During 2018, we encountered a higher-than-expected number of churning and unsatisfied customers. International Customer Service Director at Visma, Edgars Dzenuška, explains:
“New sales were lagging and customers were switching to competitors’ products. It looked like our pricing model was not competitive enough, and we needed to understand which features our existing and potential customers are willing to pay for and appreciate the most.”
Let’s look at how we implemented a customer-driven business model into one specific system–and were awarded the Customer Excellence price from Confirmit’s ACE 2020 Awards.
Read more: Organising for successful software development.
Improving the customer experience in EasyCruit
As part of our customer-driven approach, we wanted to improve the customer experience for those using our recruitment software, EasyCruit.
We started by appointing a Customer Success Manager (CSM) in each country with the mission to increase customer satisfaction and to make our customers more successful.
In collaboration with the Key Account Manager, the CSM helps our customers benefit from the full potential of the solution so that they can be as effective as possible in their daily work. CSMs are also the voice of the customer and bring their requests for change to the development team.
However, to find out exactly what did not work well in EasyCruit and understand how to turn this around, relevant stakeholders mapped the entire customer journey of an EasyCruit customer, to identify potential pain points and areas for improvement.
Edgars Dzenuška explains:
“Based on the findings from the customer journey mapping, we came up with a plan to set up a process on how to gather, structure and organise customer feedback in ways that provide insights to take actions on for the Customer Success Manager and Product & Development. Some of the insights and feedback needed to be channelled to other stakeholders in the customer value chain to ensure that the right owners could take the right actions.”
Also read: Tailoring the customer journey to new online behaviours.
Different methods for gathering customer feedback
Product NPS (Net Promoter Score) has been implemented inside the system to receive feedback from end-users. This feedback is then shared internally to make sure it reaches the right person in Visma. The support team closely monitors support cases and feedback from support satisfaction surveys (Transaction NPS) to identify both customer delights and pain points.
At the same time, the CSMs collect what they have heard from the customers in a structured way and can either request a software update from the development team or raise the priority of specific product incidents based on customer feedback they have gotten.
“Once a month, we have a Voice of the Customer meeting where relevant stakeholders share their insight about customer experience over the last month. After discussing the feedback, the participants agree on specific actions and assign them to the right owners. The actions are then closely monitored to ensure they are closed in the agreed timelines,” says Dzenuška.
CSM in Sweden, Sophie Cronberg adds:
“I would say that Voice of the Customer is a very important forum because this is an excellent opportunity to share information from customers and discuss possibilities to enable customer success and development that is needed to make our customers more efficient and happy about our solutions.”
To inform the customers about new features and how to use EasyCruit more effectively, the team has started broadcasting regular video meetings named “Coffee Club”, where two experts in the product team share news about the product, discuss best practices and test new features.
“Another activity we have started with to be able to gain even more insight is an Exit survey. The Exit survey is a form that the CSMs use during their last call or meeting with the customers to try and get a better understanding of the reasons why they are leaving us and what we could have done better,” Dzenuška concludes.
