Product Strategy & UX
Reducing operational friction for enterprise customers and unblocking upsell bottleneck
Initially stated problem
High churn rate of financial advisors
Initial hypothesis
We will reduce advisor churn if we simplify lead management and add value beyond lead generation
Initial request from the business
Deliver the following features: kanban view, reminders, enquiry notes, calendar integration
No doubt, these are all great features. Though we needed to see the bigger picture and understand the impact of these features on the business and the users.
We needed to ensure that we’re tackling the right problem.
So we outlined the plan:
Estimate potential reach and impact across user segments
Large advisory firms were identified as the primary target audience for the initiative.
Validate assumptions through interviews with advisers
Clarified product usage patterns and uncovered pain points specific to the segment.
Decide whether to move forward or pivot
Decision to pivot to support the most critical jobs for large advisory firms.
Next steps
We had two most critical jobs of our largest customers which we needed to support
Job #1
When managing new client leads from Unbiased, advisers want to seamlessly transfer them into their CRM so they can keep their workflow in one place.
Job #2
Clarified product usage patterns and uncovered pain points specific to the segment.
Job #1
Transferring leads to CRM
We identified which CRM systems our advisers used at the time and after evaluating feasibility with the dev team picked the solutions that helped to universally connect Unbiased dashboard with almost any CRM – Zapier, Webhooks and polling API.
Upsell opportunity
Even though this feature was targeted at our largest customers it actually opened up a great upsell opportunity. We started to offer it as an add-on for lower tier clients.
The results
4%
Increase of MRR within 6 months
3%
Of lower tier subscription upgraded
Happy customers who reported that they no longer needed to import CSVs manually and freed up resources for more valuable tasks
Job #2
Managing multiple locations
That's where we stumbled. On the surface bulk profile editing looked like the most obvious solution. And we designed it. Just because it was so obvious. Obvious ≠ right.
Two mistakes we made at this stage:
Mistake #1
We didn't involve the dev team early in the process thus completely missing technical limitations and constraints that the architecture imposed.
Mistake #2
We didn't spend enough time in problem space and based our decisions on a limited picture of the current technical implementation and false assumptions.
We made a step back...
...and started from visualisation exercise to get a holistic picture of what we’re dealing with.
With this new knowledge and together with the team we were ready to re-evaluate our options.
The solution is not something particularly exciting from visual design point of view. But what is more important...
The solution was feasible, it created value for the users and drove impact for the business.
The results
4%
Increase of MRR within 6 months
3%
Of lower tier subscription upgraded
This initiative was a significant enabler for future projects, making it easier for the sales team to sell additional locations.
Thanks for watching!