Completing the Customer Feedback Loop

Vanessa Pfafflin

Hi! I’m Vanessa, a User Researcher here at Yammer. Many people have never heard of User Research, so allow me to explain what I do. User Researchers are in charge of gathering insights around the people who use our product, to help inform product and design decisions. Simply put: We ask a lot of questions. It may sound elementary, but it actually takes some practice to learn to ask the good (and often, many) questions that can get us to the meat of the problem. So, when our customers reach out with new feature requests, our job is to dig into the request to get to the root of the real problem they want solved.

Admittedly, up until now we’ve been lacking a good process for new feature requests. In the past, most feature requests were posted to the Yammer Customer Network (aka The YCN), an external Yammer network we run. The person requesting would usually receive a response from a very busy someone at Yammer who would give them a reason why we couldn’t build the feature they were requesting, and there the thread would end. This was no good: The customer didn’t get a good understanding of why their feature idea was rejected, and the product and engineering teams at Yammer never heard the request! We recently recognized this missed opportunity, so we’ve been building a new process for engaging with feature requests.

The first step was to try to help customers to think about their feature idea in the same way that a product manager would consider a new feature. We started by creating a form designed to help the customer articulate the problem, which looks like this:

Problem:
What is the problem trying to solve? What are you experiencing?

Hypothesis/Expected Outcome (for majority):
How will your solution make the majority of Yammer users more productive?
What are your expected outcomes (e.g. increased engagement, simplified user experience, faster response time)?

Proposed Solution:
How would you solve this issue?

Impact:
How would your solution affect ALL Yammer networks?

Using this form, customers can now submit features into a group on the YCN called Yammer Product Proposals. Then, once a month, we will gather a cross-functional committee to go through the requests. Last month’s committee included a product manager, a designer, a user researcher, an analyst, a copywriter, and three customer success managers. The group went through each proposal, one at a time, and discussed each aloud. In many of the proposals, we discovered that the real problem ran much deeper than the solution proposed!

One of the requests was for an admin tool that could be used to bulk delete inactive groups. This customer noticed that the many inactive groups in his network were creating clutter. Cleaning up the inactive groups was very time consuming because it required him to click into each group and then click again to delete it. After discussing his request as a team, we were able to gather information from research and analytics from some previous projects where we had looked into group creation. We discovered that 70% of groups created during a user’s first week on their Yammer network go inactive. We hypothesized that this is because we ask people to create a group during signup, which is before they have a good understanding of Yammer. Groups that are created after the first week have a much higher success rate! So the solution, rather than the ability to bulk delete groups, would actually focus on preventing duplicate and unnecessary groups from being created in the first place.

The discussions around the other fifteen or so requests went similarly. We uncovered the varied pain points our customers were experiencing, and determined the best solutions to each. Once we had finished discussing as a group, we posted replies to each request. We are excited to continue these conversations into the future. The committee participants will be rotated to enable people from the product, design, and engineering teams at Yammer to gain more perspective into our customers’ challenges.

Do you have an idea for how to make Yammer better for everyone? Then please submit it on the YCN in the Yammer Product Proposals group.

Vanessa Pfafflin is a User Researcher at Yammer. Her many talents include squeaking like a cat, screaming like a goat, headbanging, and riding a Harley.