Liquid Control Panel

User & Business Problems

The Liquid product was not equipped to support proper onboarding and care for customers.

As Liquid launched with a handful of customers, the team was not well-prepared for the onset of new customers. Everything internal was a long and manual process—from moving funds to customers’ account to keeping track of Liquid cards being distributed.

• Moving funds to a customer account was a long, manual process performed by engineering and finance teams.
• There was no way to track customer health and activity. The operations team checked each individual account each week.

Defining GOals & Measuring success

A control panel for all customer activity of TripActions Liquid for internal teams.

After I scoped user and business problems, I defined goals and presented what we would build to tackle the problem.
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The main goals we focused on were:

• Automate customer funding process, creating a single platform that would monitor customer health.
• Be able to onboard a large amount of customers quickly and easily.

Scoping an MVP

Workflows that would allow us to test our hypotheses.

I explored a few workflows based on the problem that we defined. We tried to pare it down to the most essential workflows for an MVP.

Exploration of different flows

• As someone who works in finance, I want to be able know when funds are being moved, and be able to approved or reject the movement easily.
• As someone who works in customer support and operations, I want to be able to see customer health at a glance.

Components

Moving money is too easy

One of the most exciting aspects of this project was getting to be my own PM and researcher. I spent a couple weeks getting to know the various processes that finance, CSMs, sales, and operations has to go through in order to onboard a customer onto the Liquid platform. The most painful point that everyone expressed was being able to fund the customer’s account.

Fund approval workflow

With Liquid customers, we’re moving millions of dollars into various accounts. Because of this, I designed a two-step approval process in order to move money. This not only increased confidence in funding customers’ accounts, but also left less room for errors. Having the responsibility of moving millions of dollars is a scary thing.

Components

“Logging in as” is a security issue

Because Liquid is a small startup within a larger startup, we naturally inherited a lot of things from the larger TripActions organization. “Logging in as” was a workaround feature that TripActions implemented in order to make changes to a customer account. This was a feature that was a huge security issue—there was no way to know exactly who made what changes because it looked like it was all coming from the customer!

After much convincing for those who held the the “log in as” feature near and dear to their hearts, we decided to implement customer settings into the Control Panel. This would not only give us all the features “log in as” had, but also additional controls internally.

Components

A cohesive customer directory

Before Control Panel, the operations team would go through many different tools to ensure customer health. This was a major painpoint in their workflow, and took a massive amount of piecing together information.

Company listing

The company directory section of the Control Panel allows the team to see customer health at a glance. Are their funds low? Has their bank account been verified? Do they need to change account owners? All this information would be accessible through the company listing.

This relieved the operations team of having to go searching for information, and piecing everything together.

Learning after launch

Liquid was not efficient

Through the research, meetings, and project scoping I did, I immediately noticed that Liquid was not efficient enough. Through building an MVP of Control Panel, we’ve managed to save the operations team’s time by 50%—they can now spend their time doing more important tasks.

I’m excited to build out the rest of this tool, roll it out to the larger TripActions team, and see how it alleviates many areas of pain for various teams.

Updated May 2020