Emplify Insights
Providing actionable insights for business leaders by making large data set simple to understand.
The Setup
About Emplify: Emplify Insights is a leading employee engagement software. It is a B2B SaaS platform that provides executives and managers with the information they need to make the right choices to improve their organization’s employee engagement.
The Setting: Emplify is starting to mature. The data provides unique insights, but is difficult to act upon without the aid of a human coach.
Problem Space: Emplify is differentiated by its human touch, but as we move upmarket we can’t continue to scale a human for every user. We need to rely more heavily on the product to provide actionable insights for our customers.
Personas: Executive and Manager
Project Duration: 4 weeks
Defining the Problem
Emplify's coaches and strategists have long used what they refer to as "The Action Playbook" to guide customers through the data and explain how to best act upon that data.
This playbook currently exist as a PDF and a worksheet, which executives must manually distribute to their managers. This takes a lot of time, and provides essentially no insight into actions for the execs, but the content of the worksheet resonates with people.
In the product, we do an excellent job measuring (using data to ID problems) and asking (providing tools to dig deeper into these problems), but we provide no way to implement (or act) to fix these issues. We need to close this cycle.
“How can we take the best elements of the Action Playbook and power them with the data inside our portal to drive actionable insight?”
Research and Ideation
We started by interviewing over a dozen managers and several executives to further refine our personas and discover what is an is not working throughout the process as a whole.
We created extensive story maps to understand the current process, identify pain points, and design a more efficient process for the future.
We hosted co-design sessions and design workshops both internally and externally to generate a wide range of ideas to address this problem space. Then we worked closely with product leadership and engineering to hone in on the “next best test” and decide on the most immediately impactful plan.
The design and future plans
The first step was a way for managers to understand their data and turn that data into action. We knew we had a little time before actions would need to be reviewed, so we focused our initial efforts on designing and building this flow.
Managers encounter a simplified flow that uses the “Influence” and “Struggles” algorithms to serve up the ideal ares to take actions. They are then presented with specific actions related to the area on which they choose to focus.
Next, we built out the oversight and tracking portion of the feature. Managers and Executives can view their actions and track progress using the Action Dashboard. Managers can only see their own actions, but Executives can see all actions within their organization.
Future plans include a mechanism for employees to leave feedback on how well their managers carried out their actions, and additional oversight tools for executives.
User Feedback
“A customer just signed up for another year, and said a big reason was the action planning feature!”
“Responsible action is so critical to the success of our leaders. I can finally see who is doing what without sending a million emails or making a dozen phone calls”