Conversion funnels and the first time user experience at Razorpay

<aside> 📌 #Funnel-Optimisation • #Data-Oriented • #Ops-teams • #Redesign

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Note: This is a retrospective case study. As product building is an ever-evolving process, there were things I/we learnt or realised on the way. I’ve tried to document things in a way to make it easy to understand which may have not been the actual order of execution. Also, to shorten the case-study (and save my time), I’ve oversimplified things or grouped similar information from different timelines under one section.

Before We Begin, My Role and Responsibilities

• Led the product’s design and managed designers that worked on its multiple phases.
• Coordinated with teams and brought everyone to same platform to keep pace.
• Worked with the team to validate requirements, find out users' pain-points, define the product construct and create the roadmap.
• Organised multiple cross-team workshops & discussions.
• Deeply involved in conceptualisation, ideation, wireframing, prototyping, giving overall direction and design reviews. My hands-on involvement was limited as I was also leading other design projects in parallel.
• Worked with the tech team to come up with solutions that that would work in the constraints we had.
• Wrote and reviewed UX copy.
• Acted as the checker or the QA ensure a great experience.

Background

Razorpay is a fin-tech company that provides financial services (Payment Gateway and Neo-Banking) to businesses in India. That implies we have to follow a number of regulations issued by the Government and our Partner Banks. On top of that, we need to put additional checks to reduce the risk on our side.

Given that, before we could let a business/merchant transact on Razorpay, we have to collect quite a lot of information. Now that's a huge friction. All this is part of a user's first time experience – the activation & onboarding flow.

This information (text inputs and documents) are then reviewed by the internal ops (activations) team. Based on a large set of parameters, eventually, either a merchant is "activated" or "rejected". Also, we often need to reach back to merchants for clarification – to collect more information or to recollect anything that has a discrepancy. The process takes anywhere between a couple of hours to a week to complete.

Importance of Activations

This probably doesn't even need a section. Signup & Activation is the most critical funnel for the organisation and we actively keep a tab on it. Every user who wants to use Razorpay has to go through it in their journey.

Conversion Funnel at Razorpay

Following is the conversion funnel at Razorpay. There are more granular steps to it but these are the primary touchpoints we measure.

Numbers, Of Course

Following are the key metrics which determine the health of the funnel:

• Overall Activation Funnel (conversion rate) Referring to the funnel above.
• Velocity, Time for Conversion Weekly/Monthly cohorts to understand how many days it takes for a user to convert.
• Monthly Transacting Users (MTU) This is a core metric for the organisation. Businesses who make at least 1 transaction via Razorpay in that month.
• Other Metrics

Projects/Versions

The entire activation flow has gone through a lot of major and minor changes in the last 3 years. Here, I am covering 3 major projects:

1. Activations Design Refresh Solving the basics and fixing low hanging issues.
2. Instant Activations Break the flow in 2 parts for "trusted" merchants to activate them instantly.
3. Needs Clarification Optimise the operational flow for the erroneous merchant submissions for the internal team.