Boosting Customer Loyalty: Key Lessons Learned from a 20% NPS Drop

Hi there, I’m Olena, the Head of Product for B2C at Atlas, a biomedical holding company that specializes in genetic technologies.

Today, I’d like to share the story of our search for growth opportunities for our products and the results we encountered along the way.

Let’s dive in!

How It All Began

As the Head of Product, I'm in charge of the user experience for our DNA and microbiota testing products across both desktop and mobile apps. When I joined Atlas, the company had been around for seven years and the average employee had been there for 5-6 years. The team needed a fresh set of eyes to take a look at our product line, so I was tasked with evaluating the current offer and finding ways to boost B2C sales.

We started out by analyzing our sales funnel. The results were passable—we had average conversion rates and our acquisition strategy worked. Tweaking the sales funnel alone wasn't going to make a significant impact. We had to look into other growth hypotheses.

Search for Opportunities and Early Insights

Our next move was to analyze the LTV and upselling opportunities. We put together a long list of ideas for expanding our product line but quickly realized that they were either too expensive to implement or had little profit margins, and sometimes both. So, we decided to take another look at our existing products and search for growth opportunities there.

We began with customer development and analytics.

The first important insight we uncovered was that people talk about DNA testing a lot—during coffee breaks with colleagues or when having lunch with friends. Alright, so what we have is a fun, trendy product. Great. Armed with this knowledge, we delved into the data—studied our sales numbers, interviewed our users, and went over the 2,000 feedback forms we've gathered from customers over the past two years.

As a result, we found out that 90% of people share the results of their genetic tests with family and friends. Moreover, 60% of our surveyed customers first learned about our products from a relative or someone they know. It also turned out that 10% of all sales were purchased as gifts after a successful personal experience using the product, 10% of customers bought microbiota after buying a genetic test, and another 20% purchased a genetic test after buying microbiota.

Key Issues

The research provided valuable insights. We learned that our products were going viral. The next step was to figure out how to improve them. Yes, people did talk about genetic testing, but we needed to know exactly what our customers were saying. Were they satisfied? Disappointed?

So, we ran surveys to measure the number of satisfied and dissatisfied customers and discovered that the overall NPS for our products was -20%. As we looked at the results from different perspectives, we discovered additional insights that we later used in product development and marketing.

Take the most dissatisfied customers, for example, with an NPS of -60%. They took a genetic test in order to get recommendations on the most suitable type of sport or nutrition plan. In our ads, we promised to do just that, but in reality, genetics cannot be a reliable source of information in this regard. As a result, customers' expectations were not met.

We also found that customers with health-related concerns were more dissatisfied with the product than those interested in learning about their ancestry.

After ranking the issues by frequency and importance, we identified two primary concerns: the test results were either not informative enough or too complicated to understand. We tried to tackle the first problem by engaging a copywriter to rewrite our text. The thing is, the information we offered was just as detailed as our competitors’, give or take a few traits, which were not critical. Still, customers remained unhappy, and we wanted to know why.

Poor UX Design: The Root of All Problems

In search of a solution, I tried to reproduce the initial user experience during a UX interview. I asked potential customers to log in to a test account and give me feedback. In 8 out of 12 interviews, users displayed identical patterns—they were skipping whole sections of information because of poor navigation.

Our "Health" section, for example, had three subsections: multifactorial risks (20), hereditary diseases (300), and other health-related factors (20). Clicking on "Health" in the main menu led to this fork, but the most clickable card on the homepage directed users straight to the subsection on risks.

After checking it out, users kept following the side menu to the sections on nutrition, sports, and origin. This way, they skipped over the entire section on hereditary diseases and other health-related factors. The same thing happened to “Origins”. Users saw a high-level list card but didn't notice the button leading to a page with detailed information.

We analyzed the metrics and confirmed our suspicions: one in five clients didn't see the details of their origin, and every third user skipped the health-related sections.

Results

As a result, we set out to revamp the navigation in our users' personal accounts. The initiative paid off: our NPS increased from a negative average of -20% to a positive score. At the same time, we improved the visibility of upselling blocks. These combined efforts led to a 33% increase in upselling and a 20% increase in half-year LTV.

During the process, we had to deal with many unknowns. To some extent, NPS is subjective and slow to respond to changes; it is difficult to establish a correlation between sales numbers and the viral effect, and cross-selling one-time products doesn't address the issue of long-term LTV.

Despite all that, this story aims to show how important it is to keep searching for patterns using all available means, even when you're unsure of what you're looking for.