We offer a bunch of different things, but we wanted there to be one front door to those services for the interface itself to automatically customize based on what a client or their institution already subscribes to, so that it didn’t feel like there were a bunch of empty spaces where there should be something else, but it really felt like a bespoke environment for their experience. And then that environment needed to play nicely with future offerings that we’re planning to roll out in the coming years. It’s still early and we’re collecting metrics from the new environment, but the portal’s been live for about six months now, and one of the early metrics is very positive. The number of visits to our portal environment has increased almost 70% across that six-month period, achieving new levels of visits that we’ve never even seen before. So early signs are that customers must like it or be intrigued by it and are spending more time in there.

Dave Cowing

There’s something you mentioned that I’ve seen play out in other organizations. You can have a fantastic product or service, but oftentimes clients evaluate you based on the digital experience and if that doesn’t measure up to the quality of that service, clients may degrade their opinion of the entire organization unfairly.

Geoff Collins

That’s absolutely right. I think we were approaching that point, or maybe were even past it, frankly, with our previous environment. Market expectations have changed across the last 15 years. User expectations about what environment should be have changed, and the new portal aligns more closely with user’s modern expectations.

Dave Cowing

What are some of the unique features or capabilities that the new client portal enables you to bring to your clients that the old portal did not.

Geoff Collins

It’s a pretty long list, but I’ll touch on some of the more obvious and upfront ones.

The new environment has a personalized content stream front and center. As soon as people log in, they see something dead center on the screen that provides recommended content based on what we know about clients through their industry, function, prior activity history, and stated areas of interest. We produce a lot of content and throwing everything at everybody could be overwhelming at times. So being able to provide a customized content feed, helps personalize the environment and helps feature our latest insights that are available. Every time they log in, there’s a new piece of content they see that keeps the environment feeling fresh and gives them reason to come back on a regular basis. So that’s a big one.

Overall search ability/findability is much better. We have a much better search engine now, with filtering and tagging that clients can use to refine their search results. We also used our in-house AI tool to help generate new types of metadata for every asset we have in the portal, and all that metadata is now searchable, which makes finding what you’re looking for a lot easier and a lot faster.

We deliver custom projects to our clients and clients are often curious about the status of those projects. So right on the front page, we have a project status tracker. It gives clients visibility into the status of their custom projects. You know which ones are actively underway, which ones are queued up next, and which really helps with transparency and we expect it to reduce the number of times that they’re either having to call us asking, or the number of times that we have to send kind of proactive updates because they can self-serve and see it themselves.

One last big one, and then I’ll stop, because we could go on like this for so long. One of the important things for us is for clients to understand all the different ways that they can work with us. We do a lot of different things, and they have access to many of those things through even a single subscription with us. So, we want to make sure that we’re reinforcing to them all the things they could be doing. The new environment does a much better job of teaching them what they could be doing with us through their existing relationships, or even by expanding their relationship with us. It helps empower our client facing teams who would otherwise have to do that themselves manually. It becomes an additional, you know, resource to give them some more leverage in those client education efforts.

Dave Cowing

There’s two items that I want to call out for different reasons. You started with f the content stream that’s front and center, and that’s an interesting one. This is a business to business platform. You’re providing services to organizations and education and corporates. Yet this is the feature that is pulled from a lot of social and consumer types of applications. So, there’s the idea of pulling metaphors that users are used to using in other aspects, and then tailoring that to the specific need so that users are familiar with it can add a lot of value. The other concept was this notion of education. A lot of people, when they build a product, get narrowly focused on how to use it to distribute or provide access to the service. That teaching angle that you mentioned at the end there, I think is very interesting, because it’s about teaching users how to use the platform, but also educating them on other products and services. It serves as a very subtle marketing and sales mechanism to show there’s more value that you can provide them.

Geoff Collins

You guys helped us in those conversations. The last thing we want to do is for that to be an intrusive part of the experience. We don’t want to bombard people, we want to help them find what they need but also promote things that we think might help them in other ways. And so, the vast majority of the environment is not in your face, pushing new services, but there are places people can go learn about those things should they want to.

Dave Cowing

It 18 months from kicking off the initial strategy to launch. What were some of the key aspects of that process, whether it’s strategy, design, implementation, change management, etc, that enabled you to get to a successful launch and those metrics you mentioned.

Geoff Collins

One of the things that you guys helped us realize early on is we don’t know everything and admitting that as part of this process and being open, to learning ourselves. I mean, we had a list of requirements before we even heard about NovusNorth, and certainly provided that as part of the kind of upfront content sharing, but you guys baked into your process some discovery and client research that helped make it better. It helped identify areas that we had under emphasized, and perhaps identified areas that, while would be nice to have, weren’t necessarily needed for an MVP. We’re a market research firm, and so eating our own dog food in that way is important, and it really provided a lot of a lot of value, and not just up front. We ran usability testing all the way through just to make sure the design was keeping in line with what clients need across our various segments. The communication between our teams was also an important piece. We talked literally daily, oftentimes many times a day, and that was some combination of your team providing updates and questions for us to answer. Also, we are a research team. We’re an inquisitive bunch, and so we probably ask more questions than your average client might. But you guys were great in entertaining those questions and listening closely to our feedback and input. So, the thought partnership and collaboration between the teams, was a really important piece. This was undoubtedly the largest tech project we’d ever conducted as a company, at least while I’ve been here. One thing that helped de-risk that was chunking the overall initiative into stages. That made the whole thing feel less daunting and gave our team and our decision makers the confidence they needed that things were proceeding in the right direction, and they had a chance to pause before biting off the next piece. So, lots of internal deliverables and checkpoints where people could ask questions get comfortable before moving on.

Dave Cowing

Two items you mentioned are worth calling out for other organizations. One is the notion ofnot assuming that you know everything about your clients, and asking the questions, observing how they work, doing the research. That hard work can yield a lot of insights that may either contradict or add to what you knew or what you think you know about your clients. The other one is that it’s one thing to design and build a new platform. But there’s a whole set of change that goes along with it that starts with bringing the organization along with it, especially when you’ve got you’ve got researchers and content creators and people in sales whose jobs are tied to how the platform works. Bringing them along contributes greatly to the success, because if they don’t believe in the platform, it’s not going to succeed at the end.

Geoff Collins

Absolutely. Now we had a large group of internal stakeholders who were keenly interested in this initiative, and as you said, they have different requirements. And so ensuring that we were listening to them and getting those inputs was really important.

Dave Cowing

What are some of the other ways that using AI in the platform today, and how do you envision it, you know, kind of adding to the value you’re providing in the future?

Geoff Collins

So, we are using it the way you describe to create metadata for our portal for all our assets. That saves us a bunch of time and, as we’ve mentioned already, makes findability a lot easier.

We’re also embedding it into some of our other products. We recently rolled out a new product called Rapid Insights. That product uses AI to expedite survey analysis. We do 1000’s of surveys every year, and we pride ourselves on being survey experts. To do it right, it’s actually a very complicated process and time intensive, and so the faster we can deliver insights to clients, that serves them well. But we don’t want to shortcut the quality steps we put in place to ensure they’re getting a result that we feel confident in this new product called Rapid Insights. It doesn’t just provide clients with the quantitative results from their survey, but it actually analyzes those data. It understands what the client’s objectives are, taken from the statement of work at the outset, and it drafts a narrative with insights and recommendations based on all of that. And of course, we have a human in the loop, and we’re reviewing those before they’re delivered to clients. But in many cases, that means that clients are getting their custom insights from us many weeks faster than they were before. So, embedding AI into our products is something that we think could be a win, win for us or and for clients. And then additionally into our products, we’re also embedding AI into our operations.

We have a 200 plus person research team here, and there are various tasks that we do regularly that AI can help make easier. Things like summarizing long documents that we consume before writing a report, preparing first drafts of those reports, proofreading. T hings like that can be real time savers, giving our analysts more time to spend on higher order work around critical thinking, insight generation, recommendations, etc. Those are some of the early ways we’re using AI. It’s a fast moving space, so I’m sure there’ll be more things we do with it, but that’s how we’re using it today. We have a team dedicated to being on the lookout for new ways for us to use it in our operations and our products.

Dave Cowing

As you’ve gone through this process of creating launching the new portal, what are the top lessons that you’ve taken away? That were either unexpected or more valuable than you might have expected?

Geoff Collins

You mentioned one a second ago around stakeholder involvement. One of the things that surprised me in this process was just how many stakeholders had an interest in this initiative. I knew I was excited about it, but I underestimated how many other people were excited about it at the outset. As a result, we had a very, very long list of requirements to consider for this project. Many more than we could ever get into an MVP in a reasonable amount of time. So, figuring out how to prioritize those things was important. You guys brought some helpful lenses to do that in terms of aligning with our long-term business objectives, our short-term objectives, but we also, ultimately, let the voice of the client break a tie and help us with prioritization. We want to make sure that we’re putting clients first and wanted to make sure that anything that we were putting into the MVP was aligned with things that were of client interest. That was a helpful determinant for us, and especially when there were ties or dissenting views or different views on certain topics, we’d let the client perspective help us prioritize.

A second one, and I credit your designers with this, is creating something that’s intuitive to use, easy to use, doesn’t need explaining. A simple to understand environment can sometimes be very, very difficult. I have a new appreciation for that. The number of different ways to communicate something to users or lay out something in the UI so that it’s easy to understand for a user on their first visit is something that we spent a lot of time on. Even though it looks simple now I can tell you that it wasn’t simple getting there. So making things simple can sometimes be difficult. Maybe another lesson or takeaway that I took from this process.

Dave Cowing
I think that’s a good one. I view that as one of the core roles of design is to, one, obviously, understand the needs of the customer, the user. But then two is to ruthlessly work to make it as simple as possible. A platform or products is there to serve the need that the user has, the user is not there to serve the platform.

Geoff Collins

Exactly, the easier we can make it for them to use it, that the faster they’ll get done what they need to do, and the more likely they’ll be to want to come back. We think that this platform, is many steps ahead of our last platform in that regard.

Dave Cowing
You’ve launched client portal, what’s next for the platform and for Hanover Research?

Geoff Collins

We did, we have launched our first portal for our K-12 clients, and we’re rolling out a new portal for our higher ed and corporate clients in the first half of this year. We’re actively working on that right now, but that should all be done by mid-year this year. After that, we’re going to be able to really take advantage of these new environments to roll out new products that live within them. Our team is actively working on a number of new products, which I won’t mention specifics here, but they will live in that new environment and take advantage of some of the features in that environment. We look forward to announcing those this year.

We are a market research company, and the product team spends a lot of time trying to understand users, their needs, their behaviors, and the new environment will help us do that. Leveraging some of the analytics that are part of this platform to better understand user behavior, what they’re interacting with, how long they’re spending on something, which parts of it are they consuming, which parts are they not consuming, where are things under trafficked? Then taking those insights to improve our products and services, is something that we’re really excited about. It becomes a whole new source of data for us to incorporate into our thinking around generating new product concepts and ways to improve what we already do.