TL;DR:

- This is purely a fanboy post, I love Sharesies
- This post is 50% appreciation for the an excellent delivery of Design craft in the context of digital services
- This post is another 50% a tutorial for former employees of Xero living in NZ who are looking to sell their stock

I love digital services, and I’m fortunate to make a living crafting them. And I really love when companies take digital experiences to the next level. Sharesies has been doing that for a while now. I’ve been investing with them for the last 5 years and I always respected what they did, they have a great product, a great value proposition and they consistently get all the elements of the User Experience right; UX, UI, Content Writing, CX, you name it.

The interesting thing about digital products is that when they are exceptionally good, people talk about them, in person, on the phone, online, on social media, and people love to talk about good products and experiences. And I used to be like that with Sharesies, I would talk to friends, recommend it, use their amazing referral program, just spread the word.

But a couple of months ago, Sharesies helped me to get out of a tricky situation in the most delightful way, and I feel so grateful, that I decided to write a full article to share the aroha for them.

A tale about time & money

This story is about 2 of the most important things in our modern world, time and money. Almost 2 years ago, I was wrapping up a very successful 3 year tenure as a Product Design Director at Xero, to join Atlassian as a Design Manager. I had a decent amount of Xero shares that were trading at a decent price at that time. Selling your shares while you are employed it’s an extremely easy process through the Shareworks (by Stanley Morgan) platform, but at that time I didn’t need the money, so I decided to keep them, assuming that selling them later would be equally easy.

I was wrong.

Since then, the Xero stock hasn’t been doing so well, when I left, it was around 190 AUD, and since then it’s been oscillating around the 90 AUD and 120 AUD mark. Around September 2023, I decided to sell them through the company that Xero uses for former employees, an Australian company called LinkMarket Services. To my surprise, they can’t manage the shares, they just hold them, to sell them, I needed to transfer them to a broker. To do that, I asked around, talked to people, did research online, and I couldn’t find a straight answer. The fact that Link Market Services is an Australian company and I’m a Kiwi citizen, didn’t make things any easier.

I gave up on selling my shares for a couple of weeks, until one day I was looking at my investments in Sharesies, and I decided to click the chat icon on the top right.

A nicely orchestrated multichannel experience

Once I opened the AI chatbot, I asked it a simple question, trying to provide as much detail as possible, and then the magic began.

Honestly, I couldn’t believe that a bot was giving me such a simple solution to something that I was giving up to, so after reading the message I just followed the instructions on this link.

The experience was very intuitive, from the beginning of the journey, there are some key details that made my experience delightful, and reassured me that I was going on the right direction:

To start the transfer, Sharesies needs a couple of documents and data, such as an ID (to prove that you are you) and Holding Statement Document (with the SRN number, proving that the shares belong to you) and a Transfer Form that you need to print, sign, scan and send to them.

After initiating the transfer, I received an email with the form. Again, another masterclass in Content Design:

• The subject line, describes the content and the key action
• They explain not only what they expect from printing the form, but also how to mitigate potential issues (data mistakes, poor quality of the photo)
• All of this with the same tone and voice from the app, providing a feeling of reassurance and warmth

After printing the form, and uploading to the app, it was a matter of waiting, I knew it was going to take between 10 to 15 days, since this is something they repeated a couple of times during the process. I was still unsure about if the transfer was going to go through, for some reason I was skeptical that the process was going to be that smooth.

But voila, after a little more than 2 weeks (I started the process right before the Christmas break, as if I was expecting Santa Claus to help me) I received this email:

As soon as I saw the message, I went to my Sharesies account, and the shares were there! Now it’s a matter to wait until the Xero stock performs a bit better to sell them.

If you don’t have a Sharesies account yet, I have a referral link where both of us get $5 if you sign up, click here for my referral link