Merchant Onboarding
The following is a presentation I put together in order to propose additional work on our process with onboarding merchants. The Developer Portal is one of my previous projects, and I was super excited about the effect it was going to have in making our product much more accessible and bring in oodles of revenue. However, I felt it was not enough to fully address all of our issues with onboarding new merchant partners, neither SHOULD it be the full answer to all of our onboarding needs.
I am most excited about the potential this onboarding process has to bring continuity and a more modern process for both our customers and out internal employees.
The Developer Portal is a piece of Onboarding, and Onboarding will address much larger issues.
1) Rather than being the answer to everything, it should be just the first step of many in addressing our Merchant Onboarding Experience.
2) In order to make you feel great about keeping the Developer Portal simple, we have built out a master plan for how we plan to address the other issues Prog is facing with our Retailer Partners.
3) We want to build this fantastic process the way any great architecture is done. One step at a time. Here we will propose which sections of the process we think should be built first, and which are less urgent.
This is our discovery journey. It was initially led by Tom and Mike. And their needs were vast.
The point of this story is to explain why the Developer portal got so many different expectations and definitions from the start.
Why Dev Portal might have different definitions to different people.
You may have heard something that no longer exists today.
1. They wanted a library of demos that they could show interested parties, and add some recommended paths to our process.
As we got further into discovery however, we realized there was so much more that also needed to be done. Generic documentation didn’t exist, because it was being custom created each time by our SA’s.
We also learned that our application process was so slow, we were costing ourselves $5mil/year of easy money. (See Vaishali for more information on this data)
2. Over Christmas break I read several books on the best Onboarding practices, on content strategy techniques and how to teach adults, in addition to my own expertise as a UX Designer, having worked previously on Domo’s onboarding experience as well.
1. If our retailer was a date, this should be like getting their number. Don’t try to explain your whole life story here.
2. This is building the relationship with our date. It will happen over multiple emails, phone calls, chats, and presentations. It should take 4-6 weeks, because it involves offering digestible amounts of information over multiple encounters, building trust, and offering support to their questions.
3. In the date scenario, the Developer Portal is the Coffee Shop, where you can have a short, casual first encounter.
4. This will be like all of the dates you go on until you decide to date exclusively each other. They will be wide, and varied, and take lots and lots of time to really get to know each other.
We are showing you this to emphasize that Dev Portal is one piece of this big Kahuna
This first section is part of what I learned about what an ideal onboarding experience should include.
Happily, Jess Linford and I were able to list out the steps that will be involved in the Customer Journey (and more specific details about each of those steps).
You don’t necessarily have to read all of these but they are there for your reference.
But remember, just because these are the steps the customer will go through, it is not necessarily the order in which we should build each of the items.
So here, based on urgency, difficulty and many other factors, we have listed out the steps we believe should be taken to build out this onboarding experience.
This brings us back to the point of this presentation that we stated at the beginning.
The best part about defining the onboarding process as a whole, is that we won’t overload the Developer Portal with features right from the get-go.
This is the first effort in what I hope will develop into a multi-year multi platform project that will drastically improve our relations with merchants.
Next, I wanted to throw in this list of questions around my plan for developing this Onboarding process further, to demonstrate my UX process I like to go through.
Last of all, this is an image of our Merchant facing dashboard we call Prog Central. As we work to integrate our Onboarding process with all of the internal software, I added an icon that could indicate to merchants when the Onboarding process needs attention, and what step they are on. It would also prompt them with a button for the next step.
Although I am not sure now about the side panel, and might just make Onboarding it’s own page to allow full focus to remain on the Onboarding material and process.
