As customers, why do we enjoy interacting with some software and dread others? And how can SaaS companies create that feeling of joy in an embedded payments product?
Payments UX expert Joseph Solomon of WDIR joins us on the Payments Strategy Show to answer these questions and more.
We covered:
- One critical UX touchpoint with a disproportionate impact on payments adoption (SaaS companies don’t want to miss this)
- How to boost merchant onboarding completion rates with progress indicators and other UX best practices
- The critical importance of trust in payments, and how to build it through UX design
- How to innovate on a payments product that demands reliability and stability
- Simple changes that make a big difference in confirmation pages, status emails, and other payments touch points
🎧 Listen on Spotify
🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts
Brooke Smith: Welcome to another episode of the payment strategy show. I’m Brooke Smith. I’m filling in for Joshua Silver today. I’m the content manager at Rainforest. We are the payment provider purpose built for vertical software platforms to help you process more payment volume at higher margins with a payments product that your customers love to use. And that’s what we’re going to dive into with Joseph today. So I’m joined by Joseph Solomon. He’s the founder of WDIR, a UX and product strategy firm for B2B payments. So Joseph, thank you so much for joining us.
Joseph Solomon: Yeah, thanks for having me, Brooke. Big fan of the show. It’s an honor to be on.
Brooke Smith: Thank you. So to get us started, tell us about your background. How did you get into Payments UX?
Joseph Solomon: So I actually started, funny enough, I started in vertical SaaS maybe about 10 years ago. That’s before I even knew what it meant or just the tech space in general at a company called Finance It. And they’re a large successful company now, FinTech, point of sale financing. Back in the day, was vertical SaaS for home improvement and retail. And I think some automotive as well. And that was my first kind of step into seeing how people built vertical SaaS and understanding how, you know, bringing professionals in and making really niche products for really, really important niches, like home improvement, retail, just understanding how that whole process went. And throughout a career in digital marketing leadership, I started working more intimately with products and understanding, you know, creating a narrative around products. Something that
would bring me into my UX work. Then I got the chance to work at American Express on a cross-border payment solution called GlobalPay. And this is targeted to SMEs sending and receiving payments in different currencies globally. And that’s really where I properly started to dig into UX work and overall payment UX, across invoicing, procurement, and so on and so forth.
Brooke Smith: It’s funny, that no one in payments actually got into payments on purpose.
Joseph Solomon: Yeah, yeah. That’s a common thread with this show and other payment shows. There’s a lot of people, kind of just fall into payments. But yeah, such an interesting space.
Brooke Smith: It’s true. So why is UX a non-negotiable in B2B payments now?
Joseph Solomon: Number one, it’s the demand just shifting, right? You and I are used to calling Ubers at any moment. We can order food in 20 minutes, it shows up or less. We’re used to those experiences in our personal lives, even personal finance, Investment platforms, savings, all of that. So we’re so used to that level of convenience and that’s moving into the business space where unfortunately many processes are still manual and unnecessarily complicated. So number one, this drive or shift towards more convenience and ease is why UX is more important than ever in B2B payments.
Secondly, it’s an exceptional competitive advantage, right? Especially in this space where, you know, there’s many slow moving sectors like, you know, healthcare is notorious for this and construction, you know, amongst others that are slow to adopt digital payment solutions. So those who do, right, they stand out pretty much, especially because B2B digital payment solutions, are still not where they need to be. Far from competing with consumer solutions. So it’s a competitive advantage in the B2B payment space when you have excellent UX.
And that obviously translates to obviously the business aspect, higher customer lifetime value, lower customer acquisition costs, right? Because when people find your product easy to use and intuitive, they tell others. And word of mouth is, you know, it’s still so underrated. And that’s one of the big reasons why B2B payments, in my opinion, has moved so slow. It’s a huge focus. And I like this aspect, actually. But we’ve got to find ways to move with the times and technology. But it’s a huge focus on the person and on cultivating relationships over a long time. But yeah, that demand towards convenience and ease and just getting rid of unnecessary complications is a huge reason why exceptional UX is an advantage.
Brooke Smith: It’s true, and you’re so right about word of mouth because when there’s issues in the UX, people might never tell the company about it, but they will certainly tell their peers when their peers ask if they should use it.
Joseph Solomon: That’s exactly it. Exactly.
Brooke Smith: Where in embedded payments products is UX the most critical?
Joseph Solomon: Oof, everywhere is the short answer. But obviously, onboarding, right? It’s first impressions, first time they use your payment product. So making sure that onboarding is nice and easy, intuitive, and they know what to expect. In my experience, I’ve seen many onboarding processes where there was a lack of visual progress or, you know, they left people wondering what’s coming next or this is taking too long, like when is this actually finished? And when we’re talking about B2B payments, document uploading for KYB and KYC, a lot of these processes can take a little longer than other consumer apps, but they can still be done efficiently, they can still be done thoughtfully.
But onboarding really is a key aspect where companies really need to nail it and make that as frictionless as possible. Just make it easy to start. The numbers vary depending on obviously verticals, what rate or onboarding rate you should be shooting for. But just high level, make it as simple as possible.
Brooke Smith: Yeah, you mentioned like progress indicators. Why are those so important?
Joseph Solomon: Because you need to know what’s coming next. You don’t want to be forever just in one step and not knowing, OK, what’s coming next? What do I really need? When am I actually going to get started here? Whether it’s scheduling a shift or team management or processing your first payment within minutes. So you want to know how quickly you can get to that value.
Those who are creating these platforms, that’s what they need to think about. Make it valuable for them. Get them to that time to value. It’s a product marketing term, UX term, but show the value immediately. Get them those immediate wins. So those progress indicators let people know, I care for you. I want to get this done as quickly and as efficiently and as pleasantly for you.
Here’s what you need to fill out. Here’s what you need. If you need help, here are your options. Here’s how you can contact us. If this is like error messaging and those little moments, those little interactive moments are so important, just like in a conversation, eye contact and a gentle pat and touch here and there. So you’re just building up that rapport.
That’s how you do it digitally with these visual progress indicators.
Brooke Smith: That’s a great insight. And I feel like it’s that same phenomenon that makes us love headlines like three mistakes to avoid for this, 10 ways to achieve this outcome. Because when we know how many tips or mistakes or steps we’re signing up for, we know what the commitment is going to be before we start reading or start working through a process in an app.
Joseph Solomon: That’s right, definitely.
Brooke Smith: What are the symptoms or clues that UX might be an issue?
Joseph Solomon: So the first symptoms that would be Obviously difficult onboarding Is a key kind of area but it shows up as low usage of a particular feature or Even dropping off at onboarding right? So if people aren’t using Your payment feature Right or they’re still calling. Let’s say your dental office or you have software for dental practices
People keep calling the office instead of using the supplier portal or the vendor portal, whatever you want to call it. But the secure link where they can pay online and they can pay seamlessly. You know, those kind of processes, if they’re not doing that, well, that shows that the tool is not intuitive, right? It’s indicative of a tool that wasn’t necessarily thoughtfully designed. Another point is they start and they finish.
So they can begin the payment process but stop before using it or just because it’s too difficult it’s too complicated. They can’t figure out, I’m getting this weird error message, this is vague, I don’t know what to do next. It just says payment error, like what am I supposed to do with this? So they call in, they mail the check, or they found some other work around.
So these are just some of the signs, but there’s also lots of questions or complaints, know, negative reviews. There’s many signs that point to, hey, maybe we should tweak the product experience here, make it a little more easy, more convenient, more intuitive. So these are just some of the signs, but.
That’s the thing with UX, it’s so many of these interactions add up to the total experience. And it’s very important to get as many as those interactions as possible and get them right.
Brooke Smith: For some of these key metrics like utilization rate or drop off rate, are there benchmarks that platforms can use and like how specific are those benchmarks to specific applications and verticals?
Joseph Solomon: In terms of churn and drop off rates, a lot of these differ and they vary based on the industry. If you look at restaurants versus fitness studios, I don’t know what those would look like, but I’ve seen anywhere between 9%, 13%. Sorry, for churn under five is a good goal. But again, those vary.
Again, I don’t want to dive too deep into the numbers just because they’re so different from tools that are, you know, the toasts of the world and then other tools for that are lesser known, right?
So, yeah, but a good number to keep in mind, you know, a three to one or five to one ratio in terms of CLV to customer acquisition costs is kind of standard. That’s so pretty reasonable to expect, right? And under 5% in terms of churn.
You definitely want to be data driven. That word I know is so like buzzword soundy, but it’s true, right? You want to look at what’s working, what is the information, what’s the data telling you. But also the intangibles, I would say.
And it’s not really that intangible in terms of, like, these are your customers that are saying this. Or if you’re reading through usability testing reports, or any UX research reports, you can see common themes. You can read sentiments and understand. And this is something that.
I do all the time reading through UX research reports and understanding, seeing common themes. And with AI now, it’s easier than ever to understand themes, do thematic analyses and other kind of cool sectioning and grouping of sentiments so that you can tailor the experience to be something that’s as frictionless as possible.
Brooke Smith: So once a company identifies that UX might be a weak point, how should they go about diagnosing the issue or identifying like the highest priority areas of improvement?
Joseph Solomon: You always want to be proactive, right? So if you’re going to do well in any vertical, you have to be in lockstep with the people that you serve. You have to work with them from when you get them to onboard to during those little moments throughout your relationship, post payment kind of feedback. So all touch points that you have with them, you need to be in lockstep with them. You need to understand what they’re going through. So being proactive is number one and understanding what exactly is the priority here.
Whether it be, we use that scheduling example, whether it’s, just want to be able to schedule people in for shifts simply, efficiently without all these headaches. What happens if somebody calls last minute? Like, I need a tool that can handle all of these scenarios smoothly and conveniently. So that might be something that they want, right? For fitness studios or whatever it may be.
So being in lockstep with them and understanding that what is their number one priority? What is the fastest way we can get them there? So being in lockstep and understanding what it is that they’re really seeking and delivering that value, not just once, but consistently. Right? That’s a key aspect of, yeah.
Brooke Smith: Yeah, it’s funny, we talk about that in a really similar way.
We talk about what are the core workflows that that customer is doing every day, every week in running their business. And then of course, the SaaS product should make all of those workflows faster and easier. And then you figure out where in those workflows do you insert payments.
Joseph Solomon: Absolutely. That’s exactly it. And I like to say serve, right? We are in service of our customers, right? So we serve them. And how do you serve somebody? How do you make sure that you’re of service, of great service? Well, you pay attention to the minutiae. You understand how it is you can improve their condition, right? So you have to understand, what’s the pain point here? What’s the big frustrations that they have daily?
And again, varies. It’s so specific. That’s the cool thing about vertical SaaS is you can go super deep. There’s nothing too niche in vertical SaaS, but that’s the whole point. These tools are made for these wild edge cases, whatever that only happened in home improvement or restaurant industry. So you really have to be tuned in to what your customers are doing and serve them accordingly.
Brooke Smith:
Absolutely, and I love that they’ve gotten so hyper specialized that like even within home improvement, we now have separate platforms for roofers, for plumbers, for electricians, for paving contractors, that like home improvement isn’t even specific enough anymore.
Joseph Solomon: Yes, exactly. You can keep going down and find a suitable market for that, for sure.
What are the signs? Well, there are a few, but obviously good customer sentiment. My people are raving about your product, good reviews, solid reviews on, you know, I mean, these sites, some people, you know, they can be polarizing, but on the G2s and, you know, those kinds of sites that rate products, different areas online that you can find them.
But obviously if they trust you there’s high usage if your platform is reliable there’s high usage High product onboarding rate is something that’s that’s good. I’ve read anywhere between 70% to some saying, you know over 90% of successful onboarding and they’re using the product regularly are good targets, but then again these very for different industries, right?
So adoption, right? They’re using a particular feature regularly. Let’s say back again to the shift scheduling, right? They’re using that regularly. It’s intuitive. They’re scheduling tons of shifts, but you can see the usage of a particular feature and there’s tools like Hotjar and another kind of heat mapping tools that you can use to track this and even within platforms themselves, right?
I’m showing you how much a feature is being used. And we spoke about the customer lifetime value ratio, which is important to keep in mind, understanding where, how, not cheaper, I don’t want to use that word, but we’ve lowered customer acquisition costs to positive word of mouth. And when you’re looking at your books and your P&L, you’re understanding, okay, great, we’re cutting down on expenses here, on customer acquisition costs here. Those are things that you can track, like the impact to the business.
So, and greater payment volume. Just routing through, that’s an easy one, it’s an obvious one. A greater payment volume just because the payment aspect is so easy to use. Payments are frictionless. So, yeah, those are a few signs of a solid user experience.
Brooke Smith: You’ve mentioned trust a few times. Why is trust so important in payments?
Joseph Solomon: Just like any relationship, right? This might be digitally, but trust is the foundation of any good relationships. And that’s what business is fundamentally, relationships between people. So trust is key to that. So the way you show that through a well-designed, thoughtful payments product is making it reliable, making it easy, making any dispute resolution as respectful and as intentional as possible, but really giving a consistent, you know, pleasant experience. That’s one of the key signs of showing, hey, I’m in your corner. I’m committed to serving you better and improving your condition. So, yeah, this is how you show that and you earn that trust, right? Every time you do it, you keep showing up. Again, commitment.
Brooke Smith: I feel like with money, it’s exceptionally important because like it’s not hard to break trust when it comes to money. And there’s so much trust that’s required in money movement. You’re providing the service or shipping this product based on the trust that all of these moving parts in our payment processing infrastructure are going to result in this money landing in my bank account at a future date.
Joseph Solomon: Yeah, it’s true. You’re sending, you know, $50,000 or greater sums in B2B payments and you don’t know where the money is and you don’t know what happened to it. It kind of goes into this black box. Like it’s like that’s not building trust necessarily, right? So showing your customers, hey, this is where it is. Payment is confirmed, right? Confirmation screens are super important that we’ve worked on tons of confirmation screens and testing different copy to, you know, set expectations. That’s kind of a UX axiom is just setting expectations. Never leave people wondering what’s going on. These are all little things that you do to build that trust.
So important, so important, the microcopy, just getting them to the next step as confidently as possible, as quickly as possible. I think those are huge aspects and still, in my opinion, underestimated aspects of providing a solid experience.
Brooke Smith: How does microcopy fit into building trust and building that relationship?
Joseph Solomon: Microcopy is very important, and like I said before, in terms of setting the expectation, the whole point of good UX writing is making it clear and removing any room for doubt. So this is for sure, that’s what intuitive means. You don’t think about it. So moving to the next step as confidently as possible.
So when you’re writing a confirmation screen, I’ll give you some clear examples here of a good example and maybe an example with opportunities, right? That can be tweaked. So let’s say you have a confirmation screen. And the error message just says sorry, payment not accepted or error message in just a red kind of warning sign. Well, what does that do for me? That doesn’t… Yeah. Like what?
Brooke Smith: That’s terrifying.
Joseph Solomon: Right? Did I do something wrong? What happened?
Or another one that says, let’s say, you know, your payment is delayed.
Right? Too vague. I’m frustrated now. What does that mean? Something if there was a check due to a regulatory process and whatnot.
Good copy might say your payment is under review because of so-and-so verification check required by so-and-so body, for example, we’ll update you within 24 hours. Of course, that can be tweaked and shortened, right? But you’re making it clear. You’re emphasizing security, right? And you’re giving an expectation. You can expect to hear back within 24 hours. That’s an example of something that takes that, your payment is delayed message to something a little more clear and gives me a little more to work with.
I can expect an answer, I know when to expect an answer.
Brooke Smith: I feel like the everyday analogy for this is you’re waiting for a package to arrive and then you get a notification that’s like your package is delayed, we’ll update your tracking when information is available. And it’s like, that’s not helpful.
Joseph Solomon: At all. Yeah. Exactly.
Brooke Smith: And when it’s just like, we’ll update you when tracking is available, my first thought is always like, they lost my package because if they knew where my package was, my tracking would be updated now.
Joseph Solomon: Yeah. And you know, it’s so important for us to understand human behavior and kind of just the behavioral sciences because we can design better products this way, product that really serve our customers. So if we can track, you know, an Amazon package that is less than 50 bucks, well, we should be able to do that for something that’s worth a lot more, a $500,000 payment. You would think, you would know every step of the journey, you could track it in real time, but that’s something that I’m seeing a little more of and, you know, hopefully that’s the future of B2B digital payments.
Brooke Smith: So I know you’ve mentioned a couple of times being of service to the customer. What is your definition of being of service to the customer or being customer-centric?
Joseph Solomon: That’s a good one. Service for me is a commitment. I use that word again. You’re committed to doing the best that you can to improve their condition. For me, it’s a mindset. We’re doing this and we’re committed to improving this for you and we’re in it for the long haul.
Just like any good friend that you’ve had for a long time, it’s that commitment. They keep showing up, they keep supporting, they keep evolving with you. So I think of Toyota and besides their longevity, which is a case study in and of itself, but their unwavering commitment to providing the most reliable car.
That’s what we are. Toyota, we’re reliable. They’re basically synonymous with the reliability in many parts of the world. So it’s that. For me, true service is that. It’s a mindset. It’s also a verb. You do it all the time. It’s consistent. And it’s that commitment. We’re in it for the long haul. And yeah, it’s a customer promise that’s kept.
Brooke Smith: So what does innovation look like? Especially in B2B where there’s this huge necessity for reliability and consistency.
Joseph Solomon: Yeah, again, for me, innovation comes down to finding interesting ways to, again, serve, right? Building great product and continuing to improve our customer’s condition. For me, innovation isn’t hype and a lot of these, you know, things that are here today and gone tomorrow.
It’s really about challenging fundamentally the way we do business and the states of mind that we’re in when we do business and especially around payments, right? Like challenging a lot of the, this is just business or we’ve always done things this way kind of mindsets, right?
That’s real innovation for me because that’s in service to better serving the customer with great use of tools, removing unnecessary friction, and just designing products thoughtfully.
Brooke Smith: What does it mean to design products thoughtfully?
Joseph Solomon: To design products thoughtfully, simply means, I shouldn’t say simply because I think it’s a lot bigger than that, but let’s say to its core, To its core, designing thoughtfully, it’s respecting. It’s respecting your customer. It’s again showing that you value them, that you’re in it to serve them.
and you’re committed to serving them. That’s what thoughtful design means. That’s thinking about the potential scenarios where they could falter. That’s shadowing certain people to understand really what’s their day-to-day. If you’re serving the restaurant industry while you’re shadowing those who are scheduling shifts and doing inventory and a whole bunch of other things, to really understand what’s the frustration. You’re engaging with them regularly.
I read about Sam Walton and how he carried his yellow legal pad around with him everywhere and took notes and just asked a tremendous amount of questions. For me, that’s a good example of leadership in terms of understanding really what it is to serve because that was fundamental to a company like Walmart, becoming Walmart. It’s that obsession with just serving.
And to better serve, you have to really understand. So that’s what thoughtful design is. It’s taking time to understand who you’re serving and building around that.
Brooke Smith: That’s a great insight. If you could give SaaS leaders just one piece of advice for going to market with a great UX in their embedded payments product, what would that be?
Joseph Solonom: One insight, one piece of advice. I would say just focus on constantly improving your customer’s condition. Be committed and understand that, you know, see it as service.
And for me, that’s already the right mindset to properly go about bringing real change and removing a lot of inefficiencies, inefficiencies in B2B payments. It’s that we need to be focused on serving the customer and improving their condition. I’ve said it probably a million times already, but it’s definitely worth repeating. It’s focus on improving the customer’s condition.
Brooke Smith: I think that’s an important distinction because we talk about continuous improvement a lot, but it’s not just about continuously improving the product, it’s about continuously improving in a way that continuously improves things for the customers.
Joseph Solomon: Yeah, exactly. I want to thank you and the entire Rainforest team for bringing me on board and sharing this message and repeatedly beating the drum on service and commitment to better serving the customer.
Brooke Smith: Of course. If our listeners want to find you, where can they find you?
Joseph Solomon: Yes, so my website is wdir.agency and you can also follow me on LinkedIn. I post every day, I write every day around kind of B2B payments, UX, and that’s Joseph, J-O-S-E-P-H-S-K on LinkedIn. Feel free to reach out and connect, happy to connect.
Brooke Smith: Thank you so much for joining us Joseph
Joseph Solomon: Thank you, Brooke. Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure.
