Product Improvements Analysis

Note: all product names were changed to variables (X, Y, Z) in order to comply with GDPR

After taking the time to answer the user questions and searching through X, University and the User Guide, as well as trying out Y myself, I would suggest focusing primarily on the onboarding experience.

Particularly, I would focus on the following 3 vectors:

💡 Self-Service

🍰 User segmentation

🎊 Steps to success

This is the pillar of your product. Without adept and intuitive self-help content, users will constantly interrupt their first experience of using Y. Here’s one of many examples of this paradigm:

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As seen here, the user feels confused and frustrated purely because of the lack of certainty they have regarding core product functionality. At my last role, we saw a severe decrease in created tickets directly correlated with increased traffic to the Help Center. We also managed to decrease our FRT down to 6 hours (more recently, 4) from our 1-2 business day standard SLA only from investing in creating, updating and analyzing existing content from our Help Center.

High quality self-service content also helps the team scale at a sustainable pace. As such, I’d recommend:

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Researching Intercom and The X to understand the most asked questions and transform them into User Guide articles.

Consistently tag all customer feedback and commit to a monthly or quarterly review of the volume and tags to establish an editorial backlog for the User Guide.

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Analyze traffic in and out of the User Guide and establish:

Ticket deflection rates (69% of customers first try to solve their issue independently)

A baseline for our Customer Effort Score

A baseline for our Self-Service Score

Might seem odd to call this out, but I noted this here because as someone totally new to Y, I felt pretty bombarded with messages upon signing up when my profile barely has any detail and includes the word “test” on multiple fields.

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The middle two emails are essentially the same list of resources and links, so not only does it feel repetitive, but also impersonal. I always go back to a book I read a while ago (“Nudge”) when looking into the user’s experience critically: a “helpful default” will take you a long way.

One of the classic examples they share is how, in a large corporation, they asked workers to pick their specific healthcare plan. However, most people simply didn’t make a choice and would often pay more or not make any use of their medical plan. By contrast, when the default was changed to the most favorable scheme for the majority of workers, usage soared. Your default behaviors can not only be used to teach but to create trust in your product.

Given how folks struggle to get started, I’d recommend instead a more personal, but very short email with a fork:

Self-paced “getting started” course

A demo/one-to-many intro session

This will allow you to understand the effectiveness of each path whilst also pushing users towards our existing knowledge library. Beyond this, I would also recommend a further segmentation that breaks our user base into archetypes. In my last experience, we achieved this by asking (during onboarding) the following questions:

With two short questions, we’d often be able to encapsulate leads into larger “types” which told us what kind of follow-up to offer: either a white-glove, high touch approach or a fully self-service one.

As a final note, I found this section of the onboarding to have very confusing wording and a typo, which is pretty glaring, given it’s one of the very first things users see:

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Building off of what I mentioned above, I don’t believe the “steps to success” in Y are clear. A new customer should be able to understand how they successfully launch their community without investing a lengthy amount of time.

At my current position, we offer 4 products in one and the first 48 hours are crucial to determine the success of a new customer. This is because the product I support is highly technical, requiring some basic HTML/CSS/Javascript knowledge as well as an understanding of behavior and feedback metrics.

Thus, we came up with the following formula: a customer is successful with my last company after they set up their tracking code and observe their first insight. This meant that a customer had to:

Create their account

Add a Javascript snippet to their website

Open a report

Given the importance Z has demonstrated groups have in Y over and over again, it’s a missed opportunity to not outline this as a key point in the user journey. Moreover, it’s not surprising that a lot of users have trouble understanding the order in which they need to configure things, but how these features are configured as well. The email examples I got also illustrate this, and even showcase a pattern of users being either frustrated or confused by how to handle invitations to their community.

With this in mind, I’d start up a gamified path to success within the UI, inspired by this guide . So, as someone signs in, instead of having to check multiple emails to get started or having to reach out to the community or support team, a customer has the option to follow along with each step of the guide, starting from channel creation, configuring groups, payments and inviting users.

In my experience, users that experience high quality support stay longer and are more engaged with the product. And this should start at the app level, not just the Help Center or your preferred support channels.

But don’t trust my word, this 2018 report states that 68% of consumers say they are willing to pay more for products and services from a brand known to offer good customer service experiences.

By focusing on these vectors, we’ll be able to start creating more power users that will serve as ambassadors for Y in the future.