The Yarno Customer Team has been working on an overhaul of our customer onboarding experience over the past few months. It became apparent that there's a bunch of knowledge sharing and best practice guidance that goes on outside the platform that is crucial in setting our customers up for success with Yarno.
Currently, we run a range of different onboarding touchpoints, content strategising, change management and project planning to get the customer ready to roll Yarno out. We decided we want to collect this secret know-how and reformulate it in a format that's accessible to more people than can be involved in meetings. The hope was that this would give our customers with the bandwith to take Yarno and run with it, all the resources and support they need to do so. Essentially, collating our collective know how and learning from Yarno rollouts and getting the most out of Yarno, into a place that's accessible and useful! Enter, the the Customer Empowerment site concept.
Developing the concept
As we ventured down this path, it became clear that we were hoping to include a LOT in this "minisite". And one thing we really wanted to avoid was repackaging online knowledge bases and documentation we already have. Or allowing the site to become a dumping ground of information that's doesn't have purpose or logical flow.
Then UX whiz Erika Stowe, came along, our saviour! Erika has extensive experience designing website user experience and visual design. She jumped on board and applied the methodology we'd been missing.
We took it back to first principles and sifted through our customer lifecycle journey with a fine tooth comb. Queue super satisfying digital collaboration board:
This is a visualisation of the inside of four Yarno-ers brains evaluating each phase of the customer lifecycle based on our experience so far. To start we considered the different user types we were dealing with here and then split out the phases of a standard customer onboarding from "Being told about Yarno" all the way through to "Ongoing use of Yarno".
At each stage, we shifted our perspective to consider what the customer is doing, thinking feeling and any pain points they might be experiencing, as well as any opportunities we saw to improve the experience.
From here, we were able to identify potential issues with the platform usability that could be remedied in Yarno. This allowed us to start crystallising how we can evolve the Yarno platform to faciliate smoother onboarding. This also led to the realisation that a great deal of what we were trying to communicate in the Empowerment Site could be ticked off by evolving our platform. No point spelling out how to use a tool when we could just make it so simple to use that it needs no explanation.
So the project split in two directions.
So up until this point we had a lot of assumptions about usability sticking points from conversations with our customers. But we needed to test these out, which we did with some customer walkthroughs!
UX walkthroughs with customers
This phase of the project was all about gathering as much customer intel as possible. The objectives of this process were to:
As Yarno experts, we are aware that we bring bias to our feedback around the platform. But we want to build something that makes sense for our customers. So we began reaching out to customers from a range of industries and with varying degrees of familiarity with Yarno. We also brought in some friends and family with no Yarno familiarity to see how they would respond.
We needed to ensure a consistent approach to user testing. So we looked at the typical admin user type and considered all of the workflows and reporting that they may access in the Yarno admin side. From here, we developed two standardised scripts that asked customers to take us through account set up or interpret the dashboards.
Customers generously offered us their time to walkthrough the platform and provide us with their insights and feedback. We set up dummy accounts to replicate the experience of a user initiating their journey with Yarno. Our customer tributes shared their screens, accepted their invites and then talked us through what they were doing and why. Erika and I tagged teamed on each walkthrough with fastidious note taking and by digging into assumptions raised by customers.
We then tabulated and documented all of the feedback garnered from the walk throughs. Insights into pain points flowed from there and we considered the solutions. We then ranked the solutions in terms of difficulty to implement and impact if implemented. This has allowed us to prioritise when the product team should invest in the improvements.
The empowerment siteWith the recommendations for a well oiled Yarno machine synthesised, the know how we wanted to provide our customers outside of the platform came into focus.
The Customer Empowerment site will include:
- An Introduction to Yarno: what on earth is it, how does it work, what am I getting out of this?
- A dive into the Yarno learning philosophy, principles and benefits.
- The process steps involved in getting up and running including account setup: some best practice for communicating Yarno, and how to write awesome content.
- A success toolkit: all the resources and know-how to support an awesome journey with Yarno!
Delighting the customer is at the centre of everything we do at Yarno, as one of our core values. This project has informed and will continue to inform our commitment to improving the customer experience in and out of Yarno.
Keep an eye out for our Customer Empowerment Site, coming 2021!
