Salary Finance Pay Advance

Context and problem space

Salary Finance is a financial wellbeing company, that offeres simple savings, access to salary as it is earned and affordable loans – all underpinned by accessible and engaging financial education to improve colleagues financial wellbeing. Salary Finance product suit is available for all collagues as an employee benefit.

Advance is Salary Finance's own Earned Wage Access (EWA) product, that allows colleagues access up to 50% of their earned pay before payday, allowing them to better match costs across the month.

After securing launch of Advance for Sainsbury's and Tesco, with one of the biggest user bases, we expecting a significant volume added to our platform and Ops Team.

To support Ops, the Product team agreed to work on projects that will reduce time-to-serve for Advance.

Additionally, with the Consumer Duty coming to force in July 2023, it's been decided that altough not regulated, we will also be working on its implementation for Advance as part of the company's vision and commitement to deliver good customer outcomes for all its products.

High level outcomes and my role

As a Product Designer, I joined the Advance team to conduct discovery, research and delivery of design solutions that will meet the above objective, working within a dedicated sqaud in collaboration with Senior PM, a team of full-stack engineers, and QAs.

Reduce Ops time-to-serve for Advnace - from problem discovery to final solution.
Improve Customer Undertanding and build a more customer-centric Advance journey that delivers good customer outcomes as part of the Consumer Duty regulations - from the existing product review to recommendations.

Timeline: 6 months

The process

1. Discover 2. Research 3. Design & Test 4. Iterate and Measure

1. Discover and Research

Understanding and collecting business and user needs and goals.

Understanding the problem

At the stage where the requirements are not clear and we were not sure where the problem is, I kicked off the project with the discovery:

review data related to Advance inbound enquiries with Customer Ops.
internal stakeholder interviews to understand deeper the nature of the enquiries and collect customer feedback insights.
review HotJar recordings, heatmap, and other product data.

What does the data tell us

Working with the data in FreshDesk and Ops reports, I listed down all the categories that make up the Advance enquiries, and narrowed down the top 5 resons for the Advance users to contact us from each of this category.

Working together with the PM, we looked closer at the top 2 buckets that create the biggest inbound and calculated the resource effort spent on solving these tasks across various teams. This helped us to prioritise the direction and problems we want to focus on.

Having a clear picutre of the identifies problem areas and impact we will make, we were able to narrow down the goals of this project:

Business goal: Decrease the number of inbound related to ‘Funds available' and ‘Blocking/unblocking’ categories which currently makes 24.15% and 18.71% of all inbound enquiries and requires effort and involvement across all 3 Ops teams.

User needs:
When I face unexpected financial difficulties,
I want to have access to my Advance funds and know when my Advance is available
so I can handle emergencies and manage my finances better.

What do the stakeholders tell us?

I continued with the research by interviewing Customer Ops team members to understand the reasons behind users questions.

Internal flow and lack of visibility
I found out that NOT ONLY the users themselves don’t have the information they need, ie how advance is calculated, when do we get the updates from the employer to be able to display their available amount BUT ALSO that a lot of information about the users's Advance usage is not readily available for our team. Therefore, they need to check with other departments and continue their investigation which takes a lot of time.

Lack of customer understanding
The biggest confusion both for the users and Ops agents is how the pay periods works. Advance has pay period, cut off day, pay date, and depending on where a user is in the period and when their pay date is, customers have an option to use advance for a particular period of time. This data is not available on the customer dashboard which causes confusion amoung the users.

Following the interviews, I took a deep dive into FreshDesk to read and analyse users enquries.

The top 3 scenarios which users come to use with are:

Scenario 1: Why isn’t my advance available?

Scenario 2. Why is the amount I have available £0?

Scenario 3: Why was I able to take more last month? Why am I not able to take the same?

Key findings and assumptions:

Users don’t have visibility into how their Advance is calculated, pay periods and key dates and as the result don’t know when it is and isn’t available.

The way customers use Advance may not be how we anticipated Advance to work - some use it on regular basis vs accessing only when urgently needed.

Users reach out to Customer Ops mostly for reassurance and clarification because they do not have the information available to them.

Customer Ops need visibility into whether the T&As and data have been uploaded by employers and if there is an instance of delayed data to communicate this to the users.

Research

Identify user goals that must be met for the product to be successful.

What do the users tell us

At this point I formed a strong assumption that the customer dashboard lacks key information for which can lead to harmful consequences as users who depend on Advance being available may not don't have access to Advance when needed.

In parallel to that, as part of the Consumer Duty initiatives, we identified another potential harm that the product is not used as intended by the users (e.g. falling into a perpetual advance cycle usage).

To validate our assumptions, I initiated a 3-stage Research plan.

User interviews

Typeof testing: Qualitative; in-depth user interviews

Audience: existing Advance users. 5 out 6 are superusers (use Advance 1+/ month every month at least in the last year)6 interviews with existing Advance users

Goals

Learn about (bad) habits and (mis)understandings that existing users have developed throughout their usage of Advance
Fill in the gaps in our understanding of the core user needs and behaviours, especially related to super-users (ie users who’ve repetitively been using Advance every month since they’ve registered)
Test consumer understanding throughout the key journeys and identify key risk areas to address.

Hypotheses

Key takeaways

Employer Advance advocates

👉 Users approached their managers or HR when they were in need of money to see what’s possible in terms of a ‘crisis loan’ and they referred them to the Advance service.

Emergency is the main trigger

👉 For majority of users, the situation that triggered them to find out about Advance is an emergency which happened a few weeks before payday

Employer helps to build trust

💡 Since Advance is offered and advertised through employers, users knew they can trust the service.
💡 Users value that the information about the service was clear and straightforward, with all key info on the first page, and “there is no fine print”

Super-users - why so many?

Super-users - why Advance?

🎯 Affordable compared to other options, like overdraft or credit cars

🎯 Very easy to use and super straightforward

🎯 Instant and gives quick access to earned money

💡 These findings partially invalidate our hypothesis that over-usage always means harm. In addition to usage, we need to establish other detective controls to reveal cases when oversage leads to harm (e.g. track those who cancel their DD mandate; reach out to us for refunds, and alike)

💡 Participants proved to understand very well how Advance works (deductions, percentage of pay, how it affects the final salary) and did not demonstrate any reasons to create additional preventive mechanisms. That being said, we’ve detected a number missing opportunities which can improve user ability to stay in control of their finances. 

Missing opportunities

1️⃣ Overview of end of month salary

“I calculate manually what my final salary will be every time before taking Advance”

“Should I take it or should I not?! - I can’t figure out easily what his pay will be and whether it’ll be enough to pay the bills”.

2️⃣ Advance availability and history of Advances

“Sometimes I'm busy and it slips my mind that I need to take Advance then when I come to go to log on, it says you have to wait until after your payday before we can request another advance.”

“It’s not immediately visible when Advance is not available which was a bit of a surprise when I discovered it as I rely on being able to take an advance at any point in the month”

3️⃣ Using the app

“ It'd be much easier to log in with biometrics or smth like my banking app rather than opening a browser, then finding the bookmark, then log in…”

Unmoderated testing and mental model exercise

Typeof testing: Quali-Quantitative, unmoderated

Audience: a randomised list of 40 users that match an Advance user profile

Goals

Evaluate whether we are providing customers with the essential information they require throughout the product core end-to-end journeys including unhappy paths.
Learn unbiased mental models of an average user and understand what he they believe about how a service and user experience should work and what key deliverables and features it includes.

Key takeaways

👉 37.5% would expect to see history of advances

👉 37.5% would expect to see salary section/block

👉 27.5% expect to have access to an account section

👉 12.5% expect an education element and precautions measurements including:

Executive summary & recommendations

👍 Rethink the Jobs to be Done and User needs to include some level of overview into user salary as this seems to be a need that was indicated through both qualitative and quantitative research. This also will help to manage money better knowing how amount taken will affect final paycheck.

👍 Improve users ability to stay in control of their money and usage by providing history of Advances and repayments as well as key data point about their pay cycle.

👍 Address vulnerable customers:
‍- repayments to include clear statuses, flags and warnings so that the user can recover and avoid missing payments.
- develop educational element to help use the product wisely and increase level of awareness
- develop certain precaution features to customise % of salary available n of advances, set a limit on advances, etc

2. Define and ideate

Once we have a deeper understanding of the target audience and the problem we’re solving,
it’s time to create an actual solution.

Identified opportunities - summary

Having presented and discussed the findings with the team, we separated the identified opportunities into 3 distinct buckets:
‍→ the Dashboard
→ Onboarding / FAQs
→ Ops Admin (our internal tool).

🎯 Dashboard redesign:

As dashboard redesign is a much bigger project, aside from the inisghts I also did a competitor analysis to compare the feature list and gather inspiration. ⤵

I then conducted the UX audit of the Customer Dashboard in relation to the key findings mentioned above, and mapped out the areas that we can improve.

I also held a workshop with involving Customer Ops, devs, and PM to brainstomr other solutions

🎯 Onboarding / FAQs‍

For a quick win, I analysed the FAQs section to see if users' enquiries are addressed here which can allow them to self-serve. I identified missing questions as well as opportunities to improve existing questions and write a new section to help users understand the product better and address their concerns. Within a branstorming session, we've identified the following opportunties:

- Adding an intro and an overview during onboarding/employee comms
- Adding data to automated emails for context
- Updated content in FAQs.
- Dynamic fields for personalised experience within the FAQs.

🎯 Ops Admin & internal flows‍

When it came to Ops Admin, we ran a workshop with the Customer team members to ideate on the solutions which will help them to get better visibility. We landed on the following:

- OpsAdmin customer dashboard redesign to add missing data points
- Confirm set dates with clients to upload T&As

3. Design and test

Create designs for prioritised solutions

Simliest solution without devs: FAQs

Having evaluated each buckets against the effort/impact matrix, we have first prioritised initiatives by starting with improving the FAQs, quick wins for the OpsAdmins and a having a more dedicated project to dashboard redesign.

Ops Admin Quick Wins - display the data we already collect

Once we had the FAQs live, we moved to Ops Admin optimisation as part of which we designed the following 3 features:

1️⃣ Advance data points

Displays customer’s live data points including the number of Advance available and information about their pay period.

2️⃣ T&A data modal

Information about hourly paid users is available via the dashboard which enables agents to see whether users’ data is accurate and was updated.

3️⃣ Customer Status

At first glance see if what user’s current status is and whether they have access to Advance at this point in the pay period.

Customer dashboard redesign

I did a lot of experimentation and back and forth walk-through with devs and PM to understand what's technically feasbile.

😩 For instance, it turned out that unfotunately the feature that would have made a huge difference - showing gross salary vs earned - is not possible due the the way we collect data.

I also had to take into consideration edge cases, failed repayments and other unhappy paths

4. Measure and reflect

Reflect on learning, track and measure success

Outcomes and Reflections

How do we know we did it right. Key metrics:

🌟 Positive feedback from the users

📉 Reduced % of users landing on the error screens

💰 Reduced % of users who fail rempayments

📥 Increased % of users who hit "notify me"

📞 Reduced number of enquiries

Learnings and reflections:

Use metrics and hard research evidence to prioritise the solution
‍There are numerous ways to fix a problem. Focus on the one that is backed up by the research insights and user behaviours insights.

Be able to scale down and do not ignore quick wins
‍This As designers, we always strive for the best possible experience for your users, and aim for a the biggest which often scared PMs for the dev effort. Get your buy-in by providing mocked up ideas early and don't ignore simple quick wins that can be implemented in the meantime.

Pay Advance dashboard redesign

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