Good Call Experience
2015
Research
Data Analysis
Prototyping
Product Design
Turning qualitative research observations into proven revenue growth.
With great teams, comes great outcomes. I was fortunate to work with talented engineers and data scientists to drive revenue growth at Yodle, an Inc. 500 startup in New York City.
Most local service business owners are great at their profession and not good at online marketing. Dentists, lawyers, roofers, and others hired us to generate online leads to their business in the form of phone calls.
Yodle provides marketing automation products to 58,000+ service businesses, including Maaco, Merry Maids, and Miracle Ear. In 2015, Yodle filed for IPO, but was ultimately acquired by Web.com (NASDAQ: WEB) for $342MM.
CONTEXTResearch insights that matter
While conducting research for a different project, I observed the client services team that focused on retention. I listened to clients say that they “paid is $500 last month, and [we] did nothing for [them]. Meanwhile, our data showed that we generated a number of leads for them. The client services team would quickly browse through the client dashboard and locate calls we record between consumers and our clients (small business owners). I watched the team click play on the recording and hold their personal headphones up to the microphone of the phone. The client would listen to a few seconds of the call, hearing themselves talking to a consumer, and say things like, “that person spent $1000 yesterday. I didn’t know they came from you!”
This tactic stuck out to me because it was a workaround and it seemed to be incredibly effective.
Leveraging intangible assets: algorithms
The following year, the entire product organization was working to increase client retention, the leading driver of profitability for our subscription model. I learned about an algorithm that an engineer was working on to determine the quality of the call recordings. It was able to determine if the call was a good lead or a bad lead with 88% accuracy.
Hypothesis 1
We believe when clients engage with their good calls, perceived value increases. We will know this is true if historical data shows a correlation between engagement with good calls and client life.
Working in a data-driven culture, I first sought to find out if my hypotheses held true using historical data. I worked with a data-scientist to determine if there was a correlation between user interactions with “good calls” and retention. The analysis proved that there was.
Hypothesis 2
We believe that nudging clients to engage with good calls will increase perceived value. We will know this is true when good call engagement increases and client life increases.
After proving the correlation using historical data, I wanted to find out if we could drive those behaviors and still get the same outcomes. In a 1 week development sprint, I designed a simple experience that targeted users who hadn’t interacted with their “good calls.” The email we sent highlighted those calls and directed users to a filtered view of their leads in the UI.
THE SOLUTIONDriving behavior change to increase perceived value
A simple experience is triggered by intelligent targeting. Using logic to assess lead quality and user behavior, we send emails that showcase high quality leads. When users click through, they can listen to calls from those leads in their dashboards. This system helps users understand the value are services bring to their businesses.
THE RESULTSThe real test: 90 day retention
A product manager on my team ran a longer term study using this experience as one of the variables. After 90 days, we found an increase in retention across all 4 test groups compared to the control group.
Qualitative research truly can lead to measurable impact on business outcomes.