Reimagining hubspot’s
survey creation process
Customer feedback is one of Hubspot’s newest offerings. Its aim is to provide you with the tools to gather important customer feedback. Acquiring new customers can cost up to seven times more than retaining existing customers, so investing in customer happiness helps businesses grow faster. During my time in HubSpot I worked on the customer feedback team. This tool enables users to gather feedback from their customers at different touch points of their customer journey. This provides them with valuable insights they can take action on to improve their business. It provides our customers with the tools to proactively prevent customers from churning, and turn happy customers into ‘promoters’. I worked on many different projects over my time in Hubspot building out customer feedback (eg. Allowing customers a way to build a survey, enabling customers to reply to feedback, embedding feedback throughout the hubspot product to give customers a 360 view on their customers’ happiness levels). To showcase my process I’m going to go through one of of the projects.
The Problem
Through user interviews and trends bubbling up in customer feedback and support tickets, we uncovered that there was confusion when it came to identifying which surveys customers should use. Currently Hubspot’s customer feedback tool has 3 survey types: NPS (customer loyalty), CES (customer support) and CSAT (customer experience). Customers were not connecting these surveys with their goals.
Our objective was to help and guide our customers to use the correct survey that match their feedback goals.
My Process
Define
After consolidating our customer’s feedback, to provide focus on the specific needs of our users we completed a Needs Statement exercise. Through this we identified different user personas and determined different pain points and goals. The needs statements provided focus on the people we were trying to help, rather than the technology and functionality.
With a better understanding of the different user goals we were able to group these tasks and map out multiple customer flow charts which we then linked to our current survey types. This highlighted key touch points where we were missing the mark for our customers. The platform wasn’t doing any hand holding, there was little guidance and customers were unclear what option met their goals - we needed to reframe the product to match their goals so they could instantly understand the value.
Develop
With this clear, goals-centered approach outlined, it was time to wireframe out the proposed solutions. Creating wireframes allowed me to create a rough drafts of the newly proposed user flows. This technique brings to light different edge cases or functionalities that may not have been previously obvious. It provides a way to start a discussion with the full team, and I find it an easy and fast way to iterate.
Once we were happy with the flow and functionality, it was time to test our assumptions and validate our thinking. Through empathy sessions and prototyping we were able to validate our approach before collaborating with our UX writer. Not only did we want to align with Hubspot’s tone, we needed the language to be human and approachable.
Solution
Once the stakeholders were happy with the wireframes I moved onto the visual design for this project.
Our new approach introduced better categorisation of the types of surveys we provided - rather then present 3 broad survey types we created templates that match users goals. We removed one layer of thinking we were putting on the customer. We reframed the purposes to match their individual goals saving them time and energy.
