Self-Guided Merchant Onboarding

Project Overview

ChowNow’s Restaurant Onboarding process was completely manual, averaging over 30 days and requiring restaurants to interact with multiple touch-points including email, Salesforce forms, a web Dashboard, and over the phone with Onboarding Specialists. This disjointed experience prolonged the onboarding process leading to pre-live churn and unknown security issues. The increase in new restaurants joining ChowNow in 2020-2021 shed light on the need for a scalable onboarding process.

discovery

There was very little documentation of the onboarding workflow from either the restaurant or internal team perspectives or any research history. Since we were starting with a blank slate, we needed to dig in to the details.

Key Research Activities

Through primary and secondary research, we mapped the service blueprint of internal and external users, identifying gaps, pain points, and opportuntities.

• Onboarding Specialist Shadowing

• Stakeholder Interviews

• Comparative/Competitive Audits

We used this service blueprint to document the learnings from our primary research

Complex processes and lack of transparency created internal experts and a disconnect with restaurant partners.

Onboarding (at a high level)

⚡️ Most onboarding materials are collected in a Salesforce “Asset Collection” Form, but only about 45% of restaurants submitted any details using the form. This led to Onboarding Specialists chasing down materials over email or on the phone.

We discovered a correlation between onboarding time and pre-live churn

Let’s focus on improving asset collection to decrease pre-live churn and improve operational efficiency.

Onboarding Vision

Build a lovable self service onboarding experience so that we can scale, helping local restaurants thrive.

FROM

An onboarding process that’s all about asset collection

Onboarding Specialists as information gatherers

Restaurant Partners as passive actors

🔧 Project Wrench

First time sign in was a broken experience that would negatively impact self-serve onboarding

During discovery, we learned that signing in for the first time was both a huge pain point and uncovered an unknown security risk — when restaurants couldn’t figure out how to reset their password, onboarding specialists were emailing a randomly generated password to them.

Onboarding Specialists had to troubleshoot first time sign in for 90% of 101 restaurants audited, spending an average of 5 minutes per account

Without resolving sign in issues, self serve onboarding would fail. I escalated the issue and got buy-in from senior leaders to include a redesign of the sign in process for this initiative. We updated the first time sign in experience from a convoluted 7-step process into a simplified 4-steps with the hopes to further simplify post-MVP.

🚀 This incremental update decreased customer support on first time sign in from 90% of users down to 10%

MVP Solutioning

For the first iteration, we worked towards incremental gains to reduce onboarding specialist dependencies and remove roadblocks for restaurants to onboarding independently. The two key areas for this were updating the first time authentication process and asset collection of onboarding materials.

Onboarding Wizard

We wanted restaurants to be able to focus on one piece of information at a time so that onboarding felt simple and approachable. The wizard collects the assets required for a restaurant to go live (between 4 and 7 steps) with the thinking that supplemental assets could be collected later on a revamped dashboard homepage. We wanted to keep the process simple and prioritize restaurants going live so that their onboarding specialist could partner with them in optimizing.

Each step is a single task with a tip that anticipates the support they need or the question they may have

There’s messaging in key moments so that restaurants know what’s happening in the background and who to contact for help

The Onboarding Checklist helps restaurant partners to track progress and gives visibility to internal teams of missing details

The new pre-live homepage gives restaurants the ability to explore the dashboard and resources for getting started

outcomes

⬇ Decreased Onboarding Time by 20%

⬇ Projected to Decrease Operational Expenses by $250K/Year

The Team

Product Manager: Florence Vaillant Engineering Leads: Nikki Purcell and Dean Rabinowitz