One of my first projects at hometime, was to work on something that would improve retention. Project lead Rosa, explained that customers were churning at a high rate, and we needed to do something urgently to remedy that.
The inital question of "how do we decrease churn?" Triggered a question in my mind that I saw as needing to be answered first, which would in turn make it a lot easier to know how to approach retention.
At that point in time, we had no idea. Since there was no process or system in place to gather that information in a standard manner, and then store it to explore later.
Luckily, at my previous role as a designer at Channel 7, coworker and user researcher Monica Regalado had introduced me to a former Google senior researcher, called Tomer Sharon, who had implemented a system at WeWork to do that just. They called it Polaris.
Polaris was a tool to store gathered information, where insights were connected to primary evidence like sound and video recordings from interviews. Many key elements would be connected.
Tomer's idea was that searching through Polaris for something like:
Would provide a certain amount of results, and that collection, which he called "a playlist of research nuggets", would replace the old-fashioned research report. Which was time consuming to create, existing with no functional connection to any system, typically in a PDF, and would typically get forgotten about.
I'd spent weeks examining the system with Monica at Channel 7, and I decided to implement it at hometime to help us deal with churn.
Operations analyst, Mariam had already created a form for employees to go through each time a customer left, to deal with internal actions that needed to be taken. That form was important and needed to stay, but I wanted to build around it with an outward facing form, for customers to fill out when they left.
Until we had the capacity to attempt to interview leaving customers in our offices across the country. I was hopeful that the MVP of this new system, would show its value and result in company buy in, to allow me to take it to the next step and aim for face to face interviews to gather information.
Some key aspects of the form were:
Regardless, it was great to plan and build an end to end research process and system. I look forward to the next time I get a chance to be involved with this type of project, eventually using it to gain insights and utilising them to improve a customer's experience.
Selected Work