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(001)
Client
Brella
Year
2021
Services
(001)
Event managers are some of the most hyper-competent and organised people on the planet. Being an event manager is regularly reported to be in the top 5 most stressful jobs in the world. We started to see the impact of the increased stress due to the pandemic and we regularly noticed event managers, especially those on a subscription that did not include a customer success manager's help and support, making small mistakes in the running of the event. Therefore, I decided to dig a bit deeper to find out where the pain points were, and how could we address some of these issues. I started the research process with a question: What's the simplest thing we can do, to make this complicated set up easier? I also asked: What does the current flow look like? What could I learn from the event managers to get a better understanding of where their biggest challenges are?
(002)
After writing out a conversation guide, I arranged and conducted 10 in-depth hour long customer interviews. Out of these: 5 customers had a plan without customer success support 5 customers had an all-inclusive plan, which included CSM support
(003)
The number one issue that kept coming up was that customers who received less proactive support from Brella, had no idea what timelines for setting up the event would help them to be successful in the lead up to the event. Since we were all doing this for the first time because of the pandemic, we realised we hadn't explicitly ever told our customers what a healthy timeline looks like, so we decided to simply gather all of our internal experts (plus some of our long term partners) and map out what success looks like.
(004)
We explored many routes to address this. We went all the way back to first principles, and tried to understand why these timelines exist, and why they are so hard to stick to. The process looked like this: - I first presented the research findings to the rest of the company - This led to better stakeholder buy-in for investing more into the experience - After this, I gathered a team of key people across different customer touch points for an ideation workshop We started to get an idea of what we thought a possible solution could look like.
(005)
After speaking to few stakeholders and engineers, we started to get closer to something like the below. We agreed on some principles: - Event managers are BUSY. Therefore, whatever solution we would land on, it should not solely rely on the customers logging into the platform proactively (if they would, we wouldn't have this problem in the first place). - Gentleness. In the interviews, the event managers mentioned they regularly would miss deadlines, and did not want to feel punished when they did. - Minimal effort. Since Brella had an ample amount of data for what the timeline of a successful event looked like, we felt that the MVP should include NO thinking for the organisers. In this context, this meant that we used our insights to recommend a more suitable timeline.
(006)
Until we arrived to the above. An automated checklist that corresponds with the unfinished tasks and automatically calculates when they need to be done based on the event date, and sends emails to gently (not in a panicky way!) inform the customer when a milestone is missed. This also notified the Customer Success team to help them approach those struggling. This allowed event managers to focus on doing what they do best, and perhaps even more imporantly: event attendees had a better chance for finding a more suitable match for networking, as the platform was prepped in time for everyone to be organised.
