After rebranding Keap, I led a group of 6 people representing Analytics, Sales, Product, CX, Customer Success, and Brand to get customers to value faster and experience the brand promise.

Goal:

Executives challenged us to “enable every team at Keap to live out our brand promise and get all customers to value, fast.”

The ‘value’ here was our brand promise at the time: “Keap helps you get organized and follow-up fast so you can grow your business.”

My role

• Speak for brand and marketing org

• Drive project to the finish line

• Co-create research plan & write interview scripts

• Launch workshops & synthesize data

• Design all frameworks

• Present direction at Keap’s Quarterly All Hands & Leadership Summit

• Gain Executive buy-in on ‘Product Adoption’

Team: Myself, Danny Diede (CS), Mike Dudek (CX), Yanira Sesniak (Sales), Tyson Brown (Product), and Graydon Clark (Analytics)

External research

We identified companies that excelled in delivering on their brand promises.

I gained insights on:

• How they identified gaps in the customer experience

• Promoting adoption-mindset in their customer base

• Enabling teams to fulfill on consistently increasing value in the product, service, or experience.

☝️ I memory-banked these for later on.

Customer research

I’m a strong advocate for customer research. We needed to get on the phone with Keap users, not just review NPS surveys. After I made the case for real customer insights, the team agreed it was the best direction despite how mountainous it seemed.

I gained buy-in to interview 100+ customers over the next two weeks.

Why so many? We needed to get a mix of perspectives to account for all departments, NPS scores, and products:

• ✅ Active customers

• ❌ Canceled customers

• 😍 High, 😐 Medium, and 😡 Low NPS

• From all editions of our product

Without budget to hire researchers, I led the team in scrappy UX interviewing tactics.

• ✏️ I wrote an interview script and coached on best practices

• 📞 Customer Success helped interview

• 📞 Everyone on the Tiger Team made calls

• 💰 Incentivized key customers with a gift card raffle

Mapping customer experiences

I facilitated a half-day workshop

We reviewed the massive Google Sheet of interview answers as a team, and plotted what people Thought, Felt, Said, & Did—then grouped them according to similarity within each category.

Then we mapped the overarching feedback throughout their journey with us.

I negotiated priorities and mapped findings

Last, I created matrices to prioritize the most impactful changes customers identified to Keap’s goals:

• Increase monthly recurring revenue (MRR)

• Increase customer happiness and retention

• Increase our 30, 60, and 90 day customer value metrics

I clarified the gaps and friction at critical moments in the customer journey.

Customers didn't see product value or felt disappointed after onboarding:

• One-time product onboarding left customers feeling aimless

• Customers sought out support and resources on Google, not in-app

• Keap’s products didn’t nudge users to take meaningful actions

• Silos led to frequent handoffs of customers across teams

So customers would get frustrated and want to cancel, leading to major investment in Keap’s retention efforts.

Customers expected Keap to help them adopt the product as an essential tool.

Customers expected what many leading companies call “Product Adoption”:

• Educate on best practices

• Support whenever there’s a need

• Provide personalized insights

…all in-app and over time.

Simply put, the customer wanted to log in every day and see Keap as the core 'hub' of their business. That's only possible if customers can receive education, support, and insights consistently in-app (rather than calling support or hiring a partner).

Beyond that, customers didn't see "onboarding" as a one-time event. They wanted an ongoing learning experience that Keap wasn't providing.

I proposed a “product adoption” approach.

Results

We set the groundwork for Keap’s entire focus in 2020—from human-led to product-led experiences to better serve customers.

I consolidated, simplified, and designed the resulting research, guiding principles, framework, recommendations, and high-level implementation plan to make it happen.

I synthesized findings and designed materials to align 400+ people on “adoption” and Org responsibilities.

I set the vision that the product experience is the brand experience

• Gained Executive buy-in on ‘Product Adoption’

• Identified manual processes to replace with in-app automation

• Designed all internal frameworks

• Presented direction at Leadership Summit

• Presented direction at Keap’s Quarterly All Hands

Executives named 2020 “The Year of Product Adoption” due to our findings. Keap products were positioned as the primary path for adoption, and everything else would exist in support of the product experience.

It seemed obvious once uncovered. But, Executives couldn’t see it due to many recent changes that muddied the vision.

Tangible results

Our Project Team brought much-needed clarity to the company regarding customer expectations and fulfilling on our brand promise.

CEO Clate Mask called us “one of the greatest ‘Tiger Teams’ in the history of the company.”

Here are a few of the great improvements to Keap that came from our plan:

• Keap is now sold online—it used to be required to talk to sales

• Free services spark early adoption (free migration & 24/7 support)

• Onboarding in-app gets customers started fast

• Enhanced reporting in-app shows meaningful business insights

• 30, 60, and 90 day value metrics were improved and include sentiment

• Improved Chat logic to better distinguish requests and route questions

• Proactive customer success strategies (not reactive to cancels)

• Low MRR customers can cancel in-app (no need to call) and CS teams are freed up to focus on High MRR customers

…and dozens more.