By: Jesse Jaffe
Blue Paper Community Feedback Initiative
Header: Audience Analysis
Page: 16
Sub-header: Newbies, intermediates, experts – anyone unfamiliar with EOS will need…
An Alternative Solution to “Straightforward ‘how-to’ guides for onboarding”
An Onboarding and Referral System for EOS
Intro
Coming from a digital marketing perspective, the path to onboard users should be automated and “serviced” as much as possible. Yes, written and video guides are useful to some. But a true onboarding experience involves automated digital marketing funnels coupled with a human touch. Written and/or video guides without a human touch ignores the expectation of quality customer service outside of crypto, which narrows our lead pool significantly.
The onboarding funnel should gather data to provide the community with insights about demographic information and how it relates to dApp and wallet preferences.
An onboarding system should have incentives that motivate recruiters and customer support agents.Therefore the funnel needs a referral system that can deliver rewards in $EOS. It can become a primary driver of community growth. It can elevate Support Agents to provide Amazon.com-level customer service. It can motivate the Bees and other marketers to become EOS influencers. The referral system is like the engine of the onboarding funnel.
It’s important to consider whether a potential new community member is qualified to receive a referral reward. One’s qualification status will be guided by objective and subjective metrics, discussed later.
The following is a framework to incentivize Bees, Support Agents and everyone else to onboard new community members using tools from in and outside the EOS community.
Participants
There are three participants in the system:
- An affiliate is a person who recruits a qualified, new community member.
- A “lead” is a person who may or may not be counted as a qualified, new community member.
- A Support Agent guides leads through the funnel and stamps their approval for a qualified, new community member, which triggers the Referral Rewards Pool.
Leads are found from three primary sources.
- Friends and family.
- Digital advertisements.
- “Organic” recruitment made possible through an engaging content creation brand that can access followers.
Affiliates will be given a unique URL if they pass the qualification. To be qualified as an affiliate, the following information is required:
- Afiliate’s name
AND
- EOS account
AND
- Port registration
OR
- EDEN account
- EOS Support account
- BEE account
- Video submission of their face
The Method
Leads will be forwarded via a unique affiliate URL to a eossupport.com webpage. The webpage will be branded based on the lead source. For example, in the case of forwarding leads from a digital advertisement, the webpage will reference the content in the ad. A generic webpage can be created for friends and family.
The page will gather the following information from the lead while promising a near-future opportunity to earn a reward:
- Name
- Gender
- Country
- Natuve language
- Personality interests - pre-selected choices:
- Art
- Finance
- Gaming
- Coding
- Gambling
- Marketing
- Sports
- News
- Pets
- Governance
- Food
- Politics
- Fashion
The page will then ask the lead to get qualified and earn a $EOS reward in less than 5 minutes. If yes, two options will appear:
- Get authenticated with Port
OR
- Get authenticated with a Support Agent
In the latter case, the lead will get forwarded to a Support Agent in their language. The Agent will conduct a short, recorded video interview. The lead’s face must be visible. The Agent will introduce themself on behalf of the EOS community and ask a single question, “How did you find us?”. A satisfactory answer will prove that the lead is connected to the affiliate’s information. After the lead answers satisfactorily, the Agent will stop the recording and move on to the next phase of the onboarding sequence.
After authentication, the Support Agent will help the lead get set-up with an EOS account based on a conversation about owning vs custodying keys and how the fee structure of EOS differs from Proof-of-work chains. Then the Agent will produce a curated list of dApps and explainer content based on the personality interests submitted. Once complete, the Agent will trigger a new conversion. The trigger will pay the affiliate, the new community member, and the Support Agent.
The Agent is using objective metrics of whether the lead passes the automated authentication process. The Agent is making a subjective determination based on a lead’s answer in the non-Port authentication process and during the quality of conversation during the post-authentication phase.
Rewards
Referral rewards to the participants will be accessed through a multisig smart contract with myself, Randall Roland, and one other trusted person in the EOS community. The multisig account will have a threshold of 2 while the signing accounts each have a weight of 1. The smart contract will be named the “Referral Rewards Pool”.
The Referral Rewards Pool will be allocated based on an algorithm similar to Bitcoin difficulty adjustments. The baseline reward is 0.5% of the total pool as long as at least 1 lead gets converted in a one week period. The allocation of 0.5% will be allocated with the following divisions at the end of the weekly period for each group of a conversion’s participants:
- 60% to the affiliate
- 30% to the Support Agent
- 10% to the converted lead
If there were 2 successful conversions in a week, each group of participants would receive 0.25% of the total Pool. If there were 7 successful conversions, each group of participants would receive 0.071% of the total Pool.
The quantity of the reward goes down 1% for each 7 new conversions in a one week period, prorated.
If there were 14 new conversions in a week and pool had 1000 $EOS, then each group of participants would receive:
0.5% of 1000 = 5 minus 1% = 4.95 divided by 14 = 0.3535 $EOS per participant group
If the next week there are 11 new conversions in a week and pool now has 995.05 $EOS, then each group of participants would receive:
0.5% of 995.05 = 4.97525 minus 0.57% = 4.946891075 divided by 11 = 0.44971737045 $EOS per participant group
The limit made by the difficulty adjustment is 707 new leads per week. Reaching the upper limit will cause no rewards to be distributed. The Agents will stop working and a message will appear on the webpage informing no more rewards for the week. It acts as a last-stand safety net in case the system gets compromised. It may be necessary to increase the difficulty threshold from 7 new conversions per week in a more mature system.
By taking a percentage of the Pool’s current total, funds will never run out from referral rewards. It leaves room for funds to be pulled by multisig for emergency development work, for example.
The amount in the Pool and the difficulty adjustment should serve as a gauge for whether there’s enough incentive for new affiliate initiatives. On the flip side, an established brand in lead source #3 has an incentive to use the system whether the Pool is large or small because the opportunity cost is very small.
The difficulty adjustment serves as a way to reward early adopters of the system.
Sybil Concerns
The system is able to handle a Sybil attack because anyone in the EOS community can earn a referral reward if they authenticate themselves. That is, if they are apart of organizations that already solve for Sybil or willing to use a Sybil protection tool:
- EDEN member
- BEE
- Support Agent
- Use Port
- Non-affiliated EOS community member who submits a short video of their face for verification
Anyone can count as a conversion if they:
- Use Port
- Agree to a short video recording of their face
Conclusion
The System presented is meant to “hand hold” new community members. Because the expectation of customer service is pervasive outside of crypto, everyone should be treated like grandma.
By rewarding Support Agents in $EOS, incentives are more aligned compared to legacy customer service. It should result in a competitive advantage due to higher productivity based on higher motivation from skin-in-the-game rewards. A potential adjustment in compensation may be necessary to find the right incentives for the Agent’s labor in the system
The system’s bottleneck is the quantity of available Support Agents. In case of heavy use, EOS Support’s chat software will give an estimated waiting time to speak to a Support Agent to collect the reward. Those unwilling to wait will simply leave the site, unaffecting others. Therefore, the bottleneck will not jeopardize the function of the system. Reaching the bottleneck will be a powerful signal to the EOS community that more resources should be invested into EOS Support.
The data gathered from the onboarding process can inform future advertising strategies, wallet updates and entrepreneurial activity. The Bees organization benefits from the data because it can share recruiting achievements that can be verified transparently.
If the lead is qualified and prefers to own their keys, the Support Agent will direct the lead’s referral reward towards the cost of the account creation. The system can therefore solve the fundamental EOS problem of competing with “free” proof-of-work accounts.
The onboarding and referral system presented can be thought of as a public good initiative and therefore can be funded by Pomelo, EDEN, and/or the ENF. 30% of potential funds raised for the system will go to EOS Support for development costs. The remaining 70% will go towards the Referral Rewards Pool.
Randall and I have been collaborating on the idea since December. We hope to be able to build a great onboarding and referral system for the EOS community.
Thank you for the consideration and incentivized opportunity to give feedback.