Biggest Challenges Blog
As we move into the new year, I wanted to reflect on the year that went by, while 2020 was an unprecedented challenge for the world the likes we couldn’t have imagined. And regardless of how you feel it was managed, as humans we move past the challenges and continue to strive forward.
This article will not dwell on the pandemic, instead, I wanted to share with you the biggest challenges Cool Company UK faced in 2020 and how we overcame them. As a fintech business providing an umbrella payroll solution many of our challenges were merging regulations with technology.
Earlier in 2020, we decided to revamp our solution to better meet the goal of providing a fully digital automated umbrella solution. Our aim is to remove most, if not all, of the common bottlenecks found in the umbrella market and build a solution with both the customer experience and the client expectations of equal importance.
This led to the first challenge, how do you integrate multiple pieces of legislation that sometimes in excess 100 pages into a system built around code and math’s! In short, have a fantastic development team (which we do) and have a deep understanding of the reasons behind the legislation so you can apply logical steps to ensure compliance is met. For example, onboarding checks in the UK require many steps compared to other countries who have digitised ID in a much more efficient way.
To create a compliant and user-friendly onboarding system we looked at which documents and information we require from each new user and built this into our onboarding flow. This enables Cool Company to collect everything we need and also automatically refuse non-compliant users from utilising our solutions and breaking the law.
Our next challenge was to ensure that the user could efficiently register their timesheets and invoice clients is as fewer clicks as possible. We wanted to be the one-click option of the umbrella industry. And while one-click is almost impossible we managed to get this down to under 15 clicks which is a massive achievement!
Our final (well not final) challenge was to ensure that the content, website and information we present to the market is clear and concise. Too many times I have landed on a webpage to after 5 mins give up on trying to work out what it is, they actually do. Not only is it a frustration for the visitor but also a lost opportunity for the company as undoubtedly, they will buy services elsewhere when they find the information they need. We used our knowledge of the customer profiles and professional advice to rewrite our content, adverts and social posts ensuring that we are clear about our product and solutions across all platforms.
Now, this is a much shorter version of actual events and by no means is the work done, the key to having the best product on the market is to ensure you are always developing new things ahead of the competition. And while 2020 was a big year for many different reasons 2021 will be even bigger for the Cool Company family.