Main Street Hub

Implemented client dashboard to keep clients informed on their social media accounts.

Background

Main Street Hub helps local businesses run social media marketing and customer relationship management.

Design Opportunity

Look for an opportunity to better inform businesses of its overall engagements.

Success Metrics

• Lower Churn Rate
• Lift Customer Retention

Timeline

3 months

Kick-Off Meeting

The journey started with a meeting involving a product manager, an engineer, one of the business owners, and myself. I learned that while the business was doing a great job at adopting new customers, there was the problem of not being able to keep them on board as well as we should be. At that time, retention was barely hovering at 80% and we wanted to move that number up. From this high-level discussion, we made sure that we were aligned on the goals, the timeline we were working with, and what was within scope.

Research

To get the ball moving, I interviewed several coworkers from the customer success department since they had the best understanding of user expectations through their collection of feedback. From there I was able to gain valuable insight:

• Customers’ different schedules conflicted with customer success managers’, therefore it was a challenge to find time to communicate
• Phone communication was not always an option or preferred
• Some customers were not tech-savvy, therefore communication appeared as technical jargon

At this point, I identified that the customer success managers and customers were not communicating effectively, and therefore impacting the client retention. 

Brainstorming

I lead several brainstorm sessions in order to get all the ideas noted on a wall. Affinity mapping is usually my go-to. It prevents individuals from steamrolling quiet participants’ ideas. From these meetings, clear ideas emerged and were validated.

Team insights:

• Visual representations are easier to understand than words
• Most of the customers have access to a digital device, in which they can access information anytime

Two main ideas came to fruition that would mitigate that challenge and improve the relationship between the account managers and clients:

• A newsfeed that allowed the customer to constantly view the updated list of interactions that Main Street Hub had with others. 
• A dashboard UI that, somewhat resembles a vehicle’s dashboard, organized and presented all the important stats that the customer valued in an easy-to-read manner.

Wireframing

From brainstorming, I wireframed all the client dashboard ideas. It’s a quick and low-cost approach to forming the ideas into visual form. That way, once we got feedback, it was easy to make changes and updates.

High Fidelity Mockups

Once stakeholders signed off with the wireframes, I jumped straight into Hi-Fi mockups. For design inspiration, I surfed through all of my design resources. I designed 3 concepts ranging from the idea of simple to complex. As expected, the middle level wins.

Interactive Prototypes

After the design was chosen, I took initiative to put my coding hat on to create the HTML/CSS version and proficiently put together markups as an added bonus. Once I was finished with my part, I handed over the goods to one of our engineers to have it modularly implemented to the main system.

Testing and Feedback

A small selection of customers gave the client dashboard a test drive. We incrementally rolled it out to gain further insights.

• Based on data calculations, retention was improved within customers who have the client dashboard implemented. We anticipated the improvement to go up from 80% to 85% but the results yielded an amazing 92%
• More positive feedback from customer service was reported

Conclusion

The client dashboard was finally rolled out to all customers once all testing was completed and met the satisfaction of all Main Street Hub stakeholders. Debrief meetings showed that the feature was a success. As a result, we saw an overall improvement in retention.

As a result, additional strategies came to fruition. One example was to introduce gamification into the mix. While the main goal was to keep retention up, we wanted to make it fun at the same time. This means improving the engagement factor which leads to keeping the customers.