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Helping customers invoice with ease.
Problem solving | Workshop facilitation | Co-design | Concepts
Overview
After extensive research across multiple teams and initiatives, including my own, we had a solid idea of how businesses invoice today with the view of getting paid. We could see that customers were invoicing, but a portion of our customers tended to revert back to invoicing by more manual processes they previously used. We needed to discover why this was and how we could improve this experience for our customers so they could get started with invoicing as soon as possible and continue using the product with ease.
Understanding the problem
This problem was initially discovered while trying to understand drop off for a product called Online Invoice Payments, however we quickly realised that in order to help our customers get the most of of this product, we first needed to examine how they used our invoicing software.
Q.
How might we help customers get set up with invoicing so that they can send out invoices with ease and get paid faster?
What is Online Invoice Payments?
Online Invoice Payments is a product that was introduced around 5 years ago to allow customers in Australia to invoice with the ability to get paid via cards and digital wallets as well as the current options such as direct deposit, BPAY and Cheque.
Once enabled and sent to the end payer, a "Pay now" button is displayed on both the digital invoice and PDF which takes the payer to a payment portal to pay online.
Understanding the customer
Insights
Using data pulled from the software and undertaking user interviews, we could see that customers would sign up for Online Invoice Payments successfully, however between being approved for the product and sending their first invoice with online payments, there was around 30 days before this happened, if it happened at all. We are able to identify three main groups that customers fell into when it came to why they signed up for the product in the first place. We needed to know which of the three we could help the most if not all of them.
This customer type only wants to give online payment options to a few select customers who have asked for it.
Signs up for online payments, is approved then either takes 35 days to send an invoice with online payments (90%) or never sends an invoice at all (12-15% of those with online payments enabled
This customer loves the ability to allow their customers to pay in whichever way they want. They believe this is the fastest way to get paid.
'Exception to the rule'
customer
Syd, the in betweener
The online payment champion
What made Syd start using online payments?
Below you can see why Syd decided to apply to have online payments on his invoices and subsequently why he gave up on actually sending the invoice to his customer with the option enabled. The problem was the time between applying for the product and actually getting access to it meaning, by the time Syd next invoiced with the product available, he didn't even know it was on the invoice screen or how to make sure it was on for that invoice. He gives up and sends the invoice the same way he always has because Syd doesn't have time to figure it out at that moment.
The problem uncovered
We established that what would benefit Syd, would actually benefit all customers who are using invoicing whether they had Online Invoice Payments turned on or not. Through at co-design workshop, together we realised we could implement a product walk through that allowed the customer to send themselves a test invoice to see how not only invoicing worked, but how it worked in conjunction with online payments.
Conceptual solution
The concept of creating a test invoice was not the only one discovered, however it was the one we decided to look into further to see if it would be desirable, feasible and viable for the customer and the business.
In the workshop that consisted of cross-functional representation, I asked the room to put their thinking caps on and note down all of the questions they had around making this concept a reality. The aim was to see if we should take this idea any further.
We knew from our research that the concept would be desirable, but could we actually bring it to life?
Outcomes
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The answer was yes! We could and would be able to bring this concept to life. We also knew through competitor research it was being done successfully elsewhere.
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I worked with product and tech through the questions/problems raised in the workshop and we addressed them in order of high to low impact.
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At the time of running through this project, we didn't actually have the applications in place to create this test invoice scenario however, today there is a preliminary version of product walk throughs that exists in product. We hope to apply it to this problem space in the near future.
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Unfortunately in this instance, priorities shift and while we wait for this work to get picked up again, it's onto the next adventure.
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