Understanding and driving customer engagment to support Marketing, Product, and Sales

Company: Praktio, Legal EdTech Startup
Stage: Customer-funded
Responsibilities: Customer research, collaboration with Product/Design, recommendations for product strategy, creating sales and customer enablement materials

Background
After a few months working with Praktio, I identified end user engagement as a unique action that simultaneously drives customer retention and answers one of the main objections in sales conversations. Internally, Praktio had visibility into engagement rates of individual end users but didn't have an easy way to view that information in aggregate in order to analyze engagement rates across different segments. As it turns out, customers didn't have an easy way to view their engagement data in aggregate either.

Given the unique leverage of this metric, I created a plan to better understand engagement of existing customers with two main goals:
1 - Refining Sales messaging and Marketing efforts around customer engagement
2 - Helping Product prioritize and develop new features around engagement reports

The plan
Speaking with buyers and end users would be the ideal way to gather information around what kind of reports our customers would like to receive. Unfortunately, it was historically difficult to get time with these groups, so Praktio reserved that time for only the most high priority projects. And while these efforts had great potential value, they were not the highest priority at the time, so customer research conversations weren't a viable strategy.

I worked with Design/User Research to outline an initial perspective on engagement reporting data and developed a strategy that involved manually pulling those metrics for both internal and external use. By sending these reports out to customers proactively, I could gather reactions to the data as well as information around the firm's implementation strategy in a way that significantly lightened the ask of customers. The learnings from this research would then be used to determine future features in addition to serving as information for sales and customer enablement materials.

Testing with customers
I developed a timeline and cadence that spanned the most common implementation methods of Praktio's training and began pulling and sharing key insights with customers around the ongoing engagement of their end users. Each message was accompanied by a small number of questions crafted by User Research to attempt to gather insights in a manner that was least burdensome to the customer.

We received a surprising quantity of responses and insights from our customers, including feedback around the metrics themselves and details around how each firm rolled out training among their associates.

Internal value
The engagement metrics I pulled were also used to get a clearer internal picture of engagement across different segments and implementation strategies. I created an Airtable repository for this information, which I could then use to glean insights around the most successful implementation strategies, common issues, and our most popular courses within the law firm market.

Marketing materials & Sales enablement
After collecting data and information from a sizeable number of customers, I compiled learnings into various themes and information. I then created messaging around driving engagement in e-learning, which I used to form a resource article and marketing campaign to educate our audience and customers.
Read the article here.

Influencing the Product roadmap
The key learnings and customer feedback were also fed to Product and Design, along with recommendations for the priority and specifications of potential future features. These were subsequently added to the Product roadmap, broken down into incremental release stages.