Identification of Underserved Areas on the HubSpot Academy
Context
After conducting a workshop with stakeholders from the HubSpot Academy team, I was able to obtain what the team thought were top tasks for Academy learnings, i.e., a prioritized list of what matters most the Academy learners. However, these top tasks were only assumptions by our team’s stakeholders. The next step was to validate these top tasks and determine if any of these tasks are currently underserved by our platform.
Task satisfaction can be categorized into 3 categories: underserved, over-served, or appropriately served.
Tasks that are underserved provide our team with the opportunity to try to improve that tasks for our customers while tasks that are over-served provide an opportunity to try and improve the efficiency of that task.
To determine whether a task falls into one of these 3 distinctions, customers are presented with a specific task, and then asked 2 questions:
Scores from both of these questions provide us with an opportunity score that we can plot on a graph. The idea is that if a task is very or extremely important to a user but not at all satisfied by our platform, then the task is being underserved.
Tools: Survey Monkey
Method Used: Opportunity Driven Index (ODI) Survey
Participants: 388 HubSpot Academy Learners who had completed at least 5 lessons
Timeframe: 1.5 months
Results
Of the 10 top tasks we surveyed, we found that only 1 task was categorized as underserved.
The task that was underserved was: Applying what I’ve learned on HubSpot Academy into my professional role. 89% of participants said that this was very or extremely important to them, but only 72% said they were currently very or extremely satisfied with how this was currently being done.
In particular, certain segments of users felt more underserved than others. E.g., Non US-based learners felt underserved while US-based learners were appropriately served. A hypothesis here was that US-based learners felt better served because there is more content for them to consume.
Readout
The results were presented to the team, providing rationale into why the particular tasks was underserved and which segmentation of users was affected most.
Next Steps
Recommendations were provided to the product and marketing teams and further research in the form of a diary study was initiated. The goal of this future research was to test our hypotheses and determine why learners felt underserved by this task on the HubSpot Academy platform.
Specifically, it was crucial that specific segments of users (e.g., non-US based learners) were prioritized to recruit for future research in order to understand why these respondents felt underserved by this task.