When a Tweak in User-Journey Rose Online Engagement to 62%
We’re a home loan switching service company, empathetic content on our website and blog gets us crazy inbound traffic. Having our fair share of on-boarded users (read Signups), sadly just 2% of the onboarded used to check out the primary feature themselves!
Let’s check the spin-off
Without signing up, we let our users calculate how much can they save by switching their home loan. We gain their trust by transparently showing them the costs involved. The next logical step is to check whether one is even Eligible to switch or not, this is both a User Goal and a Business Goal.
Problem well stated is half solved
As a customer advocate, I analyzed this behavior with BJ Fogg’s Behavior Model: Behavior = Motivation + Ability + Prompt (at the same time)
For our inbound users, consuming the content on website & blog gives them enough high (read Motivation) and a Call-to-Action to Signup to Check Eligibility-FREE! plays the Prompt. Okay then, Ability looks like the culprit, which is stopping our users from Checking Eligibility!
Let’s Analyze the Ability
Ability refers to the how the Simplicity Factors work together in the context of a Prompt. We want our users to start checking their Eligibility themselves, Eligibility is a series of questions about the Applicants’ age, income, expenses, documents and property to check if they’re eligible to switch their loan or not.
Usability
Watching a sample of users successfully do the task and listening live calls where users answering the questions with little or no assistance, validated the User Goal and our Targeted Users’ capability to answer them!
Also, the elements used in answering the questionnaire like text field, checkboxes, radio buttons, forward-backward buttons were pretty standard. Checking it across a combination OS, devices and browsers wasn’t a treat back then but was pretty usable!
User Journey
SwitchMe holds its position in the market because of Personalization and Transparency. The model is such that a user will interact with one dedicated Advisor at all times unlike the one-to-many call-center-ish service models prevalent in India. Therefore, the product flow looked like this:
The experience of going through Check Eligibility looks seamless for the users for the Advisor got assigned. So, the users who took the call were out of question to go through Eligibility themselves. Just to validate this, we checked how many users got on a call within few seconds. Here’s what we bumped into:
We could reach out to maximum of 55.7% on-boarded users within few seconds of signup.
Sadly, in remaining 44.3% cases, either the user did not take the call (user segment which prefers doing it themselves) or user had to wait for an Advisor to be assigned. Hour-of-the-day dimension in Google Analytics turned out to be the hero parameter in validating that users signing up in non-office hours were facing the friction of Advisor assignment of till next day morning.
Solution
Thanks to SwitchMe’s culture of Focused & Collective Brainstorming sessions, pretty fast we narrowed down on letting our users Auto-login immediately after the Signup Form by tweaking the product flow:
We purposely did not make any change from the findings of User Testing and Usability Testing results. Since we wanted to do a quick pilot test, we discarded solutions which required major changes e.g. adding Password field in Signup form etc.
Result Time!
The engagement for taking the eligibility test shot up to from 2% to 62%, which was certainly higher than our estimated impact! But what came to us as a surprise was, users were not just finishing the test the eligibility test themselves but also opting for our service by paying online. Woah! Look at those dollar eyes of the product and tech team!
We scored the brownie points too!
Since people were Checking their Eligibility themselves, our Advisors could help those users in taking faster decision. Last but not the least, this also increased brand recall value because users were spending more time after signup, till they received a call!
This successful pilot test bought time to revamp the post-signup experience from the business! Our next gig is to work on the results of User-test and Usability-test and thus increase the online payments.
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