At LTP, Hugh McLachlan reminded us of a valuable product lesson – that Product is not there to serve its own goals but is there to make sure the customer is the driving factor for delivery.
Diane Sexton, a long time fan of Leading the Product and Product Manager at Lorica Health, shares how she worked with a previous team on how to get the focus back on the customer.
A few years back I joined a company that was part way through a digital transformation. All, product attention was focused on what we could deliver to our customers through “The App”.
I attended a meeting, early in my employment, where a Product Lead explained to me the journey to the app, with milestones and measures and all the cool roadmappy stuff you could want. When I asked: “but why would a customer want to use The App? What is the need that we are meeting?” they actually said “Because it’s The App!” And when pressed, it seemed that the only reason given for driving customers to use The App was so that they would be using The App!
Look at the complete customer journey to find the most painful problem
Thankfully, the team that I joined had been started by the Head of Product had a broader view. I had been hired into a team with only one goal – “find out what it is that is most painful for our customers and fix it.” This instilled an amazing sense of freedom and power. It felt like our team was empowered to look outside The Matrix and to change the way the world worked for customers. And we didn’t need to start, or end, with The App.
So where exactly were we going to start? We all know the adage that you don’t ask customers what they want, because you may end up with a faster horse instead of a car, or Amazon Prime (or something like that). Luckily, the company had an extensive Customer Service (CS) team with documentation and logs, and they were willing to let us know more about the whole customer experience -, from initial contact with sales, through sign up, onboarding and right through the service life until customer drop-off.
The exercise was an eye opener. We mapped it out around the four walls of our biggest meeting room, with dates, times, customer verbatim feedback and photos of each screen or step on the way. When we took each department through the journey, it was clear that this was the first time anyone in the company had done this. Instead of a spotlight with a single focus, we had floodlights illuminating all the corners of the field.
Problem – onboarding. Solution – ??
Once done, it became blindingly obvious that the biggest pain for our customers was nothing to do with the product, and nothing in The App, but instead was in the post-sales onboarding path. Customers were getting frustrated and angry. They were getting lost. They were being forgotten. Customers were leaving the onboarding flow to go to our competitors even though the sales team had “won” them.
We had to discover the reasons why customers were dropping out, and work out which of those we could address, with limited to no engineering budget. In the end, we settled on building out four onboarding flows for the main “easy” customers to onboard, with a path to deliver them one after the other and gather customer feedback after each delivery.
Building stakeholder support
We had backing from the Head of Product but we did face headwinds inside the company. Other product teams saw us as unaligned, not helping them deliver on their goals. By not focusing on either existing customers, or The App, we were a distraction to their own roadmaps. We had a lot of work to do. Success came through relationships. We built really strong relationships outside of Product – in Customer Service, in Risk and Compliance, and in post-sales Account Management. These teams were the most impacted by the customer dissatisfaction and they had traditionally been the least heard by Product. If you think of them in a RACI model, they were only ever Informed of change, never Consulted.
We walked through the proposed onboarding flows with our CS, Risk and Account Management colleagues to get their input, and make sure we were solving real pain. Then, rollout required us to train the Sales Team to take on greater responsibility. A key factor was to make sure they took ownership of the customer further than they had before – which did require some change management and adjusting performance measures. Our Product Team became cheerleaders, celebrating the Sales Team’s adaptation to the new process and raising the profile of customer onboarding across the company.
Measuring success
When we had built the onboarding flows we could then measure how well we solved our customers’ problems. We had already set out our measures for success, all around customer onboarding, and pleasingly they all went in the right direction. Customer onboarding completion went up, while time to onboard went down. Customer satisfaction with onboarding also went up – as we even managed to re-onboard past customers and ask them for their feedback comparing the two journeys!
As well as these specific measures, we also put in place new ways of working which set the company up better for future success. We built a lot of long- lasting relationships and networks in the company, all focused on knowing how to better serve the customer. People had never thought of CS, Risk and Product working together before, but once we did it, it seemed obvious. And that is my personal definition of a successful transition – we formed a new, beautiful interconnected pattern, with the customer at the centre.
Want to improve your company’s chances of Transformation success by learning how others transformed their companies and teams using Product-Led techniques? The evidence shows that Product-Led organisations yield better financial results.
LTP DIGITAL 2022 USA is a one-day conference on March 9, 2022 that is all about how to become one of those organisations.