Shareable Wow Moments

Why this problem?

With how often people already shared moments when Chime proves its worth on their social networks, we looked inward and wondered, "Why aren't we making these moments easier to share?" Our belief was that by highlighting and emphasizing moments where members experience benefits tied to Chime's main value props, we could present actions to people like sharing to social or telling a friend about their a-ha moment.

On the business side, a bottoms-up goal we pushed for was to increase the number of enrollments in a way that had viral, word-of-mouth potential and didn't require any additional incentive spend. If we were to get members to consistently experience these moments of delight, evangelize Chime in their networks and drive organic conversation on social channels, we estimated we could achieve ~10% of our company level OKR goal.

Our approach

We knew we wanted to consider building on an existing component that already had a track record of usage. These wow moments were built to prove out whether or not these celebratory moments were interesting to members. We evaluated the existing moments to see if there were any we wanted to make shareable, then add any we felt could be impactful. We ended up breaking up the effort into three phases run as experiments before shipping to everyone.

Collaborating with the creative and social teams was pivotal to the success of our efforts. We wanted to leverage their knowledge in what made for successful shareables. It was also important to keep the Chime brand intact as we were creating a new suite of animations and visuals. This breadth of involvement wasn't often seen at Chime. So, we knew we had to be consistent and inclusive throughout in order to reach our goals.

It was a goal of ours to make sure we built shareable wow moments in a way that other teams could utilize for their own purposes with our oversight. There is a fair amount of logic that goes into how often a member can see a wow moment, so as long as a propose wow moment fell in line with the wider strategy, we would help facilitate it.

One challenging thing

What makes a prompt to share effective is two-part. It helps to pair it with an organic moment where the product delivers on a key value prop. Secondly, the content shuld play a supportive role and not a directive one. It's all too easy to get "salesy" in efforts like this one. In order to keep the member at the center of the celebration and the decision of subsequent action, we worked with content design to establish a set of principles to keep us in check.

Results

Each phase resulted in a successful experiment. There was very little change going in to shipping to production. We saw gains in all our primary and secondary KPIs while impacts on quality were within our predefined ranges. Enrollments saw a 3% lift and 30-day direct deposits increased by 2.1%.

Once each phase was launched, it was interesting to see how members were adding their own personal flair to their posts and how this generated impressions in their networks. Unexpectedly, the shareable wow moments most shared were related to the Chime' overdraft protection product, SpotMe. We had our reservations around people sharing how often they need dip into overdraft territory, but this goes to show that if a product can truly solve a real world pain point, people can be motivated to share.