How to be KPI Driven when your main KPI is Satisfaction

AT A GLANCE

• As a SaaS company, satisfaction is key to drive growth
• As a product guy, finding out the most impactful feature based on satisfaction is complicated
• Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a good indicator of satisfaction but is not specific as it measures overall satisfaction; it might include service, price, product, current mood, etc.
• It’s essential to understand the main components of satisfaction and to design a correlation model

This article describes our plan to enhance Doctolib practitioners’ experience. Our CPO Julien is eager to share how much we think that transparency allows a healthy ecosystem which is of utmost importance for us at Doctolib!

SYMPTOMS & DIAGNOSTIC — Deep diving into practitioners’ satisfaction

Practitioners satisfaction is, since day one, one of our core values. Our CEO Stan always keeps his eye on it.

We measure “satisfaction” using the net promoter score (NPS) which is based on the question, “From 0 to 10, how likely would you recommend Doctolib to a friend or colleague?”. NPS has become increasingly important for SaaS companies as more and more potential customers online value their peer’s opinions over any other form of content/ads. You will find a ton of resources on this topic on the Internet.

But NPS is not specific as it measures overall satisfaction. As a consequence, it could include support quality, product feedback, price, or other categories. To deeply understand the components of satisfaction, we added ten specific questions to the NPS survey matching our key values of Doctolib. We defined these components after dozens of surveys, workshops, and data analysis.

With the support of our Data team, we built a correlation matrix model between NPS and its components. As of now, we know what are their impacts on NPS.

As expected, service (1) is the most impactful component of satisfaction to earn NPS points. One bad experience with our service (support, commercial, etc) dramatically impacts NPS which is consistent with the reality !

Note: We have hidden the other satisfaction component titles for confidentiality

Getting into the details, we realized that the mobile application (2) was causing significant dissatisfaction from our customers and the correlation with NPS was strong. We obviously had heard feedback from the field before, however these additional insights were eye-opening! Here is how we felt about it:

• Disappointment (and shame) because we realized how much frustration the mobile app generated. Our app today is exactly similar to the mobile version of the agenda, which is very basic (and, I must confess, unoptimized). We only thought of the mobile app as a shiny add-on to the desktop app. Indeed, every practice needs a computer to manage patient follow-up and billing, so we never invested much time or resources into the mobile version.
• Huge excitement because we now have a strong lever to increase satisfaction! Analysts told us we could earn up to 7 points of NPS by increasing mobile satisfaction (see figures below) !! Best news of the week :-)

ADDITIONAL EXAMS — A dedicated task force to deeply understand needs

We kicked-off the project in early June with our Design and Data teams. We went on many field trips, ran interviews and a couple of focus groups to set our common understanding of the root causes.

At each step, we included engineering managers and software developers in the loop to nurture their knowledge and involve them in the thinking process. When you are a Product person looking to create a robust roadmap, you definitely need alignment and collaboration.

We learned three important things:

• 70% of practitioners log in at least once every week on their mobile device and a large part of them use it as a day to day working tool
• Usage varies between practitioners’ specialties, but showed equal dissatisfaction, from surgeons to physiotherapists through anaesthesiologists in France and in Germany
• Their main complaints relate to performance and usability

TREATMENT PLAN — Start by delivering a high quality basic application

An objective without a plan is no longer an objective, it is a wish. At Doctolib, we have a pragmatic approach, that’s why we will only design a “live roadmap” and won’t list dozens of features. KPIs impact and iteration must be our main driver!

We organized a tech & product workshop off-site in early June to define a plan together. All Doctolib stakeholders were represented. Research and hypothesis have been presented. The attendees had to work in small groups to establish a macro plan. The plans proposed were very similar, people were 100% aligned. That allowed us to establish our key principles for this project.

1. Back to basics: we will start by improving global usability before adding more features (1). Even on core usage (such as connecting to the app, reading your agenda, and creating appointments), we didn’t meet our users expectations. The frustration about the app was global
2. We will provide a different set of features (2) between mobile and desktop. We want to focus on improving actions that are needed and repeatedly done on mobile
3. We must heavily invest in user engagement tools for mobile. As on desktop, users need interactive support. Today, practitioners are trained for 1 hour on desktop but not a minute on mobile.

CONCLUSION

Technical development started 2 months ago. As expected, we noticed an impact on the mobile satisfaction (+5 points) and practitioners enjoy the improvements.

For the NPS, it increased by 3 points. To be honest, we were not expecting such good results :), to be confirmed within upcoming months.

Let’s continue to be KPI driven.