Wallet payments

Core Problem

Interakt was losing revenue each day as the business model and payment services implemented to cater to SMBs was not working as we scaled to Enterprise clients

Target Audience

SMB Users - Owners, CEOs of SMBs, Marketing & Sales Manager, Digital Marketing Managers
Enterprise Users - Marketing Heads/ Managers ,Business Development Heads / Managers

My Role

In this project, I was involved end to end collaborating on research activities, conducted design thinking workshops, participated in feature prioritising activity, brainstorming, design reviews, resolving collaboration issues, tracking metrics

Key Collaborators

1 product Designer, 1 Product Manager, 1 Engineering Manager, 1 Front End Engineers, 2 Backend Engineers, Director of Product, Interakt Business Head

Major Goals/ Success Metrics

• Provide Offline payment options with the ability to send the payment request directly to the approver reducing approval timeline
  
  

• Provide the ability to schedule Auto-recharge of wallet for both online and offline payment methods
  
  

• Provide a way for the user to track their expenses and wallet transactions

  
  

Problem Discovery

As a SaaS service, catering to Small and Medium Businesses, our business model involved payment post-service usage. This model allowed us to acquire 5000+ SMB customers .

However, as Interakt scaled from Small and Medium Businesses to Enterprise, we had an interesting issue crop up - Our post service payment business model which was designed for SMBs was leading to defaulted payments by Enterprises which was a larger amount.

This meant delayed payment and in some cases revenue loss for Interakt and Haptik as a business.

My Approach

I collaborated with our director of product and business head and got involved in multiple discussions with our enterprise clients/ target users to understand the major issues with payments and why did we not receive them on time. These discussions enlightened us to some of the issues on their end.

• Most of our enterprise clients had a bureaucratic approval process where the marketing teams/ managers had to submit a request to the finance department that could take days to get to the final approver
  
  

• Online Payments involved a surcharge of 2% fees from payment platforms like razorpay which was a large amount for enterprises and hence at times the final amount would exceed the cost added
  
  

• Finance teams wanted Marketing to be able to track expenses from campaigns, conversations, transactions to provide approvals
  
  

With these insights, I led a design thinking workshop involving design, product and engineering to brainstorm on ideas that we could use to solve these problems. We were able to formulate our main goals for the project

Constraints and Challenges

• Possibility of alienating some of our SMB clients by switching to a pre-paid subscription model
  
  

• Verifying offline transactions and reconciling them with user accounts or orders can be challenging, requiring manual intervention and tracking.
  
  

• Auto-recharge feature required significant technical integration with payment gateway
  
  

Designs

Once we set the goals and metrics, I collaborated with the PM to finalise the design requirements and planned out the sprints. I then worked with the designer to help them understand the business goals and conducted a brainstorming exercise on how our designs had to incorporate not only the ease of payments but ensure an uptick in auto-recharge options. The designer then worked on the designs

We implemented a simple analytics dashboard that would help our user track their expenses based on conversations, campaign costs, transactions and subscription costs

To smoothly transition our SMBs from a post paid to pre-paid subscription plan, we introduced tiers as a business model. From the design end, we incorporated it into our platform ensuring that we provided clear details on what each tier would involve and also a comparison between tiers

To solve for verifying offline transactions and reconciling them with user accounts or orders, we introduced the ability contact us in case of any offline payment issues

Implementation Issues

During this project, one of the things I had to deal with was that the designer was not explorative in nature and while it was a practice to try different variations as needed, he stuck to mainly one of them. This was creating some communication issues as well with the PM and EM. I stepped in to resolve this and guide the designer, brainstorming with him to come up with different options and conducting design reviews.

This also resulted in the designer being left out of loop for some changes that the EM directly made on the platform which was an issue. I had to step in and work with the PM, EM directly to resolve communication issues between them and the designer and ensure that changes were always made with designer’s approval.

User Testing, GTM activities

Due to the nature of the project, At first we released this feature to a few key accounts to get direct feedback on the following,

1. Ease of understanding offline payment concept

2. If the offline payment option was to be default or to be an additional option based on the nature of their customers

3. How quickly were they able to get payments approved

We then decided to release it to our broader customer base. This was positioned as a flexible payment structure that would help our customers choose convenience without the bureaucracy and we conducted longitudinal studies over 3 and 6 months to monitor the metrics set.

Results and Learnings

Key Learnings

To ensure that there is no communication mishaps especially between an experienced Engineering Manager and a relatively junior designer, I established designer data acceptance testing process by working with our scrum manager to add the process into our JIRA.

We solved the reconciliation issue in offline payments by providing the user an avenue to contact us. This meant the experience for the user goes beyond the interface and hence worked with the director of product and our business head to establish a proper customer service practice

I realized that most of the work done by design team was not visible to the entire company and hence started a practice of a quarterly design newsletters that highlighted the work we did and also celebrated the designer of the quarter to encourage designers