360learning drives product strategy with customer feedback and data

360Learning launched in 2013 to turn companies into learning organizations and is now a market leader in collaborative learning. Its Learning Engagement Platform facilitates knowledge sharing for more than 1200 customers and 1.5 million end-users across 120 countries. To keep up with its steady growth, 360Learning uses Harvestr and Zendesk to manage customer feedback at scale and build customer-centric products.

The Problem

With 8 Product Managers and 8 product designers, the 360Learning product team is organized in squads. Each squad collaborates with customer-facing teams to build the right product strategy. Support, client success teams and pedagogical experts all interact with customers on a daily basis. They are the main source of valuable feedback and insights for the product team. Due to the company’s fast growth, product managers could hardly keep up with the amount of customer feedback and requests that were coming in. They ended up with a growing backlog of hundreds of requests that could not be tracked and prioritized.

When they sought to replace their dated spreadsheets and Trello boards with something more robust and built for the purpose, they chose Harvestr in combination with Zendesk Support. Both solutions helped 360Learning streamline communication and collaboration between support and product teams. They are now able to collect and take action on customer needs at scale, faster than ever before. With Harvestr and Zendesk, the company proactively prevents issues and misunderstandings in the product, while also reducing support workload.

A differentiating product strategy based on product-driven customer service

Customer-centricity is at the heart of 360Learning’s culture. Everyone in the company is doing customer service for at least a few hours per month. As they were using Zendesk Support to provide personalized assistance to their customers, it also became their main source of customer feedback. By integrating Zendesk with Harvestr, the support team can seamlessly escalate all this valuable feedback to the product team. In Harvestr, customer feedback from Zendesk is aggregated with feedback from Sales and Success teams, giving Product Managers a global overview of customer needs.

By helping identify product improvement opportunities, Harvestr and Zendesk allowed 360Learning to halve the volume of tickets they were getting on some of their products, such as the Knowledge Base. This product-driven approach to customer service helps them better anticipate and solve customer problems.

Backing roadmap decisions with customer feedback and quantitative data

In total, Product Managers were able to increase the volume of exploitable customer feedback by 100%. Harvester makes it easy to categorize those insights into customer problems while handling duplicates and measuring occurrences. Product Managers know which parts of their products generate the highest volume of customer feedback, and they finally get visibility on the most requested features. They use this data to inform product decisions and build their squad’s roadmap. Harvestr now plays an integral role in the company’s feedback and product strategy.

By backing decisions with both qualitative and quantitative data, 360Learning also wanted to structure its prioritization and roadmapping processes. In addition to Zendesk Support, 360Learning integrated Harvestr with their Salesforce CRM to prioritize according to customer segments and business data. For each feature idea, Product Managers know how many customers requested it, who they are, and how much revenue they represent for the company. Product managers are empowered to make well-informed decisions that will drive product and business growth. By making this process transparent, the product team is also able to align the rest of the company on their decisions.

Giving visibility and transparency on product decisions

Thanks to its integrations and collaborative features, Harvestr helps 360Learning optimize all aspects of product communication. In Harvestr, each product squad has its own space, where roles and responsibilities are clearly defined. Product managers can build and share their own roadmaps with the rest of the team, who can easily follow the evolution of projects they are interested in. When support agents and client success partners need to enquire about the status of a specific roadmap item, they will know immediately who they should talk to. They can engage the conversation with product managers, and understand why some projects are prioritized, while others are not.

By sending targeted roadmap status updates, Harvestr even allows product managers to automate product communication. In Zendesk, support agents get notified about the status of the tickets they send to Harvestr. In Salesforce, client success and salespeople can view the roadmap for each customer. All in all, the whole company gets better visibility on roadmap decisions and product strategy.

Looking ahead, 360Learning wants to integrate Harvestr further with customer data sources like Zendesk, to better inform product decisions. Product managers also expect to increase collaboration with other teams, by adding more people to the platform and by integrating additional tools like Figma.