Abstract

What conversations do we have with our customers? From the moment the user accesses our product, how do we speak to them and what UX elements do we employ in speaking with them? We have a wide range of users that come in at different stages in their self employed career, all needing different levels of assistance. The idea here is that we need a consistent medium to interact with our customer, capitalizing on a relationship we can have as an advisor throughout their freelance career.

Details

Interacting with the product

We recently introduced tool tips as a way to guide our users throughout their FTU experience. For a product that requires a lot of setup, this is a good way for us to point users in the right direction. But what happens beyond initial setup? How can we continue to have conversations with users? Are our conversations one-sided or do we engage in dialogue?

Two of our competitors: Lili & Quickbooks Self-Employed, use conversational user interfaces (chat bots) to enable their customers to speak with them. This conversation is a two-sided user-generated conversation, where the user must prompt the bot UI and begin the conversation by typing a question or tapping on a few pre-formatted options. Often these conversations are about the state of their account or business. This is effective, but speaking personally from my time at Intuit, I can tell you that this wasn’t that effective. Users simply don’t know how to interact with these bots. Can they ask broad questions? What type of questions are they able to ask?

Another approach is a one-sided product-generated conversation, where the app displays UI elements like tooltips, carousels with informative cards, or fullscreen onboarding tutorials . This is predominantly used by most apps as it enables the product to control the user experience through micro-interactions conveying information. It can also be generated in a more controlled manner so as to not overwhelm users.

The benefit of tooltips are that they are light touch and easily dismissible – they don’t interrupt the experience of the user. Tooltips are also contextual, placed at the point of interest. Carousels on the other hand are handy as a place where users know they can go for any information they need to know. Too much information here and it can be rendered useless (like Robinhood’s carousels) or they can have the right amount and be a less-invasive option for more seasoned users. Fullscreen onboarding tutorials are great for first time users, but if we were to implement this in our product, it’s adding several screens to an already lengthy (but necessary) onboarding process.

There are also two-sided product - generated conversations which include some sort of feedback. Modals are the common choice for products and they’re often used to improve the experience by reminding users to enable certain features, or to provide any warnings or notices. Discretion is advised here as well, being too heavy-handed with these interactions can be invasive to the user’s experience (yikes, remember Clippy?).

Regardless of the medium, the question is how do we know who we are speaking with and do we adjust our interaction with the user based on that?

A diverse user base

A query for business types in our database fetches 359 results. Segmenting users can be an endless exercise, but to start, we have different business types, business needs, age ranges, business tenure, business goals, & more. Business tenure stands a head above others when it comes to how we speak with our customers. A newly self-employed user that downloads the app probably has no idea what they need and would benefit from a more thorough walkthrough, while a seasoned self-employed user would only find any handholding to be annoying.

There are also times in which these conversations should occur. An FTU experience understandably front loads the conversation upfront, but that user may be downloading our app and a few others to test them all out. Knowing when the user plans to have the conversation can be to our advantage – this cuts at the heart of a product that acts as an advisor.

How we communicate with our customers can extend beyond the app experience to marketing. There was a time when I would take Ubers & Lyfts and ask the drivers if they planned to file their taxes – most didn’t know they had to pay taxes. One could argue leading with tax products in our marketing may not work for this cohort of users, but instead lead with another product offering and bake in taxes to the conversation later.

In fact, there could exist a future world where our product is customized to the user, where primary features important to them are upfront and center while other features slowly rise up. Understanding a user’s needs could be a worthwhile conversation during onboarding (in a future where we can reduce the time to onboard).

Voice & tone

During my tenure at Found, I felt we had a consistent voice and tone both in and out of our product. I personally believe Found executes incredibly well here, it’s stated as a product with specific features across a wide spectrum of self-employed users. There are niche neobanks like Creator.Cash that are specifically aimed towards a particular demographic: younger influencers. The disadvantage to choosing a niche demographic is you pigeonhole yourself to that cohort – while you might convert more of those users, you’ll alienate others (can you imagine a construction worker or a teacher making deliveries on Doordash on the side, signing up on the site below?)

There could be a future where we customize our landing pages and use targeted ads to direct users from a particular demographic to our home page. There could even exist a future where the app chooses which feature to put forward during the FTU experience.

Different conversations to be had

Conversations with users often come in two most common flavors: product/account assistance and nudging users in a certain direction. This feels short-sighted. If we assume there is a cohort of users that are confused and need general assistance with their business, we can have more meaningful conversations with them. Perhaps they need access to health insurance, access to certain government forms, or to connect with a trusted accountant. Accounting for the full lifecycle of our users in their self-employed career can create talking points for us as we engage with them.

Nerdwallet does an excellent job of generating meaningful content. In fact, when I have questions around personal financing, I often go on their website before Googling anything – this solidifies their role as an advisor. We can produce similar content and share them externally, which can be a meaningful acquisition tool, but seamlessly stitching this into our product would build a long lasting relationship with our users.