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 newly created 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: “Keap helps you get organized and follow-up fast so you can grow your business.”

My role

• Drove project to the finish line

• Represented brand and marketing Org

• Created research plan and wrote interview scripts

• Built and led CX and UX workshops

• Synthesized data to find actionable next steps

• Conceptualized “Product Adoption” and gained executive buy-in for it as new company focus

• Designed all frameworks

• Presented direction at Keap’s Quarterly All Hands and Keap’s Leadership Summit

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

External research

Timeline: 1 week

I researched companies known for delivering on their brand promises and leveraged my network to gain firsthand insights. I interviewed a VP of Customer Success at UserTesting—formerly at Zappos—to learn how top brands:

• Identify gaps in the customer experience

• Foster an adoption mindset within their customer base

• Enable teams to continuously deliver more value through product, service, and experience

☝️ These became critical insights that would shape strategy later on.

Customer research

Timeline: 2 weeks

I’m a strong advocate for real customer research. Instead of relying solely on NPS surveys, I pushed to have direct conversations with Keap users. Talking to real customers:

• Provides deeper insights into expectations vs. actual experiences

• Reveals hidden challenges throughout the entire customer lifecycle, not just product usage and retention

• Adds crucial context that quantitative surveys can’t capture

• Helps every Keap team build real empathy for prospects and customers

Since we didn’t have a dedicated UX Research team, I equipped teams with simple, effective tactics to gather insights:

• Keep interviews short (just 10–15 minutes)

• Use a simple script to stay focused

• Ask a set of templated questions for consistency

• Fit interviews into downtime between sprints and projects

• Share key findings in a central, accessible spreadsheet, including recordings

Once I made the case for these real insights, the team agreed it was the right approach, despite how daunting it initially seemed.

I gained buy-in to interview 100+ customers.

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

Timeline: 2 weeks (1 week for prep and workshop; 1 week for synthesis and outcomes)

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, and Did—then grouped them according to similarity within each category.

Then I guided the team to map the overarching feedback according to the customer journey stages: Try, Buy, Onboard, Use, and Ask (for support).

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. But Keap wasn’t doing that.

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.

Transforming Keap

I helped Keap shift 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 aligned 400+ people to “product adoption” and how it applied to their specific role.

I synthesized insights and designed materials to drive company-wide clarity:

• Guiding principles for the entire company to align on for a shared vision

• How we deliver on the brand promise across the customer journey, with key metrics and outcomes

• Clear roles for every department in driving customer adoption, even for teams without direct customer interaction

• Visuals and a clear process to assess the user journey from the customer’s perspective across all business areas

• Recommendations for quick wins to complete in the next 30-90 days

• Recommendations for big lifts to complete by end of the year

I set the vision: “the product experience is the brand experience”

I led the team and did hands-on UX and CX design. To get the company aligned, I:

• Secured executive buy-in for “Product Adoption”

• Identified manual processes to replace with in-app automation

• Designed all internal frameworks to implement

• Presented strategy at the Leadership Summit

• Shared the vision 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 including services 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 their vision.

Results

I led Project Team to help the company better understand customer expectations and deliver 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.

Keap achieved its goal of fueling small business success at scale in 2024, by being acquired by Thryv.