Listening to Customers Systemically
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Context
In 2021, symplr had made several acquisitions that didn’t work out as planned. Most Product Owners, Product Managers, and Engineers from acquired companies moved to other opportunities—dissatisfied with leadership systems. Instead of providing opportunities to cross-sell customers were leaving, threatening revenue needed to create an integrated operations platform.
Problem
High customer attrition could be traced back to a perception that symplr simply “wasn’t listening” to acquired customers. From my role as a Senior Product Manager of five workforce solutions, there was an opportunity to both improve our product life cycle and codify listening into our product life cycle. I would need to work with Aha!, the product management software. Our Leaders had chosen to use Aha! across the company but were having trouble rolling out to all symplr product teams due to the solution’s limitations and lack of training.
Key Actions:
Worked with Aha! representatives to understand system capabilities and limitations
Collaborated with Product Managers across divisions to standardize a customer listening framework
Led implementation for the highest-revenue Workforce solutions, including customer communication standards
Formalized the toolset into a workflow for Product Leads and Managers
Presented and supported implementation of workflows across symplr Product Divisions
Results
Workforce Management Solutions:
For the 5 Solutions I managed and influenced, customers and internal teams loved the new workflow, generating 300+ documented improvement ideas in the first quarter alone. We refined our Product Lifecycle communication to report on voting and requests, resulting in 99% customer retention. In return I got more leverage with the Support, Customer Success, and Sales teams who wanted to partner in order to achieve their KPIs.
Organization-Wide:
The Ideas Portal is now embedded across symplr’s Product Life Cycle. This standardized listening workflow contributed to increased organization-wide customer retention. (See the example image of our Ideas Portal with early-stage communication.)
Skills Highlight:
Cross-functional team leadership
Stakeholder engagement and communication
Strategic planning and Roadmapping
Example: the ideas portal is still in use today. Here is a redacted example of an idea and the use of a templated response by the product team.
If you’d like more detail on this methodology or you would like some help as work to craft systemic listening into your roadmap - reach out to me via the Contact page.
