Automating Yocket’s Premium User Onboarding to Reduce Turnaround Time by 96%
This article outlines the impact our automated onboarding has had on our sales operations and the turnaround time for our premium users to begin their study abroad journeys.
About Me
As a product designer at Yocket — while I’ve had a chance to work on projects across the company’s different verticals — I was mainly tasked with handling design initiatives for our internal management tool and the platform’s dedicated premium user experience.
About Yocket
Yocket is a community-driven, ed-tech company that helps students with their admissions to universities around the world.
The platform operates on a freemium model where aspirants can take advantage of numerous free tools and resources OR enrol in paid services to plan their overseas education.
Yocket Premium
Given that the overall study abroad process can take months of tedious research and documentation, for those looking for a structured, guided path to their overseas dreams, Yocket provides personalised counselling services to assist aspirants through this process.
Users can explore a multitude of premium service plans on Yocket’s website . To purchase a plan, users need to sign up with Yocket, choose the plan that best suits their needs and budget, and proceed to checkout.
Existing Premium Onboarding Process
Users interested in enrolling for a Premium plan could complete the payment process with ease, entirely through Yocket’s website.
However, once their payment was completed, they were NOT onboarded to their premium platform experience right away.
Users begin their onboarding journey with Yocket’s premium services once they have signed and agreed to all of the company’s legal terms of service.
These terms of service were typically shared via email as a 17 page legal document. Users were required to sign and submit this document to an assigned sales advisor via email.
Issues Faced with Current Onboarding
- Due to back-and-forth communication between users and our sales advisors outside of the platform— there were long delays in users’ eventual onboarding to their premium experience.
- On average, it look at least 48 hours for a user to get started on their journey, despite having paid a premium sum for their expected services.
- Our sales advisors had to track legal documents across multiple assigned users and would have to update their onboarding statuses on our internal management tool. This caused delays for users and required excessive effort from our sales team.
The Goal
By automating this onboarding process, our goal was to communicate all essential legal terms via the platform, post plan purchase, in order to reduce efforts from our sales team and decrease onboarding turnaround time.
This was one of the first initiatives taken to introduce a dedicated Premium user experience on the platform. The process would eventually set the tone for users’ paid experience with Yocket.
Introducing an Automated Premium Onboarding
To achieve our goal, the existing 17 page legal document was broken down into 3 steps and completely automated on our platform.
This allowed for the onboarding statuses of users to be updated automatically on our internal management tool, without intervention from our sales advisors.
1. Collection and Confirmation of User Details
On completion of their plan purchase, users receive a payment confirmation and are redirected to start their premium onboarding process.
2. Overview of Plan Deliverables
As part of the onboarding process we were legally required to reiterate to users the deliverables for their purchased premium plan.
3. Acknowledgement of Terms of Service
Upon reviewing an overview of their premium plan details and if needed, the associated terms and conditions — users can then proceed to prep their profile such that a personalised counsellor is assigned to them.
The profile completion stage is a the next significant part of the premium user onboarding journey.
Measures to Ensure Onboarding Completion
To ensure a smooth transition to this automated onboarding, we closely monitored completion rates for this process over several weeks of new premium users joining us.
In the event of user drop-offs in the flow, we set up periodic nudges via email to remind users to complete their onboarding in order to start their premium experience.
Impact
- Since automating this process, the turnaround time to onboard our premium users has decreased by 96%!
- This has reduced the operational handling required from our sales team in terms of documentation and communication, saving time and costs for the company.
- This has also led to a decrease in the time it takes for users to proceed to their next step — profile completion. As a result, users were observed to begin their study abroad requirements with their assigned counsellors much quicker.
That’s a Wrap!
Thank you for reading along, Feel free to reach out to me for a chat or any questions on LinkedIn or Twitter!
