Hello, everyone. I'm Jeff Sheldon. I'm the Senior Vice President of Engineering here at WorkRility.
And I'm really excited for today's session. Talk about subscriber experience. And here with me, I have Greg Jenkins from Find MyPass. Great. Would you like to introduce yourself?
Yeah. Hi. Morning. Afternoon.
Yes, I'm Greg. So I'm had a product final pass.
We're a, fast growing technology subscription service, I guess, is the way we place it, with the back billions of digitized records, we get access to most on the most renowned historical databases globally. And what we do is we tie up people's past and present, connect people with a past Great. Yeah. So it's a really great product and it's it's a great service to be able to offer people to to build those connections, with their with their ancestors and and kinda see you know, build that story and and dig in and understand where they come from. But to get things started here, how do you think about the subscriber screens in general, and and how is important is it to you if I might pass?
Subscriber experience.
I I guess this paramount to us for for multiple reasons.
And I I think I can probably rattle off up, possibly the top four that that's bringing to mind. I guess, one of the things that we always satellite, but like a broken record that that you'll often hear in final passes is retention over acquisition.
So one of the key things is, for us, is is the experiences model providers and promote that customer loyalty for us. If you get a customer coming back, especially in a subscription service and a final pass, customers will come back, and and the acquisition will start to take care of itself. So we we definitely find that that our attention over acquisition is something that we we want to do. And a happy and happy experience you provide will provide people the ability to retain and stay with your product.
The second one I would go with is probably word-of-mouth and referral.
Again, I think they're on twenty percent of our subscriber based comes from word-of-mouth or referral. And so and that's by promoting experiences and happy a an appy journeys and journeys where people start to get engaged and and enjoy the the product as it is, because what they will do is they then provide in turn, they're referral, and won't amount to to friends and family.
On the on the flip side, not providing that experience, and provide broken experiences and and broken UX, provides a negative, negative sounds across social, and and that'll have negative impact on our acquisitions journey again. So that's where that experience really comes to place.
The the second, I guess, experience, first put a third one in there, expansion. So it's to upgrades, up sales.
Again, if you've got if you've got a if you've got a product where the experience is, especially if I'm a bastard, we look at some of the experience that we have around our tree and around the search. Searching facilities and on newspapers, there's a lot within our product, and there's always ways that we want to potentially expand within our in our base.
How do we grow that or return that revenue within our customers who've been with us for quite a long time, and and our utilizing our product locked, and there's new products and new features that we wanna provide them. If we are providing an experience that they are engaged with, then the likelihood of them expanding and upgrading and buying new features and we grow that value within, is more likely.
And if I was to throw the last one in there, I'd probably go reduce cost.
Again, if you're providing a a a If you're providing a private, that is intuitive and easy to use, the likelihood is that you'll reduce your, cause into your customer support teams. And lower that cost to serve, and that's something we've definitely found.
I found in my previous, but I find my past as well you're able to provide people the the tools and facilities and intuitive, experience online, there there won't be that need call into the contact center, and they can really focus on helping people who do have additional needs above that.
So at their support. Yeah.
I really liked that first point of, retention over acquisition. I I think that's really key, especially in this subscription world where you're engaging and needing to re earn your customer's business day after day, week after week, month after month.
I really like that focus.
Yeah. It's it's a huge change. And it's something we we worked on a lot over the last over the last four years. Where it it's very easy to fall back into trading mentality of get them in.
Get them in. Get them in. But if you really focus on that retention Uber acquisition and and think actually is cheaper to serve, to retain a customer than it is to, to acquire a new one. If you always have their mentality, then, actually, that does half the job for you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now I'm curious. You've mentioned cost and some other things, and and that kinda leads into you know, thinking about how you how you scale things up, how you're how you're growing. So when you're when you're scaling a subscription business, There are a lot of priorities there that you're balancing. As I said, cost being being one of those. But, how do you approach the product prioritization and and choosing where to make these investments and what to invest in.
Yeah. It's, it's, it's always a juggle, and that sometimes you get them wrong, but, but I think we've, I'm a firm believer actually that if you combine a deep understanding of your customer needs, and the strategic business goals, and a new a structured framework to to make those decisions. You you you get that wrong less.
And by my past, we we we very much have the I guess, a framework of of setting out very clear objectives. So we we run on our KRs. We we we evolve from thematic objectives of kind of of really kind of capturing capturing the essence of what we wanna do from a goal. And the and the role of product is ready to then understand what other customer needs they're gonna help us achieve those future goals. And so, we we have an ongoing, trail of customer needs that we've started evolving in research, and we work in in families, which are triumphs, equivalent, that kind of spotify tribe model. And each one of those tribes are building out a knowledge and and understanding of what those needs are.
And so when the objectives, when we understand what the objectives of the business, then you have to completely continuously repeat them. And and make sure everyone else has got them drilled inside of what it is. And we set them out annually, and then we break them down into quarterly objectives. And, but we then we then make sure that we we look at what are those needs of those needs are gonna start to break down or break down those objectives? And how do we start to measure those?
And then it's really down to families to come right through and kind of going, okay. We've looked at this. We've looked at these needs. We've got some hypotheses around our saladovers, and these are the things that we believe.
We validated through data through research. And through quality and quantitative research, and and this is where we're sort of starting to put our bets. Some of them vac most of them, like forecasting. A lot of them are bets that you're gonna lean on but you the the educated guess is that you're kinda saying, well, actually, I've seen I've seen the research and seen some of the some of the desires that people are getting.
And then that'll fall into the frameworks that we we use. And every team has slight different variations in the frameworks, the the rice, the muscos, and, you know, is trying to effort over value.
That we feel we're gonna get and we sit down there. Occasionally, we have some bigger complexities that come in, which, which block us from achieving some of those goals. And that's where you when you're talking about scale, and, sometimes there are some bigger pieces of work. You say, actually, there's some things we have to do to enable us to get through to those It could be it could be something that relates about specific need or want that the customer has, but we don't have the technology that means to be able to do it.
So there's a slightly higher call where we start to prioritize. So what are the things that can enable us to do that? And and those priorities go back in there. And in every quarter, we to play back as a company kinda going, right, these are the top bets that we wanna put in.
Here's the research that we have, and and and start to, and and look at those frameworks and see which ones are starting to really hit the top and hit those objectives, and then we fly in behind them.
Really important for us is that on a weekly basis, we're checking up on those. So we work on Iraq States across our objectives, and we really closely monitor how we're achieving against those other ones that we need to stop, start continue. What are the things that need attention to? What are the things that we think actually we're we're really off the market? Do we drop it, or do we really start to look at how we can approach differently?
So we have that kind of mechanism that runs on a continual basis using the objectives as a clear steer of what we're trying to achieve.
Yeah. And I think, you know, really interesting there is is how to, you know, when you are, viewing the results of those experiments and and understanding is, are we achieving what we sent out to do being able to dig in and and make that understanding, make that decision about do we stop what we're doing? Is this the wrong path, or is there a pivot that's necessary? And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you kinda drive that decision making and understand when you need to adjust versus when you need to just strike down a a different path altogether.
Yeah. It it's it's it's really it's a it's there's no direct issues. There's some there's some hard conversations you have to have on on a on a on these weekly, on a weekly basis, you start to measure those.
And and data, yeah, I'll keep mentioning the word data, but data really gives you that early input. And it's really important when you up those objectives and then setting out the priorities.
Once you've agreed them and you've decided to go full ahead and start to them, you've got the measures in there. You've got the data that's able provide you the scale of where Eric on on trajectory or not.
We've we've had, I'd say, fun, but, you know, we've button, I really try to establish at what point do we consider pivoting at what point do we consider that? Actually, it's not going to.
Some of is on, is on is on the person who's working on it. If they've really got the ability to demonstrate, actually, there is dying to be that movement. There is something that they feel that they it's worth pushing. And again, we're reviewing on a weekly basis.
But occasionally, we we've had to sit back and just say, well, is it worth potentially really going for it knowing that we might not hit it, but we might roll it into the net objective. It's something that we wanna push through, and we believe that there's actually momentum going. There's also some that you might look at and say, well, actually, we don't expect a movement yet. You know, we we've come across sometimes where you think we've gotta measure in place, but we know some of the traction might not take place until we start to run some of the initial experiences we want to do.
But how we're gonna start to measure that those initial experiences are working. What are the indicators that we have that'll start to give, give us the goal of what we're trying to achieve?
So, I guess, to specifically to that question, that it's really difficult. And sometimes it's on a priority budget, but as long as you've got the measures in place, it makes that conversation a lot easier to have.
And we we've had times where we sat there and the team of guy, leave it. We're we're at it. We've we've got confidence in doing that. And you've gotta bring the whole team in to kinda say, right, to really convince us and really work. What's what's making you think that way?
Which is really good.
Yeah.
I'd like to take a minute and kinda touch back on sort of, we, you know, we talked a bit about the subscriber retention, but on the subscriber acquisition front, You know, we've recently discovered through, a recurly report that seventy seven percent of people are more likely to sub scribe if it's easy to cancel the subscription, which seems kind of counterintuitive.
But, how do you think about that cancellation experience from a product perspective.
It's, that is an interesting stat. It's it's it am I surprised? I guess not. I mean, if you think my own my own experiences, my own experience is up when you take a product that you're not familiar with, and and you're asking someone to commit to it.
People are starting to get and I'm start you start to understand is the cancellation? But is this an annual contract? Is this something you're not gonna be stuck in? How easy is it for me? And those are questions now that are being ingrained into people on this subscription, I guess, is as a business as a whole is is growing, and people are getting very familiar now with how subscriptions works. And some of the pain points that early subscription companies had of, you know, hiding the sys hiding the cancellation flow so you can cancel.
So it does, yeah, I guess that doesn't surprise me those numbers.
I guess from experience here at Fire, my boss, we've had, we we spent quite a bit of time looking at that from when it was quite it's always been fairly simple to cancel.
And I think we've never really had the the the the problem of cancellation. We've got an amazing customer service team at the moment who her great at dealing with cancellator. Grace into offering people, and what we did find is actually people who called the contact center to cancel, more often than not, their cancellation rate dropped. Satisfaction levels were high. Those who did cancel were great. We're a seasonal product as well. So we have customers sometimes who come who come users on a three month basis and then drop off and then come back during another season.
Because of the type of hobby we are, But we started doing real kind of research. And what is it that CS we're doing that? We're not doing it online. That that wasn't enabling that same kind of outcome. And it really was understanding what what's driving that cancellation.
And more often, people like the benefit of being able to know that they can say cancel so that when they do reach for that cancellation button, Actually, what we found is by by offering them alternatives or or offering them a lease here, but it needs to say, however you can set it, one of the biggest reasons is normally price, you know, they're gonna not get my money's worth. Easiest option to go for, but actually if you dig down and kinda go, what were you trying to what were you trying to achieve? You know, if people come to you because they wanna achieve something, there's something that's a goal at the back of their mind.
And if you're able to go, by the way, this is this is how folks you were to achieve in your goal, this is what we're aiming to do. How have you tried these features and functionalities? Give them a go. Could be actually providing them an alternative subscription, an extended free trial, for example, to be able to go.
You've not tried that, actually, which is probably something that might help you achieve or something we spend a lot of investment time is just better understanding what the customer's done to that point. So we can say, actually, we can see how far you've got. By dropping your keys and going, you've got to this far.
The only missing step you had was this bit. And we've seen some remarkable trends, changes already, just in being able to offer people the ability to. We're starting to test out recently. The ability to pause your subscription is something we're starting to look at as well.
But also the ability to downgrade your subscription. If so, actually, that's not the subscription you wanted to be able to do, or be able to extend A free trial for someone who is on a free trial, we noticed they've not used all the experience, and they've not used all the products that are currently at Dan. And by identifying what they've not used and have used, we've been able to be a bit more specific around tailoring that cancellation flow. So, though, we're not up to the elders CS team or able to do and be able to discuss with the customer.
We've seen some remarks changes on a cancellation flow. So the numbers in reflection, I think, don't surprise me.
But I I definitely found that if you really dig into action what the customer's why they're canceling.
I deal with my phone company. You fired up your phone company. You go, I wanna cancel. They're like, oh, you know, here they go. That you can do next thing, you know, I'm I'm still with the same phone company I've been for eleven years.
It's because they are to tell you things that you might not have known out.
I there's a really interesting article I actually read, which was talking about.
One of the big reasons why customers might churn, is actually, it's not for fear that It's too expensive. It's not fair, but actually one of the big reasons is, they're unaware is the, is they're unaware of what's available for them in the product that they're using.
And it's only late to run. I think the Evernote example takes three years for you to get to the point of Evernote to really understand it before we start paying for it. Yeah. And it's that kind of it's that kind of ability.
If people are looking for the cancellation, that's a that's more of a, like, I can cancel if I need to. So that doesn't surprise me, but the ability to then go. What have something's brought to you here. So at what point have you not been able to achieve what you came to do?
I think that becomes really quite important for the experts.
Yeah. I I really like that focus on, ensuring a positive customer experience, even if that customer may be leaving your service. And and that recognition that those customers that are are leaving, are in many cases likely to return in the future and ensuring that they have that positive experience so that they will come back I I've been finding, more and more retents that I work with are are kind of realizing the same thing that While the retention is important, it's equally important to let people go if they wanna go or make sure they're educated on the way out as you as you said. That they can make good decisions and also so that you can win them back in the future. So, I think that's a a fantastic focus.
Yeah. And I I remember doing this, we do this occasion. We do a tear down of of sites just to get a better understanding of how they worked. And and one of the areas looking at cancellation flows at the time when we're looking at now I remember seeing this one slide, which didn't have a cancellation flow.
It just had a number. Wanna cancel, call this number with a massive waiting line on the call to cut out disrupt. And the impact it had on the on the review side, and the impact it had on I wasn't able to cancel. I couldn't get through the phone number.
I tried calling. I was waiting for ages, and all they did was try to upsell me and keep me.
And that impacts your ability to acquire new users. That starts to send out the wrong sentiment. And you're absolutely right. People people sometimes do drop off and come back. But if they do leave, leave them with a sentiment that you that you want them to take with. And I think that's that's really important.
Yeah.
I'd like to return now to talk a little bit about, subscriber engagement and, you know, really keeping keeping those subscribers engaged so that they do coming backs that they're active.
I was wondering if you have any examples that you could share of of something you've implemented in your product experience that has, helped to improve subscriber engagement? Yeah.
I hope we do lots of that. We've got we've got a lot of our teams that spend a lot of their time, looking for their engagements. So, we we've done a lot of it. I get what's I guess A key focus for us has been, family, genealogy and family history is quite is quite a It's quite a challenging hobby.
It's not something that you can walk in and just pick up. And, I don't know why I sometimes use the analogy of of golfing of, you know, when you start golfing when you first go out and you hit the ball, you don't you don't hit the fairway. You lose your ball. And the temptation to just give up and say, I just I can't do this.
Since the same in in the same Gmail achieved, the idea of coming through, you really wanna find out your past, you wanna dig into dig into the history, find out where your family, your friend, find out all the links that you're trying, but very quickly, you understand there's there's quite a lot of work in trying to do that. We've got some amazing products that are starting to really support customers.
And so what's really important is that is that initial day or two of the customer coming in. The high expectation they have, they've decided to commit themselves to kind of grow their family tree and understand a bit more about it. And and they come in very quickly, they put the than living relatives then, and and very quickly, they find that they they get stuck because there's the name that they can't remember or there's a date that they can't remember. And so, It's very easy that point to suddenly go, now what?
And drop out really quickly. And, we identify there's a good big user based pair of customers who can never use product who never thought of going into this hobby who come in and hit that first stop, and you can tell that by the number of nodes they create, how far they get. And so, we we spent some some good valuable discovery time understanding at what point are they dropping off? Why they're dropping off?
What are the key blockers? And And small things we've done recently, really introducing kind of stepping stones for customers as they come in. So if you go hard to find my password, there's been a lot of time ready to kind of experiment as you start your journey, What are the key bits of information? What are the tools that we have that could really help support you?
Do they know, for example, that actually just the name and a date will get them will get them quite far back. Drop an area, for example, a location, and you can you can spread the mileage between how far their location is so that we can maybe pull out some more closer. And so there's loads that you can start to do and enriching information as soon as people start to put imagery or You know, we've got massive archive in newspapers. And so, actually, just by clicking a button, we can start to dig through our newspapers, see there's people that stories around that area or things that might trigger memories.
And, and just walking people through that first step, even on day one, is really starting to get those customers. And we've seen an amazing increase in our occasional rates in the first first of two days in the last two years. Since we've been slowly tactically just changing things and and seeing what the outcome is and seeing what people wanna get out of it and So that that on onboarding journey, that that that flow has been really, has made a huge difference in people's success rates in getting through those first few days.
That's great insight. And, and that is, you know, great information on, on how important that initial subscriber journey is in in ensuring that they are with you for the long term.
Yeah. Because, it it's very fall back into what we think is very easy to play. And I I remember a long time ago in a former life, building up a a website, and, we we did the behind the mirror experiment where, you know, you sit behind a mirror and you start to see people using your side. And and given them simple instructions, and very quickly understand the com things that you believe are common and easy to remember.
And, of course, yeah, you just click that top button. You click the logo takes you home. People are kicking around the sky going, how do I get back to that? How do I find and and because you've been so embedded in the product, you missed this slight little used that customs have given you.
And we've got some amazing technology nowadays where you can actually see via replays of people's journeys and seeing where they're dropping out and the data, selling exactly. Using all that to really get a good step off of people's first few days, I think it's huge. It makes a huge difference in the experience go forward. Yep.
Yeah. And then, finally, I'm wondering about, you know, kind of looking forward. So into into the next year, what areas of your subscriber experience are you in investing in? Or or what do you see as your areas of opportunity?
Yeah. That there's a huge there's a huge amount. I think we we've got opportunities to work on. And I think we've if you look at some of the areas where we're really strong, we've got some amazing newspaper content.
More recently, we've done some amazing updates to to our newspaper content, which is available on the site. And what we're doing is we're starting to bring through some of that news content into our users' trees and, and bring some of those stories I mentioned earlier about being but in a date, a name, a location, and not only will we find records and historical records relating to, but we'll really find some rich stories that might be associated and then linked to the to those people in your trading. I think what we've started to uncover there opens up a huge raft of opportunities and enriching people's trees and experience when working on.
I think the next year will will really start to hone that in and bringing that bringing that visualization. People love a story. People love to be able to get the con the context that surrounds, surrounds their family and surrounds people to to know what it was like, I think that context is really important. I think over the next year, there there'll be some real good development around that space.
And some of the experiences that we have now on our site that we've recently launched, I think that that really we're starting to see some real good engagement on it. We're starting to see some real good, responsive response for it. And and I can only see that growing over the course of the next year. So, which we start to really, really sort of really amazing features that are gonna drive up that, that experience level.
Primarily on users, so not just the users would we just recently released that even though last week, some new and more advanced features allow people to really dig in how to really find out the niche publication of what specific events and things that happened in the past.
What we've also done is is do some of the the back end work to really enable some of those stories to be pulled through for people who aren't quite so if they would be able to dig through that the research and how to narrow down the nuances of research. And so the mix of combining those two different kind of releases, I think we'll just continue as we go over the next year to really bring that rich contact through to our customers?
It comes Sounds exciting, and I'm, I'm looking forward to to seeing what you come out with.
But for now, I I think, Greg, I'd really like to thank you for, sharing your product insights and and experiences with us. And I'd like to thank everyone in the audience for joining us, as we discuss the subscriber experience.
Thank you very much.
Thanks, Jeff.
