Have you heard of Voice of the Customer programs? You probably have. It’s not hard to guess what Voice of the Customer means; gathering feedback and ideas from multiple customer touchpoints and collating what is found.
SuiteFiles has been running a Voice of the Customer (VoC) program for some time now, with the goal being to bring the customer voice directly into product decisions. The different touchpoints for SuiteFiles include our researchers speaking to you, our customer on the regular, feedback from our sales and success teams, short, automated surveys and yes, support tickets.
We recently embarked on a deep analysis of our VoC data and determined that approximately 44% of feature requests were ideas and desires concerning document signing and PDF document creation. That’s an enormous great chunk of responses! This, despite the fact our document signing solution is highly popular. Last year we saw about 360,000 documents signed and we are tracking to significantly exceed that number this year.
Our product team looked at the challenge – our customers wanting a feature-rich, faster, more customisable experience – and decided that a simple tune-up was not enough. Just like Formula One teams redesign and rebuild the car for the new season, we are rebuilding our document signing from the ground up. Quite a challenge!
So far, we have updated the document signing engine in the current system. This will give us a solid basis upon which to build. If you have signed a document through SuiteFiles in the last few weeks, you will be using the brand-new platform without knowing it – and that is the point!
Next from an engineering perspective, we are building a new API. This is a single point that all doc signing process requests pass through. This will give us greater flexibility and resilience, new ways to use document signing and greater control across the whole process.
What about the bit that you see? The ‘user experience?’ Well, we’re redesigning that too. Given that we already have a successful document signing product, we don’t need to do lengthy discovery research, where we would talk with our customers and watch them do their work. You’ve given us heaps of ideas for what we could do to improve our product, we just need to prioritize the ideas.
One way to achieve this is using design-led research, where we create prototypes that feature ideas from our VoC suggestions and see how people respond in test sessions. We can learn from these tests and redesign. At this stage, we’ve completed one round of testing with a second round imminent, plus two more to follow after that.
From the results of our testing, we have used Kano analysis to map user testing responses to our prototypes.
Kano analysis, developed by Noriaki Kano, is a product development and customer satisfaction methodology that identifies the features and functions that people consider ‘table stakes’ – you’ve got to have that to even play – and those features and functions that are considered ‘customer delighters’. Obviously, we want to delight customers, but if we can’t meet the table stakes requirements, we aren’t going to get to play.
This becomes important when you factor in that designers cannot design everything, and engineers cannot code every little thing before we ‘go live’. Too many companies make the mistake of spending years developing something before releasing it, only to discover that basic premises upon which their product is based are fatally flawed. Better to build something and let customers try it as fast as possible – the Voice of the Customer will quickly tell you if you are on the right track!
We’re pretty excited about the future of SuiteFiles document signing. It’s great when we can delight customers, it’s what we live for. If you’re interested in being involved in the testing of prototypes, please drop me a line! You can contact me at martin@suitefiles.com. If we haven’t spaces available, then there may be another research opportunity we are conducting that you could be interested in.
