My job at Juro is never dull. As a legal tech startup, Juro make contracts simple and effortless for modern businesses, and it’s dynamic – the tool is constantly being improved. We add new features and benefits weekly, which I then help our existing customer base to understand and use. It’s not always easy, but their positive reaction to a faster, better, more accessible platform is why we’re here in the first place. There are five main stages in the process:
1. Testing
As customer success associate, I try to be involved with product development from start to finish – as someone working directly with customers, it’s crucial to understand how the product is developing and improving to solve problems for users. My role is:
Stage one: I support the design team by providing feedback from our customers.
Stage two: Once new features are developed, we’ll test internally for a week before they go live. This helps us iron out issues or bugs at the earliest stage possible.
Stage three: We allow an initial set of users to start using the new feature, before rolling it out across all accounts.
2. Feedback
The volume and type of feedback depend on the customer. Some might be too busy to provide it. Others might not be comfortable trying a new feature in the first place. We work with legal, sales, and HR teams, so sometimes a customer might even feel like the new feature isn’t relevant for their team. That said, we’ve been really lucky so far – most of our customers are highly proactive when it comes to testing and offering feedback.
Legal teams have been a great source of feedback when it comes to testing our template editor and negotiation features. We take the time to walk all legal customers through our new features individually in order to understand their usage and behaviours with new features. This helps them to encourage their counterparties to work outside the legacy tools they’re most familiar with, like Microsoft Word. Behavioural changes take time and effort: it’s our job to add value to that change, making it feel both seamless and worthwhile.
Sales teams are usually more hands-on. They love to dive straight into new features without waiting for training. They’re more comfortable with trying different platforms and they adapt to changes quickly. In these cases, we’ll often train our customer’s sales lead, and they’ll cascade the information to their sales teams. Sales users are laser-focused on finding the best efficiency whilst also engaging their prospects, so feedback tends to come from using the feature in real-life scenarios, as opposed to spending too much time in training.
HR teams, in my experience, are as comfortable using new features as sales users, but also value testing as much as legal teams. They want to ensure they deliver the best experience to their employees, so we work hard to engage in valuable one-to-one training and feedback sessions with HR customers.
3. Development
Building Juro’s product is vital to the growth of the company, and it’s crucial that our brand and product develop side by side – we want anyone coming into contact with Juro to understand what we’re about, what we do, how we do it, and why. There are several key reference points that influence us, to different degrees, when we decide which new features to explore.
Our vision: Juro was founded to make legal more human. This idea needs to be at the core of any new feature or service we choose to build for our customers.
Customer feedback: It’s impossible to know the problems our customers are looking to solve unless we communicate openly and frequently with them. When planning a new feature, we always ask our existing customers about their use cases, past experiences and pain points. Their feedback is invaluable: it lets us design features that will address their concerns in the most effective way. We also invite customers to try beta versions of our improved platform to make sure it works as anticipated.
Market research: It’s important to be aware of what our competitors do, but at the same time, other people’s plans and projects shouldn’t hold us back from coming up with unique solutions that work better for our customers and our product.
External software: Referring to software from other sectors is only important if it intersects with our own service. If we want to provide the best experience for our users, we need to ensure that they can integrate Juro with the other platforms they know and love, like Salesforce and Slack.
4. Results
A feature is only successful when 80% of our customers use it and get value from it. If we’re going to change the way users manage their contracts, we must inform them of anything new as soon as possible. For small changes we use short in-app messages and notify our users via email. We also mention it to any customer specifically during a call or meeting, if they have been waiting for that specific update.
For complex features, we create awareness in advance in our community through our email newsletters, social media, webinars and in-app guides. We’ll also offer dedicated training to customers and their teams where necessary. We’re lucky to have highly engaged customers, and we generally get almost instant feedback from our power users. It’s our job to get people excited about new features, so when we hear comments like “this made my day!” or “can’t wait to test this right now,” it’s a great validation of what we’re building. We’ll usually jump on a quick call to walk users through all the different ways they can leverage new functionality with their specific use cases, and look out for anything that might be missing from the feature.
5. Learning lessons
With a role as fast-paced and enjoyable as mine, there’s a lot of room to learn and grow on the job. For example, I’ve learnt that it’s unrealistic to expect to teach people every single detail about how the software behaves – instead, we aim to give an overview of what’s possible.
I’ve also learnt that it’s important to go over each customer’s specific use cases first, before showing them new features. This allows me to incorporate their feedback into the training and make it that much more relevant and memorable for them. If there’s a specific workflow they are already following, then we try our best to demonstrate how that will work in the updated product.
Even after all this time, our customers ask questions that I never anticipated – an innovative customer will find a way to use the product that’s new, exciting and challenging to navigate. So, of course, working at a legal tech startup, the biggest lesson I’ve learned is to expect the unexpected.
Visit Juro’s website and find out more about contract management software.
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