Back Market is an online marketplace for refurbished technology with a mission to reduce electronic waste by encouraging people to rethink their technology consumption.
Back Market operates in 13 countries including many regions of Europe, Asia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Founded in 2014 and headquartered in Paris, France, Back Market has successfully raised over $1 billion in 6 funding rounds (the latest in 2022 from a Series E round).
As Interim Product Managers for one of the squads within Back Market's Customer Care tribe, our role centered on enhancing the support ecosystem for Customer Care Agents. Our primary objective was to equip Agents with streamlined and user-friendly tools to ensure prompt and dependable assistance to customers filing claims at Back Market.
Central to Back Market's ethos is a genuine concern for both customers and sellers, exemplified by the provision of dedicated Agents who serve as mediators, striving to achieve optimal outcomes for all parties involved. Within the AXE Team (Agent Experience and Efficiency), our mandate was clear: develop tools that not only simplify Agents' workflows but also elevate the quality of service delivered, emphasizing efficiency and excellence in customer care.
Live Chat for Customer Care has emerged as an industry standard across e-commerce platforms and, for the Back Market Customer Care team, providing real-time support to customers has been a longstanding goal. This tool aimed to facilitate real-time discussions between Agents and customers, fostering collaborative problem-solving and swift issue resolution.
The team had already created and run a “Proof of Concept” of a Live Chat, that operated for one month. Now, the time has come to advance to the next stage and build a more robust and scalable solution - an MVP.
💡 Proof of Concept (PoC) - is a demonstration of a product on a small scale that focuses on determining whether an idea can be turned into a reality. The goal is to test if the idea is feasible, viable, and would meet customer and business requirements. A PoC usually has an end date, where the idea is evaluated and a decision is made to scale it or kill it.
💡 Minimum Viable Product (MVP) - a product with just enough features to be usable by early customers who can provide feedback early in the product development cycle. An MVP doesn’t need to have an end date (unless it fails its purpose), and further iterations/features can be built on top of it.
The MVP was designed to validate and test three key assumptions:
We conducted a comprehensive survey among our user base - Customer Care Agents - to gauge their experience, and gathered insights into potential enhancements that could drive increased efficiency on their end, consequently improving the overall customer support experience.
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Employing the Impact vs. Effort Matrix, we thoroughly assessed feedback from both users and the operations team to pinpoint functionalities that merit inclusion in the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) scope.
After determining the key functionalities for the MVP, we created user flows to map and streamline the new experience for both Agents and Customers, together with the Designer and Content Writer.
We prepared the new tracking plan for the Live Chat MVP, to ensure we were collecting the necessary data based on our success metrics:
We analyzed customer-reported problems to discern which ones could feasibly be resolved within a single live contact.
Not all customer issues can be swiftly resolved through live conversations with a Customer Care Agent, owing to various factors such as dependencies with delivery companies or the need for further investigation. Thus, it became imperative to pinpoint optimal scenarios where live interactions could effectively address customer concerns, ultimately leading to heightened satisfaction.
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The plan underwent a thorough review and received approval from key business leaders and C-Level Stakeholders in Customer Care.
When developing an MVP, it's crucial to anticipate future iterations and ensure the scalability of the tech solution for ongoing evolution. With this foresight, we formulated a Scale Plan for the Live Chat, focusing on additional new functionalities, scaling to other markets, and increasing the number of agents and customers using the tool - incorporating success metrics for each next phase. Collaborating closely with the Engineering Manager, we assessed the required effort for each stage and outlined a tentative timeline.
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We successfully introduced the Live Chat MVP into the US market and monitored its performance over two months.
Our primary objective with the MVP was to validate the three crucial assumptions mentioned in the sections above, enabling us to determine the viability of proceeding with the subsequent phases outlined in our Scale Plan.
The preliminary findings revealed a consistent upward trend in all success metrics (KPIs) when comparing Live Chat with alternative resolution methods provided to customers.
These results affirmed the validity of the above assumptions.
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💡 Launched an MVP in 4 months - deliverables included a list of functionalities and mapping of customer issues to target with the Live Chat feature. Coordinated the work among all team members ****(the development team, designer, content writer, training and content Materials Team, and Business Lead) to finalize and launch the MVP in 4 months.
💡 Developed an expansive Scale Plan for the Live Chat Feature, prioritizing the integration of new functionalities based on user feedback, expansion into additional markets, and increasing the number of users.
💡 Increased customer satisfaction by 8% and decreased time to resolution by 7 days compared to asynchronous resolution options.
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