Product Feature Prioritization Using Voice of Customer (VoC) - Case Study

A startup that builds mobile apps had a growing number of users but an increasingly messy product roadmap. It turned out that choosing what features to develop next was like guessing games with the users wants. MerkMetryx guided them to a data driven solution.

The Challenge

The startup had a huge backlog of potential features and limited engineering resources. They didn't know whether to spend their time on social sharing features or on their search function. Also, users kept leaving since the app became heavy and slow.

Before deciding what to spend on next quarter, the founders needed evidence of the features that would give the highest return on investment. They also wanted a "Voice of Customer" system so that they wouldn't keep spending time and energy on the wrong updates.

Our Approach

We deployed MerkMetryx platform to run 6 week roadmap optimization study:

Feature Sentiment Tracking: We sent out in app polls to 1,200 active users to hear and rank their most requested feature enhancements. Gap Analysis: We looked at 300 support tickets to figure out recurring issues which the current app version wasn't addressing. Interactive surveys: We reached out directly to the users who had stopped using the app and asked a few targeted questions to understand what was lacking. Competitive Benchmarking: We leveraged the platform to get the user satisfaction scores for the specific features our three leading competitors had and used these scores as a benchmark.

Key Findings

Users valued "offline mode" more highly than any new social or cosmetic features.
The search bar feature was the one that users accessed the most; however, it could not find 45% of very specific keywords.
More than 70% of power users thought that the on-boarding process was overly lengthy and confusing.
Customers were ready to shell out money for a premium "dark mode" and advanced data export options.
Most of the users ignored the newly added "discovery feed" and were calling it distracting.

Results

The startup deleted three underperforming features and this helped in decreasing the app size by 15%.
The retention of users improved by 40% during the initial three months of the update.
The development team was able to save more than 500 hours as they only worked on the features that had high demand.
There was a 25% increase in the number of premium subscription sign ups after the introduction of the export tool that was requested.
The number of customer support tickets caused by "app confusion" was decreasing to 60%.

The Challenge

Our Approach

We deployed MerkMetryx platform to run 6 week roadmap optimization study:

Key Findings

Users valued "offline mode" more highly than any new social or cosmetic features.

The search bar feature was the one that users accessed the most; however, it could not find 45% of very specific keywords.

More than 70% of power users thought that the on-boarding process was overly lengthy and confusing.

Customers were ready to shell out money for a premium "dark mode" and advanced data export options.

Most of the users ignored the newly added "discovery feed" and were calling it distracting.

Results

The startup deleted three underperforming features and this helped in decreasing the app size by 15%.

The retention of users improved by 40% during the initial three months of the update.

The development team was able to save more than 500 hours as they only worked on the features that had high demand.

There was a 25% increase in the number of premium subscription sign ups after the introduction of the export tool that was requested.

The number of customer support tickets caused by "app confusion" was decreasing to 60%.