[This post is based on an interview with Charlotte Brown, the Senior Director of Product at Qualia. You can watch the full interview here]
When it comes to product design, user experience is critical. Too much information, and your customers are overwhelmed by choice. Too little, and they’re furiously clicking around looking for more. For SaaS companies that serve multiple user segments, organizing and presenting information well can be the difference between an awesome customer experience and a huge load of support tickets.
Qualia is a digital real estate closing platform for title, escrow, mortgage, and real estate professionals. Given the size and complexity of Qualia, customers struggled in the past to find the information they needed to make the most of the platform. As a result, Qualia’s NPS sat squarely at the low end of average for enterprise products — 31. The Qualia team also faced resourcing challenges as engineers spent hours answering customer support tickets, functioning as customer service rather than focusing on product development.
With some UX fixes that surfaced customer support content in a dynamic and responsive way, Qualia improved customer satisfaction and saved developer resources. The UX changes have reduced their customer support burden tremendously and boosted Qualia’s NPS to a whopping 69.
So how did they do it? Right-hand rail design and responsive support features saved the day.
This video describes the process Qualia went through to build the Right-hand rail:
Step 1: Get to know your users
The first thing the Qualia team did was review user behavior. A thorough review of support tickets revealed that many users had questions around how to use the platform. The answers were often available in the help center, which was hosted externally from the Qualia platform. As a result, few users knew how to access the help center or find the relevant information they needed. Adding a link to the help center on each page helped a bit, but it became clear that, to really help customers, the Qualia team had to meet them where they were — on the pages they used most.
Step 2: Offer personalized, dynamic content
A static digital help center is only as good as the search terms a visitor uses when looking for relevant content. We’ve all been there: We search and search, and because of the term or sentence structure we’re using, we can’t find the answer, even if we just know it’s out there somewhere.
Qualia realized that their external help center was being underused, so they started to dynamically surface support articles that were related to the page the user was on. Collating all materials Qualia had on the features of the relevant page helped users find what they were looking for, surfacing the most pertinent data and information in real time.
Step 3: Embed support within the product
Pop-up guides and walkthroughs have proven popular as a means of educating customers on SaaS software, but pop-ups are interruptive, and they’re all too easy for users to X out of. Since Qualia users were unwilling to jump off a page to the external help center, the UX team decided that users would be equally unwilling to disrupt their workflows to engage with pop-ups.
The right-hand rail, therefore, was instrumental in seamlessly surfacing relevant content within the overall flow of the platform. When surfacing the right content, Qualia kept all support articles relevant to the page in the right-hand rail. This feature enabled users to know where to go for further support on any page within the platform. The UX team also created a feature where users could submit a ticket within the right-hand rail.
To build your own Right-hand rail, grab this template from Candu.
Happy users = more time for the core product
The changes Qualia made have been revolutionary to their support system. Support ticket volume dropped, and development resources were freed up to work on the core product. Customer support now sits with the right pros to get the job done — the customer success team. Qualia’s highly improved NPS proves the point: A little UX love can send your customer experience (and NPS) soaring.
Want to learn more about improving your customer experience with personalized, embedded content? Try Candu for free.
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