PROBLEM

In a contactless world, storEDGE wasn’t great at facilitating communication between storage facility operators and tenants.

In early 2021, we asked our customers to rank storEDGE’s core features in importance to their business, and how satisfied they are with their current state. We learned that while customers were mostly satisfied, Documents and Communications was in danger of being a very important feature set that wasn’t meeting customer expectations.

Learn how we solved this problem below, or skip to the shiny stuff.

RESEARCH

Pains and Preferences

I dug deeper into the issues through 1-on-1 customer conversations as well as sending a more in-depth survey that was specific to documents and communications. I didn’t ask what features were missing. Instead I looked for shared pain points to identify opportunities. Here’s what I learned:

1. Personal email is used often to bridge storEDGE feature gaps

2. Texting is preferred by tenants but storEDGE tools are limited

3. Editing documents is “scary” and unpredicatable

Document Editing Confidence

3rd Party Communication Tool Usage

2-Way Text Message Composer

Before:

• Just enough to get the job done.

After:

• Expanded the character limit from 160 to 1600 for easier conversing, and added the ability to send and receive media files.

• Sent and received media all have shortcuts to save to a tenant’s documents, view in a new tab, or remove from conversations (which is helpful for sensitive information). 

• Media can also be previewed and organized before it’s sent.

• Also added a way to format branded signatures for each facility that can automatically include a logged-in user’s name.

2-Way Email Composer

Before:

• Limited formatting options. No attachments. No easy way to insert links.

After:

• Upgraded to a snazzy new editor with lots of formatting tools, including the ability preview emails with their assigned template and email signature.

• The most sought after feature was the ability to attach files, which we enhanced with the ability to attach templated documents from storEDGE.

• Along with the option to insert standard links, we added the ability to insert links to e-signable documents.

Email Template Editor

Before:

• We started with limited formatting tools unless you know HTML.  Templates and signatures were only available to automated emails.

After:

• Email templates got a new editor with the same formatting tools as 2-way emails. The editor also included a new tool for inserting and manipulating images.

• We added a new “User name” replacement field that automatically inserts the logged in user’s full name when the email is generated.

• These email templates are also newly available to 2-way emails, so that both in match in style and signature.

🥳 A year later, we done made it better! 🥳

After sprinkling these enhancements all throughout 2021, we checked the numbers again and we made a dent! The same survey revealed a marked increase in satisfaction for storEDGE’s Documents and Communication features. We also attribute some of the steady rise in our NPS score to the release of these crucial enhancements.

2022 Core feature Importance and Satisfaction

storEDGE NPS Score

What I Would Have Done Differently

After we formulated our original hypotheses, we surveyed users to validate them. We got positive feedback on every single one, so we decided to implement them all. But myself and the product team didn’t account for weighing the impact of them against each other. Because of that, our most impactful pieces had to drop nice-to-have requirements when we ran out of development time. In retrospect, I would’ve proposed eliminating SMS signatures out of the lineup because they would not be used as often, to focus on making text and email attachment features more robust. I’ve since made impact/effort discussions part of our standard process.