Global Late Payment Reminders

Creating a third layer of settings functionality within an existing and prominently used feature.

UX

Strategy

Research

Systems Thinking

Make it stand out.

Late payment reminders is something that Owners use to casually and automatically ask to be paid, when they really don’t want to ask to be paid. Reminders allow Owners to collect on their invoices and money owing.

The Existing functionality on Late payment reminders, allowed users to create and send invoices with late payment reminders both at an Invoice Level and at a Client Level.

That meant, for a specific client, you could have the Late payment reminders for ABC Inc, and sometimes, want to tweak it on a particular invoice, like “This invoice might not need all the reminders for this invoice, so I’ll turn them off in this instance”. The problem was, we have customers who have thousands of clients that they are importing, and just want the same LPR Setting on all their invoices, for all their clients, still with that level of customization on the client and invoice level.

Problem


Through Generative research of talking to existing customers we were able to understand the problem users were facing when it came to thier late payment reminders.

  1. Customization: The lack of control and (customization) of communication (emails) with their clients makes FB customers feel unprofessional, not in control of their business and worse can be detrimental to client relationships.

    2. Automation: While today we do currently have Client Specific settings for late payment reminders, for customers with 100 clients setting up late payment reminder templates for each client is cumbersome, manual and incredibly time consuming. There is a need to do this accross all clients.

3. Data Heavy Users: Values carried over for dates/on /off client settings but not email templates, this adds work for each new client (no defaults) and existing clients need to have customized emails from scratch (per client) - awful for customers with 1k clients.


Business Impact: We had customer migrating over from our legacy product, churning and record high rates. But also this was an incredily hot feature request in support.

Reduce our migrator churn, while also prioritizing needs of our new customers. This is table stakes for LPR featuers.

Discovery Inputs

  • Support cases

  • Generative research interviews with customers

  • Talking to our support staff

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

What Have We Heard?

“It would be nice to be able to standardize my late payment reminders for all clients, in the way that I talk to my customers. Especially for the number of clients I have”

“I need to add a “thank-you” into my email, but I can’t - The FreshBooks emails feels so Robotic, and inhuman. We don’t talk to our customers like that.”

“I don’t like to show the invoice amount in the email, because then my client won’t view the invoice, and they bypass the view invoice step. I need to be able to remove it from that email”


Insight

Customers need a way to customize their email communication for late payment reminders (LPR) system wide accross all their clients, and the flexibility to tweak to add a further personalization on a per client basis.

Objective

How might we allow customers to Globally customize and automate LPR communication to all their clients, so that they are better able to manage client relationships, feel more professional and in-control of their business.

Hypothesis

We believe by enabling global settings for late payment reminders in addition to client settings, Scaling & Migrating users will have functionality that meet their needs of professionalism, saving them time and will enable them to feel more in control of their business.


OUR SOLUTION

  • Usability Testing

    What we learned

  • Table stakes functionality for reminders. Global settings just makes sense for users at all levels of needs

  • Late Payment Reminders are tricky, need to be tracked meticulously and are potentially destructive to client relationships if done incorrectly

    “If any client accidentally got these reminders that shouldn’t get them, I’d lose that million dollar a year client”

  • Potential for error on larger teams a reality (lindsay sends this invoice, not realizing the Global LPR is on, so communication between larger teams a must.

    ”What happens if Lucy sends this invoice to my customers, but i’m the only one that can setup and edit templates”
    -functionality deal breakers “if it doesn’t have the first name variable I can’t use this, it wont meet my needs. I need to keep it personal with my clients, that’s kind of table stakes for this level of automation”

Confusing things.

Depencies & Constraints

  • we have 2 layers of existing settings on both the client and invoice level, and need to figure out how they all work together.

  • developer programming problem

  • merchandising

  • mobile

  • split between a setting and a template feature (templates are on another plan)

  • Roles / Teams

    Need a visual here of dependecies user flow char etc.


The Final Solution Gif

Metrics of Success

  • Google heart engagement and adoption, task success, happiness for migrators (at first) /then scaling customers.

  • Lowering number of support calls asking for global LPR numbers

How did we do?

Support cases lowered by 60%, We did over time see reduced migrator churn