Streamlined Enrollment into a Managed 401k

While at Fidelity I was asked to help shorten the enrollment process into a managed 401k. The product team was interested in reducing drop-offs during enrollment, and assumed that making the process shorter would lead to more people completing it. They already had a proposal for a simplified sign-up flow that they wanted feedback about. An important note is that managed accounts are premium offer; customers pay an extra fee to have their account pro-actively managed based on their specific needs. This includes things like monitoring market conditions, and rebalancing when appropriate.

I always distinguish between business objective and research objective. While the business objective was clear, it was not obvious what research would best support it - or even that the product team’s assumption that shorter = better was accurate. So I began with something exploratory and open-ended, to get a sense of how people thought about both the current and shorted sign-up process.

What we found was that when signing up for a managed account, people actually wanted to give us more information. The shorted sign-up form made people think that the account wasn’t that personalized after all, because we hadn’t gathered enough information about their preferences and needs.

Based on this discovery I proposed and conducted new research to understand what information they wanted us to know about them, and how accurately they felt they could report it. This led to some interesting and actionable findings, however the product team was not interested in continuing and so the research concluded.