Sajuna Fernando
Reward Gateway breaks down their winning formula
On 10th October 2019, in a private box at Wembley Stadium, five industry professionals with 60+ years of experience between them, smiled and nodded as they judged a presentation. Sevil Rahimova ticked all the boxes for them as she spoke about Reward Gateway’s Mission to Make the World a Better Place to Work through the use of insight and feedback. She stated,
Some people might think that a tech company is a bit like a fancy car – slick, cutting edge, but impersonal and cold. We believe we’re more than this. After all, we are in the business of employee engagement, so our products have to serve the people.
At Reward Gateway our most important value is We Delighting Our Customers which we do by listening to what they have to tell us. This is why we chose it to be our guiding star for how we innovate our product solutions.
Last year, we decided to test how well we listen and measure the results from our efforts which began 2 years prior. This was the basis for the initiative we built in order to compete at the UK Customer Experience Awards 2019. Our approach was simple: follow the evidence and present it with the same passionate enthusiasm with which we build tech.
As you can see from the RG Rocketship another one of our values is We Are Human and by bringing those two factors together we had the first step of our winning formula.
The six steps to success
Step 1. Start by combining the human and the tech.
Innovation is stronger when they are close. It gives our product and engineering teams the confidence to deliver great work.
Step 2. Next, have clear principles.
We’ve created a Product Manifesto with 8 customer-centred principles that keeps as a constant reminder of what’s important when building good tech.
Back in 2017, Sevil and her team brought in a methodology that we use in our Product Manifesto. They had taken a page out of Gov.uk’s design principles and brought our own RG twist to make the principals we use in our Product Roadmaps to date. The manifesto contains the following 8 customer-focused principles that play as a constant reminder of what’s important for the when building good software:
We then coupled up the manifesto with a problem statement framework helping keep true to the customer needs. But that was just the start from there we needed some two way communication.
Step 3. Add tools to get the most out of your clients insights and feedback.
Your customer-facing teams are likely already using an NPS tool. Keep close to any product feedback that’s included in the customer reviews.
Here are the three tools we used:
At the time NPS was used by the Client Success team to collect customer satisfaction ratings and feedback. What we had noticed was that many of the client scores coming in were actually including product specific feedback, so it was a simple yet an effective way for Product to get closer to the client, cause they were already trying to speak to us.
Another tool we’ve implemented is G2. G2 is a peer-to-peer, product review platform where our clients can anonymously review our products and the whole world can read it. We used this tool to help prioritise improvements, and through the use of this tool we became a G2 leader!
The final format we reinvigorated was our in-house Client Advisory Board sessions. We invite a diverse range of clients into our London office to spend half a day with us and help us shape our products. We get to show them different design prototypes and get to tell us if they solve their pains. The best part is that it was face to face, something our Product Managers don’t get to do very often. We now understand more than ever what a massive privilege CAB sessions were and hope we can continue to have these in the future in a new format.
Step 4. Continue to measure the impact and results with DPMO.
To have a comprehensive view of how well we were really doing we introduced the well-known methodology of DPMO as a quantitative way to measure the performance of our products. DPMO stands for Defects Per Million Opportunities. In our case our defects were the calls, live chats, emails employees have made to our support teams to be able to complete a task onsite), divided by the number of opportunities– the number of transactions that were successfully completed in the same time period for the same product.
Since adopting this approach to measuring product efficiency, it has become an inseparable part of discovering and qualifying opportunities for improving the user experience.
Understanding the drivers behind employee complaints is only half of the story. We also introduced FullStory to proactively discover and remove friction in the employee experience so we are able to have a wider view or our user’s experience. This, we hope, will help us to one day become a Stiga Four company where our products are 99.379% defect free.
Step 5. Share consistently and constantly with your colleagues. Communicating successes, results and challenges across the business keeps everyone in the loop.
One wonderful by-product of the initiative is the way we communicate internally which is with our clients voices at the fore-front. It expresses why we made certain innovations and improvements so that we can feed them back to our clients.
We adopted a simple and feedback-driven language, focusing on how we were solving customer pains and why it was important to do it. This gives our customer-facing teams much needed confidence and context in our solutions:
Our Product Success News is published internally every week without fail. So far, we’ve delivered 144 editions and counting.
Step 6. Complete by focusing on lessons learned and looking at the right metric to continue to succeed.
Last year our feedback-centred approach helped us deliver a total of 186 meaningful features or improvements. It’s our customer’s voice that guides us and their feedback that leads us onto our next objective.
Later that day, back at Wembley Stadium, the pressure and spirits were high. Sevil turned to me and said, “Whatever the outcome I’m proud of the work we have done.” Moments later it was announced that Reward Gateway was the Silver winner in the Use of Insights and Feedback category.
We share the award with our clients, since we couldn’t do it without them. Thank you to everyone who helped Reward Gateway win the Silver Award at the Customer Experience Awards 2019 for the Use of Feedback & Insight. The best part is that this initiative has had a company-wide effect and we in Product & Engineering are thrilled to be leading the way for customer driven innovation.
