Notarize In-meeting Chat

Overview

We increased meeting completion by building an in-meeting chat tool that allowed signers and notaries to talk with each other, without the use of audio. This solved an issue where meetings were being terminated due to technical audio issues, or the signer’s inability to hear the notary.

You can read more about it in the Notarize blog post.

Background

Notarize (now rebranded to Proof) is a platform that allows users (referred to as “signers”) to get documents signed or notarized online. The platform caters to enterprise customers that send business and real estate documents to their signers to be signed or notarized, as well as signers that need their own personal docs signed or notarized.

To get a document notarized, a signer must meet with a notary over a live audio and video call. This is where they communicate while reviewing, signing, and notarizing the document.

Getting a document notarized requires a meeting with a notary. Because of this, meeting completion is a core KPI that we monitor and work to improve. If a meeting is terminated and not completed, the signer doesn’t get their document notarized, the signer doesn’t pay for the notarized document, and the notary doesn’t get paid for the notarization.

Problem to solve

Signers meet with a notary over a live video call to get their document notarized. 24% of all meeting failures were due to technical issues. There is a wide variety of technical issues that could arise in a meeting, but the most common reason was signers having issues with their audio or speaker. We witnessed a meeting where a signer had lost audio and couldn’t communicate with the notary. The notary still wanted to help, so the notary resorted to writing on sticky notes and holding it up to their webcam to try to communicate with the signer and help them get their A/V issues resolved. While it ended in a successful meeting - there had to be an easier way to communicate!

We were also seeing meetings terminated because signers had hearing impairments and had difficulty communicating with the notary.

We needed a way to solve for these issues and decrease meeting terminations. It’s important that meetings are completed successfully for multiple reasons - mainly that Notarize doesn’t collect payment unless there’s a successful meeting, and the signer didn’t have success on the platform unless their meeting is completed.

My role

I was the Product Manager on this project. I was responsible for writing product requirements and gaining alignment across the organization. I was responsible for writing release notes and communicating internally across the org about the release. I collaborated on Product Marketing plans for external communication on the release and collaborated on notary training of the new feature. I also worked closely with our Legal team every step of the way.

I worked with a Product Designer and UX Researcher to design a solution and user test it with notaries and signers, as well as Engineers to build the feature. I also worked with a Data Analyst to create reports on metrics we wanted to track.

What we built

We built a chat box for signers and notaries to use while in the meeting. Notaries have a lot of important things they need to be looking at while in the meeting to remain legal and compliant, so it was important that we put the chat in a place that didn’t obstruct their view from seeing the signer, their document, or any of the other necessary tools.

Both parties could initiate the chat. We built notifications into the product so both the signer and the notary would get notifications when the other party sent messages through the chat.

Laws around remote online notarization require all meetings to have audio and video recorded. With in-meeting chat replacing audio in some meetings, we needed to also build a way to preserve the chat transcript and have it show with the recorded video after the meeting was completed. There also needed to be a way to download the chat transcript, separately.

We built the feature on our web platform, as well as on our iOS and Android mobile apps.

Metrics

Main KPIs monitored

• Meeting completion - increased by 0.28%

• Meeting terminations due to tech issues - decreased by 1.6%

• Meeting times - increased meeting time by 4 minutes, on average, when chat was used

Secondary KPIs

• Feedback from signers and notaries - this can’t be measured, but we looked for trends in communication with our Support team to see if this feature was resonating with users and helping those that were struggling in the meeting

Key takeaways and learnings

• We did see meeting times go up when in-meeting chat was used, which was expected because typing takes longer than talking. With other incentives to keep meetings short, this feature did the opposite. We determined that the increase in meeting times wasn’t a major concern because in-meeting chat is not used for every meeting, and in the meetings that it is used, the meeting likely would’ve been terminated if the feature didn’t exist.

• In-meeting chat became a great selling point, along with our Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT), to show our customers that we are committed to going above and beyond to provide accessible features for our users.