Rapid Prototyping to Find Ways to Onboard New Customers and Reduce Carbon Emissions

OVERVIEW

A fast-growing carbon accounting SaaS platform was looking for new ways to successfully onboard new users. We integrated with their team to help uncover and develop original ideas to increase adoption.

THE CHALLENGE

Our client wanted to increase subscriptions from new business owners to their cloud-based carbon accounting software for small businesses. This is an increasingly crowded and competitive sector. Although their SaaS product (Software as a Service) is rich in features and backed by expert support, the value is more evident through extended use rather than first impressions.

Our client needed to find a way to cut through market noise, introduce users to the standout features of the software and for them to quickly see how it would benefit their business. Assessing the carbon emissions of any business creates a significant data collection and entry burden upon the user, as well as often a steep curve of learning. This was causing a drop-off during the onboarding process. Entering this data is essential but we thought there could be a new approach to support potential customers and onboard with great success.

THE IMPACT

Since implementing our improvements to the onboarding journey, our client has seen significantly decreased drop-off rates, as well as reduced customer acquisition costs. Not only this, we augmented the product roadmap with feature improvements, each validated in our rapid prototyping with end-users and provided new tactics for user acquisition to the marketing team. The client team have also started to apply our innovation playbook to their user engagement, which has helped them identify new features and increase reduce the time to ship.

THE APPROACH

Over the course of 8 weeks, we got deeply immersed in the tricky problem and created and tested novel solutions to solving it that our client’s engineering team could implement as part of their product roadmap.

We formed a single project team with the client’s engineering team. The mix of internal product knowledge and fresh eyes combined with the blend of skills from Stance gave the team the diverse perspectives needed to find novel solutions.

Over the course of the engagement, we got the product team closer to their customers by running innovation sprints to identify insights, come up with feasible and viable ideas, and then trial and iterate prototypes. In total, we ran three prototype experiments before making recommendations to the senior team based on the most promising results. 

The stand-out insight was that the average end-user of the product within a target business was struggling to find time to learn the ropes of the product at the outset. We found a more incremental and ongoing discovery of product features and benefits significantly reduced drop-off. We also found that providing free guides and data collection tool-kits, combined with targetted SEO, was a very effective way to build organic user engagement.