Keeping your eyes on the prize

A client had noticed they were getting a lot of prospective customers dropping out of their initial sign up process and wanted to work out how they could improve the completion rate.

After carrying out some interviews, stakeholder workshops and data analysis, the following major issues were identified:

• The current form had eleven pages of complicated questions, not optimised for mobile.

• Many of the prospective customers did not have English as their first language and would most likely be applying on a mobile device.

• There were two main tiers of customers, but they all had to progress through the full end-to-end complex process.

• The company asked for absolutely everything they could possibly need up front, on the grounds that it “might save time later”: this required customers to upload copies of documents, etc, that they were unlikely to have to hand.
  Due to this, customers who didn’t just drop out, often uploaded fake or rubbish data just to get to the next stage.

• Even when customers did upload real data, the company often then asked for a lot of the same information to be re-supplied after registration anyway.

• To add insult to injury, a lot of the information asked for during registration was never used by anyone, ever.

• All of that information was being stored in the back end, even for people who never then went on to become customers, creating storage and efficiency costs and with obvious implications for data privacy and security.

• This was the only entry point to register an interest in becoming a customer. If a customer fell out of this process, they essentially remained completely unknown to the company.

Some of these issues might seem obvious with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight - like eleven pages? What were they thinking? But this process had two fundamental disadvantages from the word go:

1. It didn’t have a single clearly identified owner, meaning it had been created by committee and was therefore doomed to be a compromise; and

2. It had been in place for a long time and had been the subject of organic creep over the years, with people asking for ad-hoc additions and tweaks for their own purposes. This had allowed it to grow arms and legs and become the behemoth it was today.

Going back to basics, I focused on the fundamental question: 

After all, once the customer has signed up and committed, you can always go back and ask for further information later - and once they’ve got a relationship with you and understand what the information is for, they’re much more likely to provide it.

This single clear objective, coupled with the identification of a single owner of the process, meant that the inevitable “helpful” suggestions or complaints about extra fields were easily rebuffed.

- “Will this help us achieve the main objective?”

- “Does the owner of the process agree?”

Unless the answer was yes to both, the requested changes were politely disregarded.

The registration process was reduced to 3-5 short screens (depending on the customer tier) of much easier to answer questions - essentially just contact details, location, service they were applying for and the registration fee - making it much simpler and quicker to sign up, especially for those whose main language is not English. Not only did completion rates improve immediately, but the company also benefited from knock-on improvements in terms of streamlining the back-end processing of applications: reducing the processing time and the cost-per-customer.

And even more importantly, controls were put in place to ensure no changes could be made to the process without the approval of the owner, safeguarding it against future creep.

Updated 07/10/2024