Problem: Canopy's CRM required an overhaul to continue successfully going upmarket. This overhaul required a change from a lateral hierarchy to a parent-child (client-to-contact) hierarchy.
Solution: Throughout the project, we conducted 50+ user interviews and even more surveys as we iterated on the various design and flow changes this overhaul entailed - including but not limited to an updated client list, client record, import experience, etc.
The Problem?
With Canopy’s previous CRM structure, the process of connecting related client profiles as spouses, dependents, and custom relationships was cumbersome and required a lot of workarounds that our users had to bushwhack themselves.
Essentially, Canopy had a very lateral structure that was very limiting as we were moving up market and garnering larger accounting firms. The ability to have one profile for married couples (a client to contact hierarchy) was the #1 top requested feature at Canopy before this project was taken on.
Ideation & Design
As far as research goes, each phase of the project required its own set of discovery user interviews, competitive analysis with other tax software, and usability testing as we iterated on the design and functionality of these changes. Overall we have talked to 50+ users and have interacted with 100’s more as we have sent out various surveys. Also,we as a team collaborated and ideated on Figjam and various white boarding meetings. On top of this, extensive design reviews and design collaboration took place with the UX team as I worked on this project.
As this was an overhaul of Canopy’s CRM as a whole, the affected areas of the app were extensive.
While I won't have all of them are imaged here, this new hierarchy structure merited functionality and UI changes to the following areas:
•An updated client record creation flow with the ability to add existing or create new contacts for the record
•An updated client record with a new contact area
•A client info drawer that users can access across the different tabs of the client record
•An updated client list
•A brand new contact list
•The affordance to create client groups
•An updated client portal invitation experience
•An updated client import experience
•And various cross squad functionality and UI updates to bring the app’s other features to the new structure
Updated client list with affordances for new contact structure
A brand new contact list to house contact data outside of client records
New functionality for client groups
An updated client record with a brand new area for contacts
Success Metrics
We launched the restructured CRM to only new customers in September 2024. For the new customers, as Canopy holistically will be new to them, we are hoping to gauge people’s efficiency while using the app. These users will be seen as a sort of "beta group" so we can find bugs and fast follows.
We are putting analytics via Mixpanel throughout the various CRM features to track performance and usage.
For existing customers, we are hoping to have 75% migrated by February 2025. Our biggest hope (and fear?) is that our users won’t churn. Introducing such a paradigm shift in a product’s life cycle like this is not ideal and is bound to cause frustration. We have been working diligently with our CS and GTM teams to ensure that our users will have plenty of education, assistance and resources during migrating into the new structure.
On the product team, we will be mindful and in tune with our users as they adopt this change and are planning on continuing the conversation flowing via user interviews to see how our users are doing and what pain points we can address as fast follows and improvements.
What's Next?
As stated above, we are working on a migration flow for our existing customers. This migration will allow our users the opportunity to see a subset of their data in the new hierarchy presented in the new CRM structure. There will also be a guide (glossary) that provides extensive education as to what this restructure will entail. So far user feedback has been very positive and we look forward to rolling this out to our users.
