Developing a customer-led product strategy allows companies to drive retention by embedding customer feedback into their technology development roadmap. By building customer-focussed software products, a company can successfully: enhance customer satisfaction and consequently reduce churn, launch and monetise new modules driving upsell and cross-sell and differentiate itself to the competition.
So, it’s no surprise that having such a strategy is crucial to enhancing growth. But how can you develop a successful strategy with the right balance between evolution and overextension? Peoplesafe, the workforce safety tech provider, recently won the Tomorrow’s Health and Safety Awards for both their cloud-native software platform and their mobile application. Specifically, Peoplesafe has developed its platform so that it can roll out new scalable tools quickly that specifically address customer needs. We chat with Naz Dossa and Will Solomon, CEO and CTO at Peoplesafe, to find out how they have successfully moved their product forward.
1. What drives successful product extension?
Understanding customer needs and solving them through technology is the key to any product strategy and the engineering sprints that follow. Will Solomon explained that they saw customers were increasingly asked by their employees if they could use Peoplesafe’s personal protection app for their commute rather than just whilst they were at work. Peoplesafe’s customers also ran a survey asking their employees for direct feedback on the new features of the app, and this confirmed concerns around incidents happening on the way to or from work. “TravelSafe was designed to help commuters by allowing a user to specify their destination. We can then work out if the journey is taking longer than expected or not going as planned and automatically raise an alarm should an individual fail to reach their destination on time.”
Similarly, Peoplesafe was looking to target new markets which had specific needs. Naz Dossa, CEO of Peoplesafe, discusses the forestry sector as an example. “This is a sector where one of the key challenges for workers is losing signal and therefore the ability to request assistance in the event of an incident. This led to the development of the Peoplesafe’s RoamSafe feature, which uses a second eSIM on the phone which can allow the Peoplesafe app to connect to any of the mobile network operator networks available, improving land coverage from ~83% to around ~94% ensuring the best likelihood of raising an alarm when needed most. That is key for workers in more remote areas and gives Peoplesafe the right to play in certain verticals.”
2. Prioritising your roadmap
Overcomplicating things is a key temptation and challenge when considering product evolution. Whilst it is important to listen to customer feedback, you don’t want to build an overcomplicated product that therefore lacks utility. Not only will that potentially irritate a lot of customers (and your engineers!) but your sales team also need to clearly understand what they are selling and the value it brings. Will explains, “It’s definitely a choice on value and effort. All feedback and ideas are brought into the product team, where they are assessed for feasibility and market potential. We have a product review board that meets every six weeks to prioritise these opportunities based on our business strategy and goals.” This structured approach ensures that only the most valuable and strategically aligned features are developed, preventing the product from becoming overly complex and difficult to use.
3. Successfully testing in the market
Has your solution answered the customer need you are trying to solve? Product strategy and then development are only the first couple of steps towards successful delivery – it is important once beta versions of a product are ready to test that they are working as intended, ideally before it gets rolled out fully to the market. Will shares how this works at Peoplesafe. “Because of the modular nature of the app, we can turn on the feature for certain companies as a trial first, often for a subset of their workforce. We can then review employee usage and behaviour, which allows us to see if it really is a solution, before selling it as such.”
Peoplesafe asks for direct feedback on new features through customer surveys. By involving customers in the process and iterating based on their feedback, they ensure that their products are well-received and effective in real-world scenarios. Will comments, “By listening to customers we’ve been able to understand what features are most valuable. Not only does this better service customers, but we’ve also halved the battery consumption of our app by learning how it’s being used.”
4. Selling benefits to customers and driving adoption
Driving adoption of new products requires clear communication of their benefits. To encourage Peoplesafe’s customers to activate new features there are webinars, product information and marketing campaigns. Naz mentions, “We have a very active customer team who have weekly webinars to highlight how customers can get more value from the product and see what else is on offer. Modules can also be packaged in ways that make sense, for example if you adopt the TravelSafe product there is a logic that you might want vehicle crash detection. Bundles allow you to create a tailored solution for certain end users.”
While the new features allow Peoplesafe to target new users or markets, Will also highlighted that it has transformed their renewal process. Without additional features on offer a renewal conversation can be purely functional or come down to discussions about price. If you can show new features as part of that discussion, then you can either demonstrate improved value for the same price or use that touchpoint to upsell additional features that are useful for the customer. “We also look at the data to see if a customer is underusing new features that we believe are relevant to their needs. That way we can deliver early intervention ahead of renewal such as training to drive adoption – that ensures customers are getting value well ahead of that conversation.”
Peoplesafe are continuing this product evolution mindset with AI, for example summarising very detailed user alarm reports that can take some time to understand, into a short paragraph to save customers time in understanding incident reports and the risks in their employee bases. Will explains, “We have a lot of sensitive data so all AI projects start and end with privacy, but that data can offer valuable insight, such as high accident or fall locations, to offer better insight back to customers in an ethical way.”
5. Evolution at the heart of growth
Naz explains the impact of the product roadmap on Peoplesafe’s growth projections, “The growth is twofold. We’re able to differentiate against competitors, giving us stickier revenues. Now people are getting more than one service, and that drives better longevity. Secondly, we can address new markets – both in terms of new verticals, but also extension within existing customers. A notable example is Pret A Manger – they had already adopted workforce safety technology to activate audio recording device to capture incidents, with Peoplesafe’s Alarm Receiving Centre listening in and escalating to 999 where needed. The feedback was that their staff were being threatened when they left the stores, on their way home for example, so now they are also rolling out TravelSafe to their staff to provide that additional reassurance.”
With a greater total addressable market, and stickier customers, it’s clear that making product evolution work, is a great driver of growth and business value.
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