Record360

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Record 360 - Take Home Assignment

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Record 360 - Take Home Assignment

Please note: Items highlighted in blue are assumptions I made, where I would traditionally use real company data, market research, and/or user research.

📝 Preface

My experience

A company I worked for, SecureClose, struggled with exactly this problem. Based on that experience, I’m taking an educated guess that even after workflows, employees, and locations are set up that customer needs continue to evolve, requiring even more back and forth manual adjustments and communication delays, especially if the exchange is through email. This can cause painful delays when a company often needs quick adjustments to their workflow. My last company’s customers cited delays and back and forth implementation as one of the main reasons they would consider competitors.

Recommendation

There seems to be two general parts to overall customer onboarding: general setup (company, employees, locations), and workflow setup. Based on my experience, I’m estimating that setting up workflows is likely 75% of the effort and problems experienced during onboarding, and any gains in UX/speed there will have an outsized impact on overall customer setup time and experience. Therefore, my report will focus on workflows to maximize impact, but in an ideal world both parts would be worked on in parallel.

The Main Choice:

There are two main choices when it comes to implementation strategy.

Revise these experiences assuming no other product changes.

Revise these experiences as part of a larger product initiative to transform the product into a self serve model.

Assuming that this is not the only part of the product where customers are likely struggling with delays and account management issues, and knowing that Record360 wants to ramp up customer acquisition, I’d recommend choosing to take advantage of this opportunity to gradually rework the product into a self serve platform, which should allow for aggressive customer acquisition with minimal consequence and reduce operating costs.

Choosing Option 1 allows for smaller, faster changes to onboarding flows, but feels more like a bandaid that won’t solve the deep underlying problem of back and forth implementation.

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Start of the Pitch ⬇️

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Self-Serve Workflows

“I signed up for Record360 and didn’t get to use my first workflow for 30+ days.” - Customer A

“We discovered a problem with our workflow that had serious consequences for our insurance claims, and we couldn’t get it fixed for 2+ weeks.” - Customer B

“In the event that we have a large influx of users, our customer onboarding process is so manual that we could easily be looking at a 1+ month customer backlog.” - CEO of Record360

🎯 Introduction

Record360 has decided to embark on a gradual transition towards a self-serve model. This will allow us to onboard a greater number of customers, decrease time to value substantially, eliminate back and forth email delays for workflow changes, and allow customers greater control and visibility over their workflows.

We’re starting with the feature that will give the greatest reduction in time to value, workflows, to give customers early access to the value of our new product vision.

📝 Description

Self-serve workflows has three main pillars:

Match existing functionality

Make the UX so simple that it eliminates the need for training customer teams

Continue to offer the option for Record360 professionals to advise and set up workflows.

🧩 Problem

Customers are experiencing problems with the following:

Creating a workflow currently requires kickoff call, training, discussions of efficiency, and more. This requires full time support staff on our end AND the customers end, causing both parties significant expenses (estimated to be $3,000 per month for customers in salary costs @ $65k salary, 50% utilization for 1 month and $21,000/month for Record360 @4 employees avg salary $65k for 1 month).

Insurance changes processes/standards for what is accepted, and customers have to manually contact Record360 to implement changes. This happens __ times per year, and is very stressful for the customer each time.

🤔 Why work on this?

Significant delays to workflow changes is the #2 reason why customers consider switching to a competitor. Excessive time to value is the #1 reason why customers abandon their onboarding flow.

Addressing a critical part of our customers experience and eliminating those risk factors increases customer loyalty, decreases risk of customer churn (specifically during the onboarding process), decreases customer time to value, reduces onboarding flow complexity by 3 high touch point steps, and decreases customer stress during periods where fast changes are required.

👥 Audience

We anticipate the typical user of Record360 assigned to set up workflows will have the following characteristics:

Technical user, potentially part of the customer’s IT team.

Comfortable with advanced builders and workflows.

Do most of their work on desktop.

📕 Rough Requirements

The general experience of workflows will be split into two tabs: Documents and Workflows. Documents will be where users can create signable PDFs by adding signatures, dates, or text fields to static PDFs.

Workflows will be a larger feature with a simple drag and drop interface that allows users to arrange and build components (like PDFs, forms, images, and more) into workflows.

Users will use workflows in the same manner they’re using them now.

Name

Description

Priority

Documents Page

A page to store documents. Includes a grid/list of documents with previewable information about each document (name, last edited date).

Must Have

Documents - Create Document

Includes PDF document upload + naming

Must Have

Documents - Editing Experience

Drag and drop signatures, dates, and text components onto static PDF document. Each field can be made mandatory or optional.

Must Have

Documents - Component Detail Side Menu

Component Detail Side Menu: Side Menu for document components. Example: clicking on signature (a component) will open a side menu/pop up for that signature and allow the user to choose if that signature is mandatory or optional.

Must Have

Workflows Page

A page to store workflows. Includes a grid/list of flows with previewable information about each flow (name, last edited date, number of uses). Also includes primary button “Create New Workflow”.

Must Have

Workflows

Drag and drop components into a linear order. Components include: forms, PDF (pulled from Documents), Photo Module, Video Module, Share.

Must Have

Workflows - Component Detail Side Menu

Side Menu for Flow Component Details. Example: Clicking on Forms allows user to customize questions and mandatory/optional status.

Must Have

Start + Choose Workflow

Clicking “Start Workflow” leads to selection dropdown with search functionality and a prioritized list of recently used workflows (based on assumption that workers go through the same workflows repeatedly).

Must Have

Workflows - Flow Location Tag

If workflows are designed for specific locations, include a location dropdown. Implement a filter to make flows viewable by specific locations.

Should Have

Documents + Workflows Page - Search

Search Functionality to help users find documents faster. Upgrade to “Should Have” if expected document count is above 20.

Could Have

Documents + Workflows Page - Tags and Filters

Allow users to assign tags to documents and search for them by tags. Example tags can also include location.

Could Have

Documents + Workflows - Image Preview

Allow users to preview documents and flows with images of content inside.

Could Have

There are no rows in this table

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✅ Success

✅ Success

Goal

Metric

Reduce time to value for customer

Metric: # of days from deal closing to first flow USED (not created).

Increase # of customers onboarded.

Metric: # of customers who sign up and create at least one flow.

Decrease customer churn during first 30 days (onboarding)

Churn Calculation: (# customers lost during 30 days / Total # customers at start of period) x 100

Reduce onboarding flow time intensiveness (via reducing high touch point events)

Metric: # of high touch point events required in onboarding flow.

There are no rows in this table

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⛔️ Risks and Assumptions

Assumption: Technological Architecture won’t limit the integration of new Workflows with the rest of the existing product or the creation of workflows as pitched.

Assumption: Record360 is willing to revise their pricing structure to reflect self serve SaaS.

Risk: This is going to be a longer, complicated product release. Large scope for design and engineers. Team needs to be highly motivated.

Risk: This is a significant shift to how customers are used to interacting with the product. Early prototype and beta testing (even with just designs) is critical.

Risk: Transition top customers with extra support and white glove service. Don’t want to lose critical customers during the transition process. Give them advanced notice of new product releases, ask for their input, make sure they are aware of what’s coming.

🎨 Design Inspiration

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️❓ Open Questions

Is this technologically feasible with the current tech stack?

Can we eliminate the need for document signing builder? How are signings being done now?

Are current users open to the idea of a self serve model? Do they have the personnel to implement and manage it? Assumed yes because they’re dealing with an even more involved process now, but want to confirm.

️🧯 De-risk

Interview top customers, show design prototypes, ask for feedback, keep them updated and involved.

If scope is >1 year, what can be done in the meantime that’s 20% effort but high value? Example: advanced form based on top CS pain points for onboarding customers. Maybe they struggle to get all relevant documents from customers, so form collects those docs.

️➡️ Next Steps

Get feasibility estimates from engineers. What’s hard? What’s easy? Any way to trim scope? Adjustments required?

Competitive research. Who’s doing this? How successful was it? (should’ve been done already)

Integrate group feedback. Work with PMs/leads of other parts of product to make sure everyone is aware of project and considers impact to other parts of org.

Build out internal vision for product transformation for other parts of product just to flush out details and ensure end result is feasible.

Start finalizing product requirements, work with design and engineering for refinements.

Official approval of initiative from relevant stakeholders.

Onboarding Flow Before vs After Comparison

Before

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After (Very High Level 2-3 hr version)

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