A merchant dashboard that stopped generating tickets
Half of all support tickets were merchants asking where their money was. We rebuilt the dashboard around that one question instead of answering it by hand.
The brief
Quill settles card payments for about 4,000 small merchants. The product worked, the money always arrived, and the support queue was still drowning. Nearly half of every week's tickets were a version of the same sentence: a merchant looking at a number in the app that did not match the number in their bank account.
What was actually wrong
The dashboard reported gross takings, and the bank reported takings minus fees, minus refunds, on a settlement cycle that did not line up with a calendar day. Both numbers were correct and neither explained the other, so support reconciled the two by hand, one merchant at a time, several hundred times a week.
How we worked
- 01
Read a month of tickets
Rather than survey merchants, we read what they had already written. Four question shapes covered the overwhelming majority of the queue, and answering those four became the whole brief.
- 02
Made the payout the main object
The dashboard used to lead with the day. It now leads with the payout: what is landing, when, and exactly which transactions and fees make it up. That is the unit merchants actually think in.
- 03
Showed the arithmetic
Every payout expands into the gross, the fees and the refunds that produced it. Support used to type that breakdown out; now they link to it, and mostly nobody asks.
- 04
Watched the queue, not the analytics
We tracked the change in ticket volume by category week over week, which is a blunter measure than session analytics and a much harder one to argue with.
What changed
The reconciliation tickets largely stopped, and the support team moved onto the harder problems that had been sitting behind them. Nothing about the underlying settlement changed. Merchants could just finally see it.
“We had been treating the support load as a staffing problem for a year. It was a design problem, and reading our own tickets was what showed us that.”
Got a version of this problem?
Tell us where you are and where you want to be. A paragraph is plenty to start, and you will hear back within a business day.
Have a project in mind?
Let’s build something extraordinary.
Tell us where you’re headed. We’ll bring the team to get you there.