Researching the Unresearched ⚡

Hey everyone! I’m Charvi. I work in the Research Team at FamPay. Our main goal is to improve retention, analyze user growth and scrutinize user insights to ensure we give the best to our users!

Today, I’ll be sharing a glimpse of how a day for the Research Team at FamPay looks like. While research sounds “boring” to a lot of people, it often does so because there's a lack of insight into what an early stage startup’s research team can look like. Typically, at FamPay, my day involves

• tracking key growth metrics,
• analysing how our product, the digital app in our case, is doing which means understanding how the users are using it.

With a corpus of data available to understand the user, it’s about identifying the north star metrics to track.

For instance, in an app for payments, a user has to complete their KYC to become an eligible user. As a result, we keep a close eye on our KYC conversion and understand via data as to where in the onboarding process does the user drop-off before doing KYC. Some other interesting problems that our Team solves are evaluating how different growth experiments perform. For instance, what impact did the new referral policy bring? How did rewards impact transaction behaviour? How did Tanmay Bhat’s shoutout impact app downloads and KYC conversions, how well we are able to retain our users and so on.

I am sure most startups do this, but within FamPay there are some elements that make us stand out! Primarily, our user base - the GenZs - the segment that has never been targeted before. They are the people who don't know about KYC (“Is it a “GenZ” slang that I haven't heard of?”) and they are not so easy to please! Catering to them is no cakewalk.

Let me put a few cases forward on how we brainstorm, create solutions and impress them!

Broadening the User Funnel

Considering one of the key steps we have on our app is completing the KYC - here’s a little case of how we understood the user’s barriers in completing KYC and how we solved it.

Before a user KYCs on our app, there are several steps that the user goes through. To understand the drop in the user funnel at every step, we chose a sample of users and spoke to them to gain insights as to what deterred them to move forward. While speaking to users seems an intricate and non-scalable process, for early stage firms, it’s these things that don’t scale that create all the difference as they provide extremely rich insight and direction.

Through our calls we found out that teenagers don’t understand what KYC is about, why it’s important, and some face legal barriers in doing it! As a result:

We embedded a video on our app that explained why KYC is important and this video popped up every time a user started the KYC process but then pressed back to exit it.

• We also tried to find a workaround to resolve the legal barriers that these kids face by providing them ways to resolve them and even iterating our product in such a way that with a parent’s KYC, a teenager is able to become an eligible user.

These initiatives combined with several other ones, helped us  improve our KYC conversion rate 2x times.

"Pushing" the right pulse of our users

Today we are announcing a new store update for our users! We are sending them this update via a push notification. Here’s what it’s looking like:

Seems small? Easy Peasy? Something that might take a few minutes?

Well to roll-out yes, one-click and it reached thousands of people all at once but there’s a lot more to it than meets the eye.

A push notification is a small nudge and a poke to our user, it needs to be carefully drafted and one doesn’t want to nudge and poke when it feels intrusive, unnecessary as there’s a chance our user finds is unpleasant. Thus, we conduct a lot of research via data and otherwise to understand our user. This is in the form of conducting and analysing surveys on our target group, speaking to a sample of users, and analysing their behaviour on the app by seeing what ticks them, which emotions resonate with them, how they spend, where they spend and everything.

For instance, we identified that emojis strike a chord with our users. This GenZ communicates via emojis. We included that in our communication on our App, our social media and at all touchpoints where we interact with the user! It’s almost second nature now 🤷‍♀️ . It did us good but - we couldn’t resist how hip memes are! And how crazy the GenZ is about their Netflix binges, and here’s what we are doing next:

Guess what we saw? A Spike! Our users started being more responsive. In less than 24 hours, we saw a 20% increase in our clickthrough conversions.

User Retention by engagement

Did you wonder why we created a store on our App in the first place?

Well, through our survey on GenZs and past App activity, we identified that our users spend 80% of their pocket money on online shopping and their favourites are Amazon, Flipkart, Nykaa among others. We also learnt that they do their own mobile recharges.

That’s when we were sure that we needed a store on our App to make it easier for them to transact on their favourite brands and take care of their own expenses from one single place!

Thus, we launched the store with all their favourite brands and shops but we just don’t stop here, we continuously run in the loop of learning, measuring and building!

We are a GenZ focused brand and we have a healthy challenge of catering to GenZs with their own unique personality. While some love engaging with us on everything from food to movies along with us being their payment support, some like how the App just provides them what they need, a payment function.

It’s very important to identify the different kinds of users a company caters to.

Why so? Well, like how every plant in a garden is different and needs care and attention accordingly to grow, such are our users.  As a result, we identify the different kinds of our users by analyzing their behaviour on our App via data as well as by having few first-hand conversations. This way, while the data gives us an overall picture, the conversations give a lot of insights to understand and strengthen our relationship with our users.

For instance, we personalize the App experience for our exclusive teen community and show them more of community updates as we know they enjoy engaging more with us. Parallely, we nudge our dormant users with the value that they might have missed to notice on our app and such customized nudges can create a huge difference in. Such customization helps us build an effective product and communication strategy and also get amazing conversions!

Wrapping up….

While feeling the pulse of our GenZ is what gives us greatest excitement, constantly working with the Marketing team and the Product team to brainstorm on the communication that sparks a difference and implementing research recommendations truly makes my experience at the Research Team eclectic and wholesome!  

Got some suggestions for us? Or interesting stories on how Research has improved your conversions and retention? Drop me an email on charvi@fampay.in!