A Targeted CX
The Problem
As Digimarc transitioned from an IP licensing company to a product company, the engineering and product teams had a tendency to bolt new features and experimental ideas onto existing products and infrastructure. In a practical sense this meant we had a quick proof of concept, but often this left a lot to be desired when it came to actual implementation within customer's existing and well established workflows.
Our original service portal rolled up several different services, but was oddly cherry picked to include some and exclude others for unintuitive reasons. When you clicked the CTA to "create new" the system erroneously made a lot of assumptions that you'd know the differences between some very similar options. Customer services were organized to suit magazines, folders meant to represent "May issue" vs "June Issue" - a system that did not suit Digimarc's new focus on consumer packaged goods companies.
The Fix
As the company became more focused on customers in the consumer packaged goods space, and started to deprioritize work in longer standing (but declining) markets, I worked with our product, engineering, and IT teams to establish a more narrowly focused workflow for our important target customers.
In the new area of focus, we wanted very tight controls on who had access, whereas in the old area of focus, we had previously wanted open customer walkup sign ups. This led to a really sticky experience where our most important customers were able to sign up easily for free... but for the wrong product - a proposition which led to a lot of duplicate accounts and folks using the wrong products for the intended use cases.
Working together we created a new site with a new workflow specifically designed for our most important targets, where users were invited to accounts with a "white glove" experience, and walked through features and functionality by customer success folks, rather than expecting these high value users to just figure it out on their own. While in the site, we made it easier to find critical related tools, and no longer forced users to navigate around other product types when only one was relevant to this user base.
We split the most important service off by creating a packaging specific site. We revamped the mechanism for sorting customer data away from "project folders" and allowed users to organize their products by tags. Previously, folders allowed customers to only associate one term with a product. But adding tagging allowed users to organize and sort by many more terms, which was much more in line with organizing consumer packaged good product lists than the folders that were intended to sort monthly publications. Clicking "Create" launched the user into creating a packaging code, and did not distract the user with other code types that were similar in function, but very costly when chosen by mistake.
We also identified that there were really two personas using this particular service, rather than a single one. Through research we learned that each persona used a different part of the system, with little to no overlap. For example, a feature that allowed image uploads for watermarking was removed since system admins that managed product data never interacted directly with artwork. Watermarking functions were performed separately by a prepress persona in an adobe illustrator extension, which enabled us to put our resources into improving that process instead of trying to create two workflows to achieve the same goal, when only one of those processes fit into existing customer workflows.
The Broader Picture
Separating our products into workflows that focused on their individual target audiences allowed us to focus our resources on the user base of our choosing, rather than having to put resources into making sure that changes to one product didn't impact the others. When we had our site set up to "serve everyone" - in the markets we were engaged in, this made production times too slow, so we weren't actually serving anyone very well.
We also began treating our customers in a way that is more in line with expectations for enterprise software. White glove onboarding is the norm in that space, not the walk up and create your own account experience more common with consumer facing software for individuals that we had previously been allowing.