my money

Reimagining the way home service businesses collect payment and manage their cash flow using Housecall Pro

The challenge

Boost revenue through payments

In early 2019, the leadership at Housecall Pro tasked every department with a new north star for our business goal: increase net revenue retention as we looked ahead to a new fundraising season. In the company’s earlier days, the goals had been centered around acquiring as many customers as possible, to grow and learn about how to refine our product. However, as we found product market fit and matured our feature set, we were now tasked with how to encourage our existing customer base to use the product to its fullest.

From the product team’s perspective, the options seemed simple; either increase SaaS revenue (through upgrades & upsells or price increases) or decrease churn. But as we evaluated the different sources of revenue generated by the product, we realized we had inadvertently created an untapped gold mine: credit card processing.

We had built the ability to accept credit card payments several years prior as a way to make it easier for business owners to get paid, without the hassle of mailing or cashing checks, or the hesitation of trusting employees with cash. However, it was clunky, hard to set up, and had received little attention from the product & engineering team in the midst of so many other competing priorities. Despite the lack of focus, the slight markup we were making on credit card fees had become 17.7% of the revenue generated by product. The challenge was how to promote this feature from a second-class citizen, to a fully fledged business unit, with a renewed focus on usability and our customer’s needs.

My Role

Product strategy / UX research / Product design / Implementation

Opportunities for growth

To define how the project should take shape we analyzed current usage data, interviewed stakeholders, and assessed competitors. Based on that analysis, we identified four areas for improvement:

  • Adoption

    How do we get more customers to start running credit cards?

    ——————

    Only 42.4% of current users were processing credit card payments

  • Usage

    How can we get the users already accepting credit cards to process more of them?

    ——————

    Despite 71% of homeowners wanting to pay by credit, only 22% of jobs actually were

  • Conversion

    How can we get more homeowners to pay the invoices sent to them?

    ——————

    Only 73.4% of invoices for completed jobs were actually getting paid

  • New Products

    Would offering a full suite of payments related product be more compelling and have a halo effect?

    ——————

    Some competitors were offering additional products, including ACH transfers, consumer financing, and business loans

the problem

payment processing as an afterthought

To provide additional color on the usage data, we conducted qualitative research with both current and prospective users. I conducted ~20 interviews with existing customers of Housecall Pro to learn about their “why” for using us as their processor, and uncover their pain points in using the product. We also collaborated with sales to create a new fintech specific pod, focused on outreach to attract new users, learn about their objections, and identify homeowner friction. Between our collective research, we identified just how crucial it was to reinvigorate this product.

money management can be complex for even the savviest of business owners, but for small businesses operating on razor thin margins, it can mean the difference between making payroll or not.

While many of our customers were highly skilled in their trade, they may not have had any education around managing their finances or cash flow. When you add to the equation how opaque and antiquated the banking industry is, it can be extremely challenging to understand credit card fees, when credit card payments will deposit into your bank account, and the benefits of accepting credit cards at all.

problems to be solved

current users

Payment product was tucked away in settings → hard to find and monitor day-to-day

Little transparency into cash flow and when payments would appear in bank account could lead to major problems making payroll & paying vendors

Disputes and chargebacks were frustrating, time consuming, and had to be resolved manually via email

Many were still using a second processor as a backup → didn’t have full trust in Housecall’s product to work 100% of the time, especially in areas with poor cell service

prospective users

Preferred cash or check for tax reasons, or due to the ability to spend that money immediately

Felt credit card fees were too high/not worth the expense, or didn’t realize they could be written off as a business expense on their taxes

Didn’t know we offered credit card processing

Used a competitor, because we were missing features, they had lower rates (or perceived they did), or they didn’t see a benefit to switching

Onboarding was clunky, buggy, and had to be completed in one sitting → if you didn’t have your info on hand or if something went wrong, you had to start from scratch

homeowners

When attempting to pay with a credit card, errors (such as incorrect zip code or CVV) weren’t clear or helpful for troubleshooting, which led to frustration or abandoning the process

Losing trust was easy - the smallest of bugs, glitches or strange looking UIs led users to be suspicious and seek out other forms of payments

The approach

payments built for people

After evaluating all the customer problems and opportunities for growth, we created the following vision for our products at the intersection of the customer pain points and business needs.

Our goals were:

  • Give visibility into where our customer's money is in every step of the payout process (the old design only displayed payments once they were in transit to their bank, which caused confusion, or panic that an invoice hadn’t been paid)

  • Create a dashboard that would allow for exploration of our new fintech products (consumer financing, small business loans, company expense cards) and not just credit card payments

  • Allow customers to manage credit card disputes (the old process was handled manually through emails, that could slip through the cracks)

  • Create awareness around our new ‘Instant deposits’ feature that would allow our pros to get paid in 30 minutes or less

what we built

improve discoverability

As we kicked off the development process, we looked for small experiments with minimal development effort to test some of our initial hypothesis about how to make the product more valuable. The first theory we started with was that the lack of discoverability was a large reason that users either didn’t know we had payment processing, or didn’t know how to set it up.

We wanted to experiment if simply moving the exact same functionality to a more prominent location would have any impact in adoption. We moved the page out from account settings, and into the main product navigation, with a new name “My Money”, to encourage users to think about this page as their home base for all their business finance needs.

the results

Despite how the simplicity of this change, the results were staggering.

46%

The new sign up rate for payments, up from 42.4%

$34k

Additional fintech revenue in the first month after launch

Encouraged by the success of our first experiment, we doubled down on our investment in the remainder of our new features.

add clarity to payout timing, and introduce instant deposits

  • Old payments dashboard

    Tucked away in settings, where it was hard to find, and gave limited context

  • New payments dashboard

    A more prominent location with more clarity about money’s location

Onboarding & activation

After improving the reporting and tracking side of our payments business, we wanted to reduce the friction in getting your account set up to receive payments. Our old flows were clunky, with minimal error handling, that made it hard for our customers to troubleshoot on their own. We didn’t have any micro-deposit verification when adding a bank account to deposit funds into, which led to delays in getting paid (which can be devastating for small, cash strapped businesses).

I wanted to create a stepped flow, so that our customers progress would save along the way, in case they had to pause to gather information or take another action in the product. I also wanted to make sure that if they encountered an error (usually this happened while uploading a photo of their ID), that they would understand exactly what step the they needed to revisit, and why they encountered that error. We also wanted to introduce the ability to connect their bank to receive payments through their online banking credentials, to eliminate the possibility to mistyping a number and delaying their payments. This process also help reduce fraud. 

Mobile onboarding

Old flow

  • Connect bank account

  • Verify identity

  • Upload ID

NEW flow

  • intro

  • Auth bank account

  • Bank connected

  • Tax ID

  • Your Business

  • Address

  • info

  • Upload ID

  • success

  • Completed page

web onboarding

Old flow

  • intro

  • Auth bank

New flow

  • intro

  • Auth bank

  • Bank connected

  • Tax ID

  • Address

  • info

  • Upload ID

  • success

The impact

A booming growth driver

In the 18 months after launch, we’ve seen the percentage of our customers that set up our payment processing system grow from 42.4% to 56.7%. Our revenue from payments grew by 5.4x, compared to 2.3x growth in overall company revenue. The contribution of payments revenue as a percentage of overall company revenue grew from 17.7% to 41.5%.