Driving Competitive Parity with Research on Payroll Reporting
Role
User Researcher, Project Lead
Methodology
Observational Research, In-depth Interviews
Timeline
May - August, 2024
Overview
When Workforce.com launched its payroll product in 2023, the first cohort of clients began using it in early 2024. Early feedback revealed significant frustrations with the payroll reports, particularly around clarity and breakdowns of payroll costs. This led to further exploration into how we could better meet client needs and refine our payroll reporting.
Goals
Enhance payroll reporting to address customer frustrations and further close capability gaps with competitive payroll solutions.
Outcomes
Delivered a Payroll Summary report that addressed key client frustrations by providing clearer breakdowns of payroll costs. This new feature improved user satisfaction with an initial score of 3.78 out of 5 and brought Workforce.com's reporting capabilities closer to industry standards, aligning with competitive offerings.
Approach
Discovery Research
Initial research into our payroll experience aimed to uncover gaps in achieving parity with other payroll products. This revealed widespread customer dissatisfaction with our payroll reports, with many customers citing a desire for more "customization." Addressing this issue became key to improving our payroll product and staying competitive.
However, the term "customization" was ambiguous, and our team was concerned it might imply the need for users to build reports from scratch—something similar to Power BI or database tools, which was outside our product scope.
Four key pain points and one area of satisfaction were discovered in initial chats with clients about their payroll experience. However, out of the pain points, payroll reporting rose to the top.
Payroll reporting pain points included seeing individual employee costs, customizing reports, downloading important reports for business needs, and more transparency around money transfers
Competitive Research Interviews
Since most of our first cohort hadn’t previously used other payroll software, I focused on gaining an in-depth understanding of competitive products and how they address payroll officers' reporting needs. This allowed me to benchmark our features and identify opportunities to create more intuitive and impactful solutions for our users.
I interviewed six payroll officers with experience using various payroll platforms in their current and past roles. By analyzing their cross-referencing their insights with our original client feedback and session recording observations of our client's reporting behavior, I identified a critical gap: while our reports provided details, such as employee payroll information, pay run totals, and taxes, we were missing a Payroll Summary.
This type of report, commonly available in other payroll platforms, breaks down total payroll costs into individual components for both employees and employers—a feature our platform lacked.
Key Insight
Collecting feedback around other competitive softwares, a common pattern was that these payroll officers referred to reports right after running a pay run and they expected to see a full breakdown of their pay run costs. Other noteworthy feedback included how they interpreted the individual costs for their business needs.
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I learned that users who requested “customization” wanted certain columns and summaries which would help payroll officers see how their individual costs rolled up into their total payroll costs at the end of each pay period and quarter.
Resulting Design
Based on existing pay run results which showed the totals for taxes and employer and employee costs, a new panel was introduced to display a breakdown of those costs by employer, employee, and taxes. The information was organized by most important information that a payroll officer would review, starting with the employee costs (in case any hours worked or taken off were wrong, deductions or other costs were incorrect, etc.) which are the first costs a payroll officer looks for.
An emphasis was placed on ensuring every detail could be rolled back up into either a subtotal, categorical total (employer, employee, etc.) or the overall payroll total. Making a connection to which numbers are affecting which totals was key to ensuring the experience was transparent and clear to understand, no matter how detailed the report got.
Impact
I ran a satisfaction survey that appeared if the client interacted with the new summary report and received a 3.78 (75%) average satisfaction across 10 unique clients two months after launch (most clients run payroll on a semi-monthly basis). With this new report, payroll officers can now better manage their business operations through accurate reporting on their total costs broken down by employees, company costs, and additional details like bookkeeping entries.
Optimizing for the Future
The satisfaction score indicates expectations were overall met for an initial release, but more responses over time will provide deeper insights on how to further meet and even exceed client expectations. Follow-up interviews with the cohort and specific satisfaction respondents could assess overall satisfaction improvements and identify specific enhancements for the Payroll Summary to refine the feature further.