by The Goal
Improve customer conversion, onboarding and retention.
My Role
Business Analyst & Experience Strategist
Expertise
Discovery – Empathy – Collaboration – Facilitation
Company
Avontage – A company and online application looking to bring bartering skills and services into the modern age.
https://www.avontage.com/
Team
Sean Serram – CEO & Founder
Carem Kipte – Social & Media Manager
Outcome
Sean and Carem didn’t realize how out of sync they were on whom they were, the goals of the company and their interpretations of their customers. After this work they not only were in alignment but they had a game plan to act on along with a process to use to work together in a collaborative and productive manner.
- Team alignment on company goals, strategy, and values.
- Improved understanding of the customer engagement and retention situation for all parties. Namely, that only 20% -ish of users remained on the platform and or completed sign up.
- As a team, we were ready for the next project phase.
Sean launched the Avontage platform in the Phoenix AZ, USA area in 2019 and nationally in early 2021. In 2020 he had concerns about the onboarding process as so many new members (est. 60%) never completed their sign up.
In late 2020, I arranged and led a discovery session with Sean and team using activities like profiling and journey mapping.
Project Discovery & Visualization Phase
Understanding the Problem
To better understand the underlying problem, I worked to become familiar with his offering, the problem space, and the platform all at a high level.
Define the goals
During my research I found several versions of whom advantage was, why it started and its intent. Making my priority to pin this down with Sean.
To help ensure that I got the full story and that his entire team was on the same page, I invited his community manager to all the discovery and definition sessions.
I leveraged an onliness activity; a brief sentence or paragraph that determines and helps define what makes your brand unique. This helped bring me and his community manager up to speed on what Sean saw in, and was planning for, Avontage.
Avontage is the only online barter platform in the USA for businesses to exchange services that supports local businesses (small companies, freelancers & venues) who want to support other businesses in their community. In an era of high costs and fees we offer a low to no cost alternative for most of your needs.
Understanding the users
This meant his goal is to provide an exchange service for businesses that helps them grow while saving money. I next worked with the team to solidify their perspectives of their markets. Using known information about their current customers, lost customers, and ideal customers.
Visualizing how the users impact one another
Given that the services being exchanged are between users, I added in a Persona Matrix activity to map out which users affected others and how.
Mapping the journey
I led the team in drafting the journey that they understood the customers were going through, then compared that with the journey they wanted customers to have.
Using the gaps between the two to create a high level to-do list for the marketing funnel/customer journey.
Results, Next Steps & Impact
“I absolutely love it! This whole process has been amazing and I can’t believe how much this applies to everything we do.”
Sean Sarram – CEO & Founder
The team impressed me with how they took to this work. They really understood the value this brought to them as a company and were quickly able to fold in many of our findings.
Next up was exploring the ideas formed during this work and diving deeper into the tools we were using. Which eventually grew into coaching and more.