Creating a distinct branded product to target a new market segment

Context

A payroll company was struggling to attract millennial customers, and wanted to explore the idea of creating a new product based on the specific needs as emerging business owners while remaining competitive with other service providers. Slalom was engaged for a few weeks initially to conduct ethnographic customer research, observing customers at work, interviewing them in context of their payroll activities, and then surveying a broader group of new business owners. Insights from this research informed the customer experience map created on the first day of the sprint.

Challenge

Test the hypothesis that a low-touch, onlne self-service service model with a new brand would attract and retain new business owners, mostly representing a younger demographic.

Approach

As a successful legacy brand, the client wanted to market their experience while presenting a subset of their services in a fresh, approachable way online. They knew this customer segment did not want to meet agents in person, or talk on the phone, and feature ideation was focused on simple package options with transparent pricing. Most of all, branding needed to reinforce to these customers that the product was valuable to people like them.

Outcome

Testing revealed that there was a clear need to service this demographic in new ways, like building additional community features that had nothing to do with payroll. We updated package options to emphasize price over flexibility, removed certain interactive features from the homepage after realizing customers needed to build trust with the brand immediately, and added new features to the roadmap. Slalom stayed on the project to update the prototype after the design sprint, and the client’s internal UX took it forward from there to continue design and testing.