Background

Ensuring existing customers continue to come back is an important component of any business. We realized that the second engagement is critical for retention. Once clients got past this milestone they were very likely to continue to engage with us. A problem we were facing however, is that the rate at which clients came back for their second engagement was much lower than desired.

After reviewing what I knew from past research projects, several key pain points kept coming up.

Project planning and scoping was difficult
The process is of hiring was complex
Hiring is expensive it is difficult to stay on budget for complex projects
Managing the project once the hiring was complete was challenging
There is a lot of friction when it comes to re-engaging with us

The Decision Statement

Decide which of the pain points identified in previous research we should work on in order to improve the rate at which clients return for a second engagement.

Evidence Needs

In order to make this particular decision I needed to gather the following pieces of evidence:

Stack ranking of the pain points we’ve identified in terms of how much they influence a clients decision not to return for a second engagement

Research Methods

Based on the decision the team was trying to make and the evidence I needed to gather, I chose to run a survey to get a quantitative assessment of the impact of each of the pain points we’d already identified.

Survey Design

I recruited two groups of participants
- Churned clients who had not returned for their second engagement
- Returning clients who had completed at least 2 engagements
Participants were asked rate the severity of each of the issues previously identified
Participants were asked if there were any other pain points no listed that they experienced in their most recent engagement
Churned clients were asked to what extent each of the issues factored into their decision not to return

Results

Trouble scoping the project and going over budget were the most impactful challenges Churned clients faced in their first engagement.
Churned clients also rated these challenges as significantly more impactful than clients who returned for a second engagement. (p < 0.00 for both comparisons)
There was no other significant difference in the rating given by the churned clients and clients who returned for a second engagement.
Churned clients ranked “going over budget” significantly higher than “trouble scoping projects” when asked how much each impacted their decision not to return (p=0.03).
“Going over budget” was also far more problematic for churned clients than returning clients.

86% of churned clients rated “Going over budget” as either impactful or very impactful compared to only 30% of returning clients.

Conclusion and Decision

The team decided first prioritize work on building tools to help clients manage their budget before and during a project.
Additional interviews would be conducted in order to understand the context of the challenges clients had with managing their budget.
Scoping and project planning tools would be the next focus for the product teams.