Your customer is hooked. They’re excited about the new product, partnership and solution that will make their lives easier.
How long will that excitement last?
To keep user excitement — and retention — a priority, product leaders must lean on a healthy mix of customer feedback, data and analysis to learn what they’re doing right in both the product and customer lifecycle, and what they can build to further empower their users.
If they don’t, customers could opt to take their business to a competitor. Reducing customer attrition is an important factor in a company’s longevity and reputation.
Minimizing churn and keeping users engaged looks different at every company, but in talking to two local product leaders, Built In Boston found some commonalities in how teams can up the value of their tools and keep customers on board for the long run.
A bit of background: ProfitWell builds revenue operations products for subscription-based companies. Since 2012, the Boston-based startup’s software has helped customers with reporting, analytics, optimization and churn reduction. While ProfitWell may be small in size — there are about 50 employees at the company — don’t let that fool you. According to the company, it holds the largest amount of subscription data you’ll find.
What tools or technologies are you using to capture and analyze user behavior data?
At ProfitWell, we use a variety of tools to capture and analyze our user behavior data. Some of our favorites include Mixpanel and LogRocket since they offer a lot of functionality and are easy to use. LogRocket is really good for replaying individual user sessions inside of our web app to see how users interact with various elements and how we might be able to improve our UX.
In particular, these tools surface up interactions like “rage clicks” or “dead clicks” that users experience that might lead to frustration. It also ties nicely into our error logging platform that houses bug reports and our customer support chat tool.
MixPanel is great for aggregate-level data analysis. It helps us understand overall product usage, which features are being used more than others, and segment that information into cohorts, user types and more.
What specific behavior are you looking out for?
We track a lot of behaviors throughout the entire customer lifecycle, from the moment the customer is acquired to if and when they churn.
We look for certain triggers early in the customer lifestyle, specifically during onboarding, that we know will lead to higher retention. For example, setting up ProfitWell’s Slack integration, downloading our mobile app or installing our optional JavaScript that unlocks additional features. We know these behaviors typically lead to power users who develop a higher overall affinity for our product.
We track these key metrics in a central dashboard and then assign product managers various metrics to optimize over the course of the quarter alongside their OKRs. Over time, we’ve developed various nudges and call to actions (CTAs) throughout the product experience to get more users to take advantage of these features.
The single most impactful initiative to drive overall user retention was to overhaul our onboarding process.”
Beyond user behavior analysis, what’s the most effective method you’ve used for improving user retention?
The single most impactful initiative to drive overall user retention was to overhaul our onboarding process.
We experimented with multiple email drips, in-app tutorials and human-assisted touches for high profile users. We’ve found that putting a specific emphasis on educating the user on how to use the product and how we might be able to help them made a meaningful difference in helping them find value in the app.
To measure our results, we do a lot of cohort analysis to look at how retention is getting better or worse over time, and develop interventions at specific moments in the customer journey where they become high risk.
A bit of background: The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston is a part of the nation’s central bank. As such, it has a number of priorities, like putting policies into place, overseeing other banks and promoting financial success in local communities. Engineers should take note of the work the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston is doing to zap cybersecurity risks and keep payment systems on the cutting edge both regionally and nationally.
What tools or technologies are you using to capture and analyze user behavior data? Why did you decide to use these tools over the other options on the market?
The FedNow Service — whose target release date remains 2023 or 2024 — will offer instant payment services to financial institutions of all sizes and in every community across the United States. Potential FedNow participants not only vary in size but in their existing product offerings, their business needs and where they are in their instant payments journey.
To better support the needs of financial institutions as they consider adding the FedNow Service to their payments roadmap, the Federal Reserve conducted an industry listening tour in the fall of 2019 to interview banks, credit unions, service providers and other industry providers to understand the unique needs of different industry participants and to obtain feedback on the FedNow features and functionality to inform the FedNow product roadmap. The team leveraged traditional customer relationship management (CRM) tracking tools to document insights, which were then leveraged to define the different user personas and inform key implementation considerations for the FedNow Service.
In addition to the industry listening tour, the Federal Reserve continues to conduct market research through customer surveys, focus groups and industry webinars, and roundtables to ensure that its understanding of industry needs remains current and that the industry can continue to provide feedback on features and functionality as we get closer to the launch of FedNow Service.
What specific behavior are you looking out for?
Nationwide reach is the ultimate goal for instant payments. To ensure the service is broadly accessible, the Federal Reserve is working to ensure that the FedNow Service takes into account the unique needs of different market segments and is compatible with other instant payment solutions to minimize the potential burden for financial institutions that may participate in more than one instant payments network.
For example, the Federal Reserve is gaining feedback on product features and functionality, and is seeking to minimize any unnecessary differences to ensure messages contain the information necessary to support financial institution processes and that end-to-end processing is seamless. The Federal Reserve will continue to work with the industry to understand the industry’s evolving needs and new trends in payments.
The Federal Reserve is working to ensure that the FedNow Service takes into account the unique needs of different market segments.”
Beyond user behavior analysis, what’s the most effective method you've used for improving user retention?
To encourage adoption, the Federal Reserve is committed to engaging a robust ecosystem of industry stakeholders that will work alongside the Federal Reserve throughout the development of the service to ensure the instant payments ecosystem can support the FedNow Service and provide an enhanced customer experience for financial institutions and end users.
The Federal Reserve launched the FedNow Community to provide transparency into service development to ensure that interested participants can help to shape the development and implementation of the FedNow Service.
Similarly, the FedNow pilot program will provide opportunities for the industry to engage in advisory, testing and operational activities to support the service’s development, testing and adoption objectives. While the FedNow Service is use case agnostic by design, the FedNow team is collaborating with a broad set of industry participants to ensure the ecosystem can support the use cases that are anticipated to have the greatest market demand at initial launch and that the Service can be a springboard for payments innovation by enabling new ideas and services.
