True Local — Insights Report
Integrating performance data into customer insights report
In 2016, I got my first gig as a UX/UI designer at True Local, an online directory of Australian businesses where members leave reviews for businesses. We were competing against companies like HiPages, Yelp, Product Review, and Google Review.
My role
User Research
UX Design
Prototyping
UI Design
Problem statement
True Local was losing its market share because of the rise of Google and many other review platforms. It needed new products and features to revitalise its business. One of the goals given to the design team was to reduce the customer churn rate.
Research
We started out by sending surveys to our existing customers to find their pain points, and we also talked to the Customer Service Team for insights.
The findings were clear — the majority of our customers were not convinced that True Local was helping them grow their business. There were no performance data readily available on our platform, so customers had to do their own research. Alarmingly, a majority of customers surveyed were unhappy and would quit once their initial contract expires.
Design process
I worked closely with the Head of UX and the rest of the stakeholders. After we designed the AI and wireframes together, I took over the project and developed prototypes and planned for user-testing.
User-testing
Since the majority of our business customers are located in Sydney, we decided to conduct in-house user-testing. We invited 10 existing long-standing customers from our top-performing categories.
User-testing was conducted with InVision. These sessions occurred over 2 weeks, as we had to be flexible with our customers’ hectic business schedules.
Key focus area
- What data is important to customers on their True Local business page?
- What would customers do if performance is not what they expected?
- What do they want True Local to do to help improve their performance?
- Do they use other channels or platforms to grow their business? If so, how do they measure ROI?
- How often would customers access their insight report?
- Prototype feedback.
Core customer needs
- Show me the numbers
Page views and Leads are the most important data to the customers. They want to know so they can determine their True Local ROI and compare it with other advertising channels used. - Notify me only if there’s a new review
One of the most prominent features of True Local is its review platform. However, customers don’t focus much on the number of reviews. They only want to be notified when there’s a new review so they can respond accordingly. - Access on-the-go
The majority of our customers are small business owners and they all have hectic schedules. It’s important to be able to see the page performance highlights on their mobile, but not necessarily all the details. - Dumb it down
Copywriting and labeling are very important to our customers. Our customers come from different educational backgrounds and industries. They’re not Marketing experts, so copywriting needs to be clear and in layman terms. - Tell me what to do
Many customers want to utilise True Local’s business page to grow their businesses, but many of them are lacking Marketing or Computing skills. They want True Local to advise them on what to do.
After our customer interviews and user-testings, we synthesized our findings and presented the insights and iterated design to the stakeholders.
Challenges
Funnily enough, although we’ve received great feedback from the user testings, there was a major concern from our management team. When they plugged in real customer data into the beta version, they discovered many customers have negative results in their Insight Report, and they were concerned that this new platform may result in many more churns.
We troubleshot this by ideating with the Marketing team. We came up with a series of automated emails that had advice and tutorials to help our customers improve their page performance and get them back on track. The Customer Service Team also came up with guidelines to help distressed customers who may call in because of their negative performance.
Results
Phase 1 of the Insight Report was successfully launched. We saw an influx of customers calling in enquiring about their plan and ways to improve their performance. So, looking back we couldn’t achieve our original design goal of minimising customer churn rate in the short term. But the design was user-centric and it gave our customers an answer to whether True Local was right for them.
