New user engagement
Although we may do a great job getting users to complete our signup flow (see my work in onboarding), we don't always succeed in our goal of creating life-long engaged customers. Customers often don't know what they can do with their account, or came to us with a single purpose and feel they don't have a reason to return. Knowing we could do better, I initiated and facilitated a multi-day workshop around customer engagement. This yielded several ideas that significantly improved our Net New Active KPI and led to a prioritization of this work on our product roadmaps.
Customer engagement workshop
In May 2016 I initiated a workshop with my design team plus Product, Engineering, and customer service agents. We also arrange to bring in customers for interviews and getting feedback on paper prototypes. I started by having the group define success, which we ultimately agreed would be:
- Gain customer empathy around how customers perceive PayPal
- Identify real customer problems that are barriers to engagement
- Define business goals to test and measure
- Come away with 1-2 ideas that we could implement
To inspire the team, I presented 13 ideas for ways to drive customer engagement, an except is shown below.
Prototyping and talking to customers
We split into 3 teams, each of which brainstormed their approach to engagement, creating paper prototypes showing their concepts. To get quick feedback, we had customers interact with the prototypes. This allowed the teams to iterate quickly
A team's prototypes
Interviewing a customer
Customer interacting with a prototype
Successful outcomes
After the workshop, my team finalized designs for 2 of the concepts from the workshop. Our Engineering team built them and they went live as part of a multivariate test. So far, the tests are showing up to 73 bps improvement in the Activation KPI. This translates to ~$50M in annual revenue.
I wanted to call out the excellent results on this project... Iterating with customers under Jonathan's design leadership led to outstanding collaboration and promising results, paving the way for a global effort. (note from Product lead to Product VP)
A tour of the account helped comprehension leading to improved engagement
We improved the design and messaging for the account empty state, using the opportunity to educate and give clear calls to action, leading to improved engagement