CONNECTING USER & BUSINESS NEEDS

OVERVIEW

Social Media Management

Sprout helps businesses manage, engage, and analyze their social media presence across various platforms. Some tools offered include:

Engagement*
Team collaboration*
Publishing
Advocacy
Social listening
Analytics & Reporting

Integrations
Influencer Marketing

* The offerings I oversaw

30K+
Customers

Sprout's platform serves a diverse range of industries, including retail, technology, healthcare, entertainment, and finance, across small, mid-sized, and enterprise sectors. Notable customers include:

Care
Product Strategy

Product
Expansion

Additional care, analytics, and salesforce integration features.

Enterprise
Focus

Tailored solutions for larger organizations. (i.e. Custom Salesforce Integrations)

Customer Experience

Improved onboarding for platform integrations and new features.

AI &
Automation

Integrated AI for task automation and content optimization.

ACTION

SITUATION

Because of misaligned needs, Sprout developed a bloated and overly complex section of the app that missed the mark on meeting users' core needs. Resulting in a number of lost deals in the sales process and existing customer turnover.

To Do:

Identify origin of misalignment across 6 product teams in the business unit.
Review and refine team processes and alignment.
Assess the need for a new short and long-term strategy.

EXISTING Inbox

NEW Cases Area

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What changed?

Case management features were built separately instead of integrating with the existing space, causing redundant development and a poor customer experience. Limited customer insights and industry standards led to dissatisfaction and the loss of major clients.

End Result

Customer Turnover

Features missed the mark for some high profile customers which led to them turning over.

When product teams fail to solve real problems, it not only frustrates users but can drive them to competitors.

How did we get here?

I joined shortly after some of the features were released and partnered with my product and engineering leaders to uncover emerging pitfalls.

After some initial light research, I identified four key problems:

Misaligned Problems

Lack of user insights led to assumption-based decisions, solving symptoms instead of root causes.

No Empathy in Solutions

Unintuitive and clunky solutions were intorduced that missed the mark on user expectations.

Stalled Innovation

Relying on industry standards over innovation led to short-sighted solutions that missed future needs.

Mismatched Skillsets

Dominant voices led to frustration, confusion, and strained team dynamics, disrupting workflow.

ALIGNMENT

I partnered with my Staff designer and Design Manager to dive deeper into these problems. In this process we took the opportunity to not only outline findings but also educate the teams on a typical design process.

The design team dedicated to this effort:

The design process we followed:

DISCOVERY

Goal

Revisit where we started, clarify the reasoning behind the changes, and gather insights from everyone to help shape our next steps.

Approach

To gain a clear understanding of the situation:

We interviewed the design team, product managers, enigeering managers and principal engineers.
We ran a design workshop to go deeper on my initial findings.
We mapped out the initial assumptions that guided the changes and shared our findings with leadership, product teams, and design peers.

Feedback

We asked for everyone to provide their feedback on what we outlined.

What surprised them?
What was still missing?
What do they wish we could have done differently?

Insights from Workshop

Beyond validating what I initially discovered, we surfaced a few additional insights:

Miscommunication to Customers
- Product teams (PM, PD, Engineering) and our partners (Customer Service Managers, Service Engineers, Product Marketing) had different views on what problems each feature would solve. This caused confusion on how to promote and teach users, leading to mixed messages for customers about setting up and using the new workflow.

Different Interpretation of How Customers Work
- Even though we all aimed to address social inquiries, our customers' different cultures, team structures, sizes, and processes made it hard for Sprout to understand their Care needs.

ALIGN ON THE PROBLEM

A lack of understanding of our engagement users' needs, goals, and team structures made it challenging to design effective features, hindered sales efforts, and complicated setup and usage for customers.

After presenting these findings to leadership, we received support to pause certain roadmap items and focus on better understanding our customers' needs. I created a high-level "Solution Brief" to outline a strategy for gathering deeper customer insights and aligning on the core problem to solve.

Primary objective

Clarify how or if customers should use Inbox and Cases together.

Secondary objective

Realign teams to build complementary skills and create growth opportunities for contributors.

ALIGN ON THE SOLUTION

In collaboration with my staff designer and triad leaders we created a comprehensive generative research plan. We leveraged our tools (Mixpanel, Fullstory, and User Interviews) to uncover key issues that we presented to the triad teams to gain alignment.

Data Tells a Story

Customer interviews, internal data and feedback from product teams helped align our insights, dispelling myths about our users and addressing lingering questions.

Many customers use Cases as a standalone product, bypassing the Smart Inbox.
A significant number of cases created are non-actionable, leading to inefficiencies.
Care teams often do not have separate roles for triage and response as initially assumed.
Customers face challenges with context switching between workspaces and unclear guidance.
Short-term goals include resolving UX gaps, creating workflow guides, and updating product positioning.

Streamlined Workflows

By developing high-level prototypes of several new workflows, we were able to merge features from the Inbox and Cases experiences to streamline the overall process.

Updated Arhetypes and Personas

We focused on revising our previous understanding of the customer care team archetypes and user personas. Collaborating closely with our product partners, we tested our insights to ensure they aligned with our newly gathered information.

All of these efforts resulted in:

Prioritized Features

Features that tackled key user pain points, ensuring the development of the most needed solutions.

Clear Development Path

A clear, strategic product roadmap focused on user-centered enhancements and iterative improvements driven by continuous feedback.

Enhanced Personas

Accurate, detailed user personas that captured the needs and behaviors of current customer care users.

Improved User Journeys

User journeys that highlighted key touchpoints and improvement areas, leading to a smoother experience and less rework in development.

Product Roadmap: Set Short Goals

We set short-term goals for the next 6-12 months, aiming to:

Identify and resolve the true UX gaps that make it difficult to perform common workflows (e.g., triage in Cases).
Create a guide to help CSMs, SEs, and self-service customers determine the best workflow for teams based on their goals, team makeup, and working style.
Develop in-app onboarding to guide users through the configurations required for each recommended workflow (team setup, automated rules, queues, etc.).
Update our Inbox vs. Cases product positioning to focus more on workflow benefits rather than "community management" vs. "customer support."

Product Roadmap: Long-Term Vision

I worked with my product and engineering partners to outline the longer term vision and align it with our 2025 goals.

Develop a single solution for flexible and structured workflows using the current Cases product.
Assess the benefits of targeting customer support teams who rely on Salesforce.
Understand team structure and working style due to high turnover and minimal training among support agents.
Address customer resistance to frequent UI updates by providing advanced notice of changes.
Evaluate if we're creating a product for a future user base that might not exist.

OUTCOMES

EVALUATE AND ADJUST

New features

Launched new AI & Automation features in the inbox.
Included new metrics in existing reports and reduced the number of overall reports to streamline analysis
New user profiles introduced (Agent, Manager, Admin) to eliminate the duplication of settings for separate parts of the app.

Successes

Increased User Satisfaction: Significant workflow improvements led to a boost in user satisfaction.
Reduced Development Time: Eliminated a number of duplicate efforts needed when intorducing new features to the Customer Care workflow.
Reduced User Frustration: Addressed main sources of frustration, ultimately reducing the number of customer support tickets submitted.
Balanced Team Alignment: Aligned complimentary skills to some of the triads resulting in faster and easier decision making.
Milestones Achieved: Successfully met key feature release milestones.

Planned Actions (for 2025)

Conduct ongoing generative research.
Identify new metrics to track
- Internally (team execution)
- Externally (workflows, support tickets, etc.)
Present findings bi-weekly.
Create design sprints for key takeaways.