TL;DR
Increased engagement KPI by 300% MoM by streamlining the process of finding and engaging customers on social media.
Role
The HYP3R platform empowers businesses with physical locations, such as theme parks, hotels, stadiums, restaurants, and malls, to view and engage customers sharing from their locations on social media. The primary engagement KPI of HYP3R is the number of visitors engaged per account.
In early 2018, we experienced a growth spurt fueled by a sales effort to expand the contract size of existing customers. Compared with our existing user base, the new batch of users had lower engagement.
I was tasked with investigating the root cause and developing a solution to increase adoption.
I interviewed users with lower engagement and compared their behavior data with users with high engagement to better understand their unique needs and pain points. A few insights emerged from this work:
Users struggle to adopt our product because they lack the time and know-how to find and engage customers on social media. Our user experience's ergonomics compounds this friction by making finding "valuable" customers unnecessarily time-consuming.
If we didn't address this problem, customers would likely churn when their contract is due to renew.
How may we empower users to find and engage customers efficiently?
The primary goal for the project will be to address the needs of these particular:
Once we clearly articulated the problem, I conducted a design sprint to brainstorm solutions with stakeholders from the customer success, product, and engineering teams.
Several "low-hanging" solutions were suggested, including more powerful filters to help streamline finding customers to engage. However, users already use them as workarounds with little success.
Ultimately, we believed the "infinite-scrolling" feed interface was not the optimal experience because it provided zero guidance to find customers and take action. We decided to develop a new surface to streamline the finding and engagement .
As a result of the design sprint, we agreed upon the following solution principles:
First I explored two UX concepts that streamlined the experience and dynamically surface the "most valuable visitors and their relevant information. To validate the approach, I conducted concept testing sessions with 12 users using clickable prototypes.
Overall, concept A resonated the most with users with a 100% of participants completing task without assistance and 10/12 participants selecting it as their preferred option when prompted.
In collaboration with our lead data scientist, we designed an algorithm to identify valuable visitors based on data points such as influence and loyalty.
We released a beta version to 10% of the user base to validate the effectiveness of new user experience. The new user experience generated over 350% more engaged visitors when compared to the old experience.
After the beta period, I interviewed beta users to identify aspects to improve. As a result, we designed and built the following improvements:
We streamlined the workflow even more by enabling users to skip or engage visitors with 1-click using pre-made templates and keyboard shortcuts.
We enabled users to create rules to tailor their queue to their unique priorities or goals to provide more control over experience . e.g. visitors with large followings, verified profiles, visitors posting about special moments, such as birthdays 🥳
We expanded the visitor information available to include data points, such as activity across owned and competitive locations, to help users make a more informed decision.
The feature was designed, built and launched in less than 2 months. As a result, we:
In addition, multiple higher level KPIs improved as a result of the feature: