Saving the Company in 3 Weeks: Telecaller Onboarding

The stakes: a business model bleeding margin

SquadStack runs telecalling for large businesses — trained agents, working remotely, managed through a platform. Most of those agents were sourced through BPO partners, and the BPOs took a huge slice of gross margin for it. The alternative — Contract Partners who sign directly through the SquadStack app — kept the margin intact, but the onboarding experience was so confusing that the company was literally paying people to finish it: ₹50 per completed step, ₹500 on completion. About ₹850 in incentives per person, stacked on top of every other acquisition cost.

The company went into a three-week, war-mode push to fix the direct channel. I led the research and the end-to-end redesign of the onboarding flow inside that window.

One principle drove every screen:

Remove friction everywhere — and use friction only where we need to assess real talent.

Onboarding a telecaller isn't a signup form; it's a funnel that has to filter. The assessments had to stay demanding. Everything else had to stop fighting the user.

The design process — compressed into three weeks, design and build running in parallel

Research on a war clock

We ran a qualitative study with participants matched to the real persona — Tier-2/3 city job-seekers, BPO agents tired of office setups. When participants no-showed and the study ran long, we didn't stall: the team started working off the first two participants' pain points in parallel while the rest of the sessions completed.

I paired that with a heuristic evaluation of the existing app and a competitive analysis that went deliberately wide of direct rivals — Zomato, Swiggy, Uber, Urban Company — because the real comparison set is every platform that onboards gig workers. Zomato's video-guided onboarding, Swiggy's three-step interface, Urban Company's progress indicator all fed the design; forced permissions, registration fees, and invisible progress went on the avoid list.

Data capture, affinity mapping, and user-interview synthesis

Affinity-mapping the interviews produced six pain-point themes: no trust in the platform · steps too lengthy · value unclear ("what will I get?") · effort unclear ("what earns it?") · usability issues · assessments unexplained ("why am I doing this?").

Pain points synthesized from user interviews via affinity mapping

The design: psychology where the drop-offs were

Each fix maps a researched pain point to a named behavioural principle — Zeigarnik effect, endowed progress, goal-gradient, aesthetic-usability, progressive disclosure. Not as decoration: as the reason each change should move a number.

User flows and wireflows before visual design

The spine of the new flow — splash → three onboarding screens → a mandatory intro video → phone + OTP → profile → a "hinge screen" timeline hub → assessments → interview + eKYC → industry certification → company selection.

Onboarding screens — original issue → change → outcome → principle

The intro video (borrowed shamelessly from Zomato's playbook, produced with an agency in four days) answers the three questions the research said mattered most: what the work is, what it pays, and how. Onboarding screens show real earners and the brands partners can work with — social proof doing trust's heavy lifting.

Profile creation — the step where 70% used to drop

The hinge screen — endowed progress across three major milestones

Assessments — deliberately demanding, finally explained

The hardest call: for speech assessment, a third-party model (Pearson's) offered a smoother experience — and would have raised the acquisition cost we existed to cut. We built on the in-house data-science model instead, and I pushed for native app UI over web forms so we kept full control of the experience around it.

Interview scheduling — slot booking went from 60–70% to 100%

Industry certification — training, quiz, and readiness

Company selection — the final commitment moment

With no time for a pre-launch usability study (design and dev ran in parallel), we shipped to the Play Store inside the three weeks and watched the real world instead — Microsoft Clarity sessions caught the early bugs before most users could report them. The proper usability study ran post-launch, with analyst dashboards standing behind the qualitative KPIs.

Outcomes

The honest mechanism first: end-to-end conversion held steady — deliberately, because the funnel must keep filtering for talent. What changed is that people stopped needing to be paid to get through it. The ₹850-per-person incentive scaffolding came off, drop-off at the worst step collapsed, and the unit economics flipped:

CAC: ₹10,000 → ₹2,700 per partner — the same conversion, minus the bribes.
Profile-creation drop-off: 70% → 10%. Time on that step: 4.5 minutes → 55 seconds.
Full onboarding: 1h 15m → under 30 minutes. Customer Effort Score: 3 → 6 out of 7.
Interview slots booked: 60–70% → 100%.
Supply fulfilment: 3 days → 4 hours. New business go-live: 3 weeks → 1 week (with a parallel training-team effort halving the training window).

The mission math mattered as much as the margin math: every direct partner is someone in a Tier-2/3 city — homemakers, people who can't relocate — earning properly from home, without a BPO in the middle.

What still wasn't good: the speech assessment scored lowest of any step (CES ~4) — too long, too repetitive. The fix we chose was again the cost-honest one: improve the in-house model to ask fewer questions at the same accuracy, rather than buy the problem away and re-inflate CAC.

The team

A war-room of sixteen. I owned research and design end-to-end; supply recruited the participant pool; product pulled the quant baselines and co-wrote the interview script; data science built the speech model; marketing and an external agency turned the videos around in four days; illustrations by our visual designer, Vivek.

Credits — the 16-person war room across design, product, data science, engineering, supply, marketing, and training

What I carry forward

Trust is a design material. The redesign didn't convert more people — it removed the cost of distrust: the bonuses, the hand-holding, the drop-offs, the three-day fulfilment lag. And the discipline of "friction only where it assesses" turned out to be the sharpest scoping tool I've used: it told us exactly which parts of the funnel were allowed to be hard.