Not every Jira ticket results in a product update at the anime streaming platform Crunchyroll, but in this instance, it did.
In August, the company released three new subscription tiers with varying plan features, like offline viewing and ad-free experiences.
Following the release, anime fans from around the world eagerly signed up for free, 14-day trials before committing to one of the new plans.
Sounds business as usual for a new service launch, right?
That was the intention.
An unexpected error occurred when existing Crunchyroll customers couldn’t switch to the new plans without signing up for the free trial.
Negative feedback via support tickets began piling up, and when the number of similar complaints reached a critical mass, the support team’s Jira system triggered a ticket alarming the team of the issue.
From there, it was up to the support team to identify which Crunchyroll team would tackle the issue to ensure a smooth fix with minimal interruption to current product roadmaps.
Crunchyroll’s Director of Customer Service Matthew Reyes walked Built In SF through resolving this issue and shared how his team prioritizes feedback and assigns responsibilities.
Describe how your company typically acts on customer feedback. Once feedback has been collected, where does it go?
Feedback is separated into types and entered as issues in Jira. These types could be feature requests, beta bugs, sentiment or issues with corner cases. Once the tickets are created, they are then divided by services, platforms or features and assigned to product, payment or engineering teams for impact evaluation. Service examples include payments, video, e-commerce and growth; device teams include mobile, Xbox or PS4; and features could be offline viewing or our watchlist. From there, the product manager that oversees the specific service or feature on the ticket takes the lead to triage. If the issue is cross-functional, then each product manager brings in respective product managers to coordinate.
BEHIND THE ANIME:
Take us through how customer feedback recently prompted a change in your company's product or services.
An increase in reports of a specific type of problem, even a known issue, triggers an update of a Jira ticket. This happened recently regarding a sign-up process for a new Crunchyroll offering. The sign-up process was designed for first-time customers looking to sign up for a free trial. We learned that returning customers couldn’t get to the premium membership payment page without signing up for a trial. The customer support cases around this issue began to increase, which caused a Jira update that showed the value of allowing returning customers to skip sections of the sign-up flow.
Once the Jira update came through, our payments team took the lead in solving this issue. With the help of multiple teams, including our growth team, we implemented a solution that allows customers who already know what they want to go directly to the payment methods to subscribe to one of our premium plans.
How long did the fix take?
The work itself was a simple fix, but, given this was an emergent request, we needed to prioritize developer time within the current roadmap. Because of that, the issue took two weeks to evaluate, design and test, and another week to schedule for production rollout.
