isn’t just a nuanced situation for those facing it, it’s also a bureaucratically challenging system to navigate. Rules for collecting unemployment benefits vary from state to state and there is no one way to apply. What’s more, the CARES Act was passed at the federal level, but applications are made through an individual’s local state government. And many states offer different types of unemployment insurance as well as different eligibility criteria. Some states only pay out through prepaid cards.

“To say it’s a complex system would be an understatement,” Miguel explains.

The biggest challenge Miguel and his team faced was boiling down the many nuances of unemployment benefits into a 5–10 question wizard — what they called the Unemployment Assistant — that could provide answers and guidance to every member. “We really wanted the Assistant to feel like a person because it’s important that our members feel how much we care about them,” he says. “It’s also a way to encourage members to be open about their unemployment with us, driving engagement with the Assistant — when more people use the feature, more people will get access to benefits.”

The final product doesn’t feel like another form — it’s like a friendly text or WhatsApp conversation with a friend that provides guidance but isn’t overwhelming — just the balance the team hoped to strike.

“We’re always looking for the balance between simplicity, information, and accuracy,” explains Miguel. “We found a sweet spot that will help members feel supported and directed while taking on what can otherwise be a daunting task.”

Launching a feature from shelter-in-place

Miguel and his team took the Unemployment Assistant from kickoff to launch in just three weeks, and they did it all virtually. “When we compare this launch — which happened entirely online, due to shelter-in-place — to previous launches, the main difference was our need for regular meetings to keep everyone on the same page and constantly updated,” says Miguel.

To that end, they had a daily standup with the Engineering Team, weekly check-ins with the PR and Marketing Teams, and followed a quick iterative process. Plans for each section would get reviewed and approved by the executive team, then the legal team, get passed on to design and then engineering to be built, get tested the following day, and then the team would move onto the next section.

Ultimately, this product launch — done from home, entirely virtually, in an unprecedented time — was one of the most meaningful launches the team has worked on. “I kept hearing from the team how fortunate they felt,” Miguel says. “People would say, ‘I feel so lucky to have a job, with a stable income, at a company that’s doing well as a business, and it means so much to me to be building this feature for people who aren’t in the same position as I am.’”

At times, Miguel worried about the team’s morale — on such a tight schedule, he knew that it might be overwhelming for some. But every time he’d check in with people working on the project, all he heard was how motivated people felt: “Everyone was truly motivated because they could see why this launch was so important,” he says. “If the launch was delayed for a day or a week, that represented time our members might not have access to these resources — it mattered to everyone that we launched it, and fast.”

Introducing the Unemployment Assistant

With the Unemployment Assistant built and ready, Miguel and the team faced the final challenge: launching with the right message for our members. With the help of our Marketing and PR teams, they worked to craft a message that would land for all members, regardless of their employment status. “What we wanted to convey is that Chime is there for our members — no matter what circumstances they’re in,” Miguel says. The Unemployment Assistant is live in the world and over one million members have already used the tool.

“Our team did an amazing job,” says Miguel. “I want every member of the team to understand how great the work they did is and the impact it’s going to have on our members, both today and in the future.”

Kudos to the entire team who made the Unemployment Assistant come to life! 👏 💚 👯