Name change | Microcopy by Amit

Simplifying the name change process

A lot of our users enter their nicknames or dummy names and have a hard time changing it to their legal name. This is how we made the process easier for them and all our users.

Objective - Simplify the name change process by leveraging risk assessment so that non-risky customers can complete the process successfully instantly without any customer service review

Role I played: Lead Content Designer

Stakeholders: Product Manager, Product Manager Lead, Design, Risk, Compliance, and Legal.

Key results we aspired to achieve:

Reduce friction for 30% of the customers who go through Name Change flow
Reduce operations (front office and back office) contacts which equates to $250,000 in operations cost reduction.

Challenge:

Traditionally, our customers were allowed only minor changes on their name (1 -2 chars). For any other major name change or legal name change, they had to upload multiple documents as proofs. This triggered a lengthy process of manual reviews and multiple back and forth with customers due to wrong or low-quality documents. It increased the overall SLA and customer dissatisfaction.

Here are a few user stories that show a glimpse of the older state of affairs:

Leading the way with content changes:

While we kept working on the simplifying the entire flow, I took the lead and made a few content edits to reduce the complexities of the doc upload page.
I reduced the amount of copy on the page so that it was easy to scan, comprehend, and act upon
Remove the mistakes from the older experience such as giving users clear instructions.
Solved for the hidden 'Upload' button. The disappearing button only shows after users have uploaded all the necessary documents on this page. Most users couldn't find the button and were resorting to mailing us copies of their documents. The copy change was a quick fix that didn't require engineering effort while we kept working towards the ideal solve.
I got the changes legally approved and approached the product to get it priortised as the first phase of the proposed name flow edits.
This proactive measure by me avoided a potential escalation when one of our investors came across the flow and raised a flag about the poor experience. As a result, we already had a go-live date in a few dates for this page and were able to share a quick update with our leadeship.

How did we optimize the process?

1. Reduced minor name change process to a one-time affair so that people couldn't misuse it.

2. Introduced mobile flows so that users could take pics and upload documents from their phones.

3. Made it a breezy affair for low-risk users to instantly update their name.

User testing:

We also tested the major name change flows and came across the following reveals:

Entry point - all participants went to Menu and clicked Profile image/name to edit the name.
Why are you changing your name? (screen) – We needed to give more context to the users to pick any of the options shown on the page.
Doc upload page – Participants had no issues on this screen.
No participants clicked the “Why is this important?” section where I was trying to answer any objections that they may have related to document collection.
When asked further on what users expected to submit for a name change, some participants expected to upload documents.
Key insight – the Certificate of Name Change doc in UK is really wide and is hard to scan
Share a pic of your [doc type] (screen) – Users scanned over Tips on how to get your [ID]…
Maybe add an affordance that the selection is a tip, maybe a lightbulb.
When asked users to click on the tip, it was helpful to participants.
ID Type selection [half sheet] – Users had issues dismissing the half sheet.
Submit your docs (screen) – No issues
Checkmarks were very helpful
Success screen – No Issues
Customers were comfortable with uploading their documents in order to continue to use PayPal.

(Click any pic to expand and browse the pics in full screen)

1- Home

2 - Non_CIP_Name change page

9 - CIP_Minor name

1- Home

1/10

Our impact:

With the new changes, what often used to take weeks now happens instantly for non-CIP users (which is a majority of our customer base. ~85%) in the US with a low and medium risk profile.

This new launch, not only ensures instant name changes but also greatly reduces the operational load resulting from manually reviewing thousands of documents.

Here is a quick summary of our findings from the 2-week experimentation window:

Ops Impact: 13 FTE savings, caused a drop in monthly volumes by ~11k cases
CVR Impact: 7.62% reduction in 7-day contact rate, ~$121k USD annual cost savings
Risk Metrics: 62% Overall Pass Rate (i.e. successful name changes via risk flow)
Name Change funnel: 546% increase in successful online/in-flow name changes (39% Test vs 6% Control)
Reduced doc uploads: 40% decrease in doc upload rate (6% Test vs 10% Control)