Empowering Customer Managers to proactively manage offices and gather important data

tl;dr

🚩 Problem:

Knotel provides office leasing and services, with Customer Managers handling in-person customer issues and requests. However, there were no consistent standards across office spaces, and no centralized system to track whether these standards were being upheld by Customer Managers.

🧪 Solution:

Our solution was an MVP mobile app that enabled Customer Managers to proactively inspect spaces and record issues (per Regional Manager’s request) and quickly check in with customers and log ad hoc issues (additional experience that mimicked their day-to-day and created a stickier product).

🥇 Results:

The beta product launched 🚀, with a 20% increase in Customer Managers proactively creating tickets within 4 months. This shift correlated with improved retention.

👀 My behavior:

  • Co-created a scrappy but effective research study to gather user insights

  • Created a new persona by deeply understanding user pain points and goals

  • Mapped user communication networks to uncover key data-gathering opportunities

  • Tested design concepts that shaped the MVP and prioritized future features

  • Engaged users for continuous feedback - collaborating on designs in a shared space

  • Advocated for a bottom-up approach, building a product users actually wanted vs mandated to use

  • Scoped must-haves and nice-to-haves with developers for efficient delivery

At Knotel, after helping launch our office listing platform (think Airbnb for flexible office leasing), I led design in the retention space, building tools to proactively address customer needs in their offices.

01 Defining the problem

Regional Managers at Knotel approached my team for better visibility into how well their Customer Managers maintained office spaces, proposing a way for them to audit their spaces on a bi-monthly basis.

First we took a step back to consolidate our knowledge and identify gaps.

Through early discovery, we found a reasonable correlation: the more issues reported by customers themselves, the lower their satisfaction with Knotel and the more likely they’d be to churn.

We observed that most issues were reported by customers, not Knotel Customer Managers. We hypothesized that increasing the number of issues reported by Knotel would reduce the burden on customers and boost their satisfaction.

Before solutioning for Customer Managers, we took the time to understand their needs. We conducted 5 walkthroughs to learn about their day-to-day, developing a new persona to highlight their pain points and goals. Key takeaways included:

  • They are the face of Knotel, holding valuable qualitative data on customers that no one else in the company has.

  • They often feel undervalued, carrying the weight of customer disappointment even when they’re not at fault.

“I try my best to keep the customer from seeing all these inefficiencies and communication issues happening behind the scenes — but sometimes it’s just impossible since Knotel still operates like a startup.”

We discovered that Customer Managers had the best, real-time knowledge of customer sentiment that wasn’t being actively recorded. To understand how this information could be used, I mapped out the current communication network in our Knotel office ecosystem. This valuable customer health data could help account managers and sales teams intervene earlier to prevent churn.

02 Diverging on solutions

With these opportunities in mind, we set out to create a solution that motivated Customer Managers to record customer data consistently.

We knew we had to meet Regional Managers' request for a sort of 'Space QA'—an audit when they had time to be in a proactive headspace ensuring spaces met Knotel standards. But we also saw the need for a 'Quick Check-In' experience that matched the reactive headspace Customer Managers operated in 90% of the time (“Hey, there’s a leak in the kitchen—can you fix it?”). This experience needed to be fast, intuitive, and enjoyable, helping them take action quickly while capturing valuable insights.

We created 20+ sketches to help gain additional insights and converge on ideas. The researcher and I presented these sketches in 1:1 sessions with 5 Customer Managers.

Checking on space and reporting issues proactively

Checking on customers ad hoc or reactively

Blue sky ideas

03 Converging on designs

We refined design concepts, validating a Space QA (pushing for a proactive mindset) and a Check-in (complementing their 90% reactive reality) as distinct workflows.

To gather continuous feedback, we posted designs on the office wall and involved Customer Managers for real-time input. Near the end, we tested an MVP prototype with Customer Managers using a think-aloud approach.

Key takeaways:

  1. A customer pulse check needed to be quick and contextual. To spot trends in customer mood, the MVP focused on collecting freeform data to consider a multi-select of top reasons later.

MVP

Future iteration

2. As a user navigated between apps to report issues, we found this experience more frustrating than originally predicted. To maintain speed, the most common actions needed to stay in-app.

3. Showing more detailed progression is important, as "Space QA" already feels tedious. This was a strong nice-to-have as we weren’t confident its absence would impact adoption for the beta.

Given the uniqueness of each property (e.g., "A few of my customers don't have a reception space"), Customer Managers must be able to edit the checklist.

While not a blocker for beta, the lack of editing capabilities would require ongoing workarounds, making it an important follow-up.

04 Results and next steps

We launched a month-long beta with 8 Customer Managers, some familiar with the app and others new to it. Our beta goals were achieved: 1 customer check-in for all customers and 1 space audit completed every 2 weeks. We received no blocking feedback, so we continued releasing the app to more Customer Managers, iterating and adding features.

Early results of soft rollout:

  • 20% increase in Customer Managers reporting issues within 4 months

  • all Customer Managers rated the experience highly for ease-of-use and intuitiveness (4 or 5 out of 5)

Next steps

  • establish baseline for customer health, enabling further analysis of correlations (e.g., does time-to-issue resolution affect customer satisfaction?)

  • enable Sales and Account Managers to receive real-time customer insights at the right time in the right way