Last updated at Tue, 25 Apr 2023 20:22:14 GMT
Building personalized and exceptional customer experiences
At Rapid7, we strive to give you, our customers, a personalized and exceptional experience every time you interact with our organization, our products, and our services. This is what we refer to as the "Customer Experience". In order to clarify what this term means, Don Peppers from the Peppers & Rogers Group defines the Customer Experience as “the totality of a customer's individual interactions with a brand, over time”.
We are all customers
In our daily lives, we are all customers. We would all like our experiences with every organization to be personalized, seamless, and exceptional. Yet, whenever we interact with an organization, I am sure that most of us have felt that we are interacting with many organizations in one, and that the right hand has never even met the left hand, let alone that they do not speak to each other. That's a difficult obstacle for any organization to overcome, as each organization has many different individual employees interacting with many different individual customers. The downside for all of us is that we, as customers, have to deal with less than exceptional experiences.
Meanwhile, at Rapid7…
…while we strive to provide exceptional experiences, we know that we are not perfect. So, what are we doing about it? A lot actually! The first step is to define a strategy, so we have a vision and we know where to focus. Our strategy consisted of mapping out our customer's end-to-end journey, initially at a high-level in the form of a Customer Experience (CX) Framework.
The model defined the start of the journey, namely where potential customers become aware of, and start initial engagement with Rapid7, our products and our services. Following this, the majority become actual customer's where they start to use our products and services, and finally they evolve as customers. The latter, might be using multiple products together, or using our products and managed security services at the same time to ensure they are as secure as possible.
Now that we had a high-level framework in place, the next step was to get a little more granular, and figure out what the touch points were within each of the AWARE, ENGAGE, USE, and EVOLVE phases of the journey. We mapped these out as:
Discovering experiences
With a CX framework and associated touch points in place, the next step is to find out what our customers experiences are. If customers' interactions with a specific touch point is great, we want to make sure that does not change; if interactions could be improved, we want to make it much better.
The UX team found that the best way to discover our customers' experiences was to collaborate with Evan Jacobs, Rapid7's Senior Manager of Customer Marketing & Advocacy. Evan runs the Customer Voice program, which ensures that customers have a say in our product roadmaps. While this is a wonderful opportunity for our customers to let us know about the features and functionality that they want to see in our products, it is also a wonderful opportunity for us to learn more about our customers' experiences.
UX Focus Groups
Some of the recent ways that Evan and the UX team collaborated to learn more about our customers' experiences was by holding a series of focus groups. At UNITED, Rapid7's annual customer conference, the User Experience team ran two focus groups. One of the focus groups looked at customers' experiences around Nexpose Now, and how we can make that an even better experience. The other focus group concentrated on the end-to-end customer experience, whereby customers marked out which touch points they interacted with using the map above, and told us about those experiences.
The UX team, as well as representatives from Product Management and Product Strategy, learned a lot about how customers' journeys, what worked well, and what could be better. For example, customer's mentioned that overall they were really happy with Rapid7's Customer Success and Customer Support teams are one of big differentiators in our favor. We also learned that reporting from our products could be better. Some reports, such as the Top Remediation report, were really helpful in making our customers successful as it allowed them to prioritize on fixing the vulnerabilities that made the biggest impact on their organization's security posture. Other reports, however, need more customization before they could truly be deemed useful.
Local User Groups
In addition to the focus groups at UNITED, we also holding local user groups. Within the past few days, we met with customers in Washington DC. Prior to that we met up with customers in Cambridge, Massachusetts and in New York City. Several other user groups are being planned across the US and Europe. Looking at the combined results of what we learn allows us to see patterns. This, in turn, allows us to deep dive on specific areas of the customer journey.
We find that the user groups are not only a place for us to learn about customers' experiences they are also beneficial for our customers, as have an opportunity to have a peer-to-peer discussion with other security professionals. Our customers also get to hear about the latest features and functionality in the product roadmap, so they can influence the development of those features prior to release.
Want 'in'?
The best way to participate and to have your say, which will help us to build our products your way and to ensure you have the best experience possible with Rapid7, is to become part of the Customer Voice program. It just takes a few seconds to sign up, and the benefits will far out weight those few seconds! We look forward to speaking with you soon about your feature and functionality requests and about your experiences with Rapid7!
Thank you for reading!
Ger Joyce
Sr. User Experience Researcher
Rapid7
