Wise • 2020
Building a new, scalable notification system
Context
Wise is a fintech that’s challenging the status quo in international banking. Used by millions to save millions, it offers bank accounts and low-cost transfers to consumers and businesses.
For this project, I was a Content Design Lead working with the Transfer Experience team.
This team had traditionally looked after the account management features of Wise. But when I joined the team, they were starting to rebuild the engine that sent out automated emails and app notifications.
Problems to solve
Could we lower response rates with better content?
Wise wants to make sending money around the world cost as little as possible. And one way to achieve that is by building efficient systems that solve problems for customers without a lot of manual involvement by Customer Support agents.
What were we sending?
The team had initially started the technical side of this project because they wanted to address issues around email deliverability. But they quickly realised the separating the content from the tech wasn’t realistic.
Emails and app notifications weren’t owned by a specific team at Wise. So I would need to spend time researching exactly what was being automatically and manually sent by the Wise system.
Which operations workflows depended on emails or notifications?
Wise had a number of problem-solving flows that depended on customer support agents reaching out to customers via email. So I would need to work with them to understand what was already working, and wasn’t working.
Working out what was going out
Prior to this project, many teams had individually set up email trigger events, across a variety of micro-services. So there wasn’t one source of truth. Similarly, most operations teams had written up their workflows using a variety of methods — both on and offline.
That meant a lot of my discovery process was very, very manual; I would spend time setting up different transfer types, across currencies and payment methods, and then screenshot the results in a Google Drive folder. A massive Sheets file acted as an index.
I also spent time out in the Tallinn office of Wise, working alongside the operations team and noting down their workflows and asking what went well, or needed improvement.
Eventually, I was able to draw a flowchart that documented exactly how and when certain emails would go out.
What makes a good email anyway?
This project wasn’t a matter of picking the lowest-hanging fruit. Because there was just too much to choose from.
Every email was inconsistent or contradictory.
Instead, I realised that we had to learn, as a team, what makes an email effective. To do this, we’d need a few test cases. Because we roughly had a reply rate metric, and that was it.
So I used Zendesk to work out which emails customers replied to the most. And from that, I was able to pick the top 3 emails to redesign from scratch.
Looking for the quick wins
The app could be a lot more precise than our emails, which led to customer contacts.
Existing artifacts
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Many of the emails included a white block that would ask customers to refer friends.
But this visual treatment often distracted the reader. So many customers would ignore the content in grey above and still ask Customer Support to clarify the status of their transfer.
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We saw that many emails couldn’t decide whether to use currency codes or currency symbols — or often using both. While both forms have advantages, the TransferWise app only talked about currencies using 3-letter codes.
The emails also used inconsistent language or euphemisms to describe certain system processes, which didn’t reflect content shown in the app.
This would often see customers write back and ask for clarification.
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In many emails, links such as ‘View the status of your transfer’ or ‘your receipt’ would lead to the same place.
This introduced a degree of indecision for the reader.
Plus, these links were secondary elements compared to the primary, green call-to-action button in the invite friends block. So would often be missed anyway.
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Wise is an international service. And while the word ‘revolution’ might have positive connotations in the Western world, it can have negative ones in many countries. There were a notable number of customer support cases raised by users from such countries, voicing these concerns.
The services sending these emails also didn’t have any idea of whether the transfer had been delivered on time. If a transfer had been delayed, often customers would get in touch to complain that they were still being asked to refer users to a service that hadn’t lived up to its promises.
From reading a sample of customer responses, I was able to pick out broader themes of feedback.
Principles behind the re-design
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I designed a series of patterns that would give visual prominence to a top-line summary of the email.
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By switching to tables for listing financial info, I could keep written paragraphs shorter, and introduced a degree of predictability to all emails from Wise.
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The content should match a user’s state of mind at the moment of time, and the information should be consistent and not contradict other parts of the TransferWise experience.
In practice, that meant working with engineering to ensure that there were logic switches to change content based on certain pieces of customer info.
For instance, a transfer that was processed faster than expected should be celebrated.
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Working with a visual designer, I came up with a system that would signal certain transfer states — for example, a dark blue background was applied for success states.
Output.
Impact of work and next steps
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We saw a massive reduction in replies for our new emails. As each customer case cost Wise ~£5/response, this work was key to ensuring the long-term sustainability of the company. So we got the greenlight to continue this work.
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Scalability was at the heart of all this work. Wise works on a system of autonomous teams, which means trying to always remove gatekeepers, or streamline inefficient processes.
So I worked with design systems to document and componentize our emails.
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I’d followed help me scale up content across all teams and supported geographies quickly. I later onboarding a junior writer to help iterate on customer feedback.
Further reading
I wrote more about my approach from a writing perspective, on Medium.
Read the article →
The Wise design system is open source. So my documentation around emails and push notifications is available to the public.