Impactful UX writing for
Google Pay India
Sometimes all you need is a few thoughtful words to reassure anxious customers. Google Pay India accepts payments via the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) – a real-time payment system developed by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) for inter-bank transactions. Sometimes, this system breaks down when a user is transferring money. For the next 3 working days, a manual process of tracing the payment status would have to be done by the bank. During this period, Google Pay has no information on the status of the transaction. However, most users become anxious when a payment does not go through and tries to find out what happened by calling Google Pay's helpdesk. In 2019, there were about 3 million such calls monthly. And 45% of such calls were related to such "pending" transactions. This was becoming a real i$$ue – especially in terms of the cost of support. I was part of the team that was tasked to solve this issue. The team consisted of a project manager, a UX designer, an engineer, with myself as the content strategist. After rounds of discussions, we decided that the fastest way to fix the issue was to add a reassuring message at the point of an unsuccessful transaction. BEFORE: Users only see this message when a transaction is unsuccessful Message: Pending | x days left AFTER: New message manages user expectations and most importantly, reassures users Transaction status: Processing | Up to a few days Message: The banks are having some trouble. Don't worry, your money is safe and we're already on it. RESULTS After this feature was rolled out to just 50% of the users, call volume for this issue was reduced by 11.40%, representing a savings of about USD$635,224 on support costs for 2019. To date, the team continues to experiment with other solutions for this issue.
