One of the biggest initiatives that I led at Gusto was to improve the end-to-end experience when customers have a question or issue that they need to resolve. Customer touch points with Support advocates were on the rise given the company's high growth rate and chronic technical and design debt did not set up the business to scale effectively in the long run. This was a highly cross-functional effort, involving Engineering, Product Management, Product Design, Data Science, Customer Experience, and Business Technology teams. My role was to lead, coach, and up-level the work of the whole team.
One of the first steps I took was to run an initial design sprint with the whole team in order to create a shared understanding of the problems to solve and develop a north star experience to go and validate early with customers.
The north star experience was built on a few key pillars:
- The user's current place in the app, prior actions, and other aspects of their overall experience were taken into account in order to predict what they might need help with.
- This contextual information was further complemented by users expressing their intent in their own words.
- With this informed understanding of what customers needed help with, the help experience could recommend various types of actionable help content.
- In addition, better understanding what the issue or question is about, we could make more appropriate recommendations about the best ways to get in touch in case users couldn't help themselves.
Building towards this north star experience was based on an iterative approach. I helped the team adopt a build-test-learn mindset and practice several growth tactics. This included building a backlog of hypotheses to test, rigorous A/B experimentation, a mix of quantitative and qualitative data analysis, and a focus on velocity and learning in order to build stronger conviction about the impact that we could make.
In addition, this work helped uncover opportunities to improve the usability of key product flows (e.g. reporting a notice, adjusting a payroll, making one-time payments, migrating information from previous payroll providers, and much more), making customers more able to self-serve.
Key results:
- Customers were able to help themselves significantly more than in the past, thus leading to a significant decrease in customer touch points.
- Gusto's CX organization received unprecedented control over directing customers to the right channels (chat, phone, email), which transformed the operations of the whole team.
- Several key use cases received a usability overhaul that made customers more successful.
- Gusto's overall cost-per-customer was significantly reduced and in target to meet projected goals tied to the company's long-term strategy.
Team credits
Danielle Cleaver, Marissa Gemma, Julia Grummel, Vivian Phuong, Jarica Schulte, Andrew Thompson