Optimizing CX with Customer-Led Product Innovation

How Best Egg leverages the DISQO CX platform for concept testing and product feature prioritization

Introducing a new product to the market can be daunting, especially when it’s geared toward an audience outside of your existing customer base. You need to understand what motivates or attracts this new audience and demonstrate how your product meets their needs. This is the challenge long-standing DISQO client, Best Egg, faced when launching their Flexible Rent product. Before going to market, Best Egg needed to understand which product value propositions resonated with their audience to minimize risks and fuel success.

Our new case study explores how Best Egg leveraged the DISQO CX platform for a refined understanding of their new audience targets and ultimately achieved a successful launch. They realized their ambition to keep their customers at the center of all decision making. We spoke with Best Egg’s Head of Innovation and New Product Development, Katie Hanson, to discuss how she crafts the right experiences for Best Egg customers.

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Katie, tell us a bit about yourself and your role at Best Egg.

Best Egg is a financial technology company that helps people with limited savings pay for things they truly need, and become confident with their finances. As VP, Innovation, Strategy and New Product Development, I build bridges between data and strategy, between exploration and execution, and between unmet customer needs and the products Best Egg offers. I love using technology to solve problems, particularly in the personal finance space.

How do you foster a culture of innovation while still prioritizing data-driven decision making?

A data-driven culture is the key enabler for innovation at Best Egg. We value an iterative test-and-learn approach, seeking continuous feedback from customers to enhance our offerings. To ensure we maintain a clear focus on delivering innovative, data-backed solutions, we ask three essential questions: 

1. What problem are we solving and for whom? 
2. How will we measure success? 
3. What data or proof do we have to determine how to best solve the problem?

These questions not only steer our efforts, but also highlight areas where additional research and data are required. Best Egg then leverages the DISQO CX platform to better understand the problems we seek to solve, the individuals we serve, and the potential solutions we are exploring. Through this process, we can bridge knowledge gaps and make informed decisions, minimizing risks with data-backed innovation. 

With a data-driven approach and commitment to continuous improvement, Best Egg empowers the team to keep our customers at the center of all decision-making and create meaningful impact. 

Best Egg is a champion of customer centricity. How do you bring this ambition to life across the company?

Have you ever been in a meeting about improving conversion or reducing costs and, a few minutes later, the team has three action items to implement? This is an overt example of how we can forget to include customers in our solutions, and we’ve all been there. 

At Best Egg, we avoid this by asking, “What do customers think we should do?” or “What do customers think isn’t working today?” Our core values “Never Satisfied” and “Be an Advocate for our Customers” drive a customer centric-approach every step of the way. We firmly believe that involving customers in our decision-making process leads to better outcomes. 

Here’s an example. To boost conversion on one of our landing pages, we used the DISQO CX platform to test our content against our competitors’ sites. Surprisingly, customer feedback challenged our assumptions around what was causing friction on the page. Armed with these insights, we developed four improved versions for customer testing and moved the leading concept to A/B test with remarkable results.  

Customer centricity boils down to including the customer all along the way. A commitment to shaping our products, experiences and processes around customers accelerates progress toward our vision and business goals.

What prompted you to seek out the DISQO CX platform?

Driven by the need for access, speed and ease, Best Egg landed on the DISQO CX platform. 

We have existing research tools that are fast to use, but limited to small sample sizes, hindering our ability to test hypotheses and concepts comprehensively. We also have tools that provide access to a large number of customers, but the setup and data analysis process is time-consuming, often taking weeks or even months to complete end-to-end. Additionally, some options require highly experienced researchers to ensure quality results, which creates barriers to swift decisions and progress.

The DISQO CX platform opened doors to a vast number of target customers, enabling Best Egg to connect with our desired audience with little effort. By utilizing templates and setting standard audiences, we could swiftly create high-quality tests, achieve faster results and eliminate the need to rely solely on data analysts for insights. DISQO’s automatic generation of readable reports, complete with graphs and charts, further expedited the decision-making process.

Over the last 12 months, we’ve conducted approximately two tests per week with the DISQO CX platform with a total of ~15,000 people. No other tool we explored allowed us to conduct research on this scale with minimal support from our team.

What features do you value most about the DISQO CX platform?

1. Templates: I can create a concept test, add additional questions, upload the assets, and have a draft for review in ~15 minutes. For our Flexible Rent product, we met at lunch and had a test live by the end of the day.
2. Speed: Our Flexible Rent test had about 500 participants within a highly specific audience segment. From launch to results, it took less than 48 hours. The data was turned into digestible charts and summaries automatically so that even non-researchers can leverage the findings.
3. Customized Audiences: We created and saved set target audiences for all of our products. Now, when we set up a test in addition to using test templates, we can also use those same templates to test even faster.

What are your main goals for the partnership?

Our goal with the DISQO CX platform is to enable any team across our organization to quickly test hypotheses with their target customer, so they can quickly make informed decisions. We give broad access to the product so everyone can review the data and comments.

Despite common misconceptions, customer research doesn’t have to be time-consuming or a barrier to innovation. Our partnership with DISQO has empowered us to scale agile research, be more customer-centric, and deliver human-centered solutions and experiences. 

How do insights from the DISQO CX platform shape your future planning? 

Insights from the DISQO CX platform were leveraged in our most recent strategy planning. We looked at all tests run over the last 6-12 months and used the aggregated data to support our three-year vision, strategy and roadmap. With insight into what resonated (or not) with customers and their common attitudes or perceptions, we were able to more confidently establish a go-forward plan.

How do you see CX evolving in financial services in the coming years?

We know that price matters to customers, but so does value. People are willing to pay more when they see the value. Many products in the financial services space have moved to commodity products, like checking accounts, savings accounts and loans. But, done well, experiences create just as much value. Differentiated CX that delivers unique value will be a key lever for companies looking to maximize revenue with existing customers and attract new customers. 

Download DISQO’s full case study with Best Egg for more on customer-led product innovation.