Microsoft Office
Lets Improve!
Microsoft Office (Word & Excel).
Word and Excel go hand in hand, but there’s features of each that exist on their own. Combining them improves document management.
Customer
Allows users to submit feature requests and lets company develop the most wanted features.
Financial
Increased User Satisfaction leads to over $5 million in new revenue and 294% ROI.
Impact
Nice revenue bump. Fantastic source of new features for Product Team.
Competition
Competition vs Google suite is strong. Continuous improvement is critical.
Summary
Microsoft Office contains two programs (word, excel) that work similarly. Power users like publishers or data analysts use some of the more complex features of each, but the vast majority of users, are regular business people that are putting together reports, analysis and other documents, that need both written text and numeric analysis and graphics.
Having two separate programs makes users do part of their work in each program, having to create multiple files and combining them for the final deliverable. In addition formatting of pages in Word in different formats it’s very challenging for the non-power user, again causing users to create multiple files for one main document.
The IMPROVEMENT is to combine word and excel into one program that combines the capabilities of both and allows users to create multiple pages in a project document similar to the tabs in excel.
In addition to the combined new product, Office needs to continue to add features to maintain the high value (and price) position in the marketplace.
The 2nd IMPROVEMENT is the ad a feedback button to the main screen of all programs to allow users to easily provide suggestions as they think of them while working on projects.
Improvements
Combine Word and Excel into 1 Product
Improves document management for users.
Add Feedback Button
Add a feedback button to the new product to easily allow users to request new features.
Improvements – Details
Combine Word & Excel
Create one combined program that includes all capabilities of word and excel, including tabs to manage multiple types of documents in one Microsoft Office file. For example, the first tab might be Word tab that is the cover, the second tab is a Word tab that is the executive summary, the third tab is an excel tab, etc. All documents for the project are included in the same file, simplifying management of the documents for the user.
The vast majority of users have the Office Suite, or use an enterprise version with both Word and Excel included, greatly reducing the risk of cannibalizing revenue.
Add Feedback Button
Add a feedback button at the top, so users can make suggestions for new features or for how the program works. Office already contains a similar button for “coming soon” so the practice for users already exists.
The key is making this easy for the user to provide the input. The button should open up a dialogue window with a text box, and a screenshot button, I mean as opposed to opening up an e-mail or sending them to a Microsoft web page, and not a stupid survey, which are usually too long, hard for the user to fill out and you never know if they are looked at Both of those processes make it more difficult for users, and make them get out of what they’re working on in order to provide the feedback. The screenshot button allows users to submit a screenshot of exactly where they are in the program, to provide context for that request.
These suggestions would be an incredible source of information for the Microsoft product team that would show both ideas, and quantity of people interested in the particular idea.
Financials
The financial impact of each of the improvements should be evaluated separately, since the complexities and impact of each vary significantly.
Combined Product -Financials
Cost of development would be very high, based on the complexity of the current office products, and combining them into one, while not adding new features, would still be creating a new program. The financial impact benefit would also be very high, with this new capability driving more people to buy Office and more people to renew and upgrade existing licenses. With over 200 million monthly users (end 2019) for Microsoft 365, any improvements that have even the smallest impacts on new sales or renewals will have huge financial benefits.
Suggestion button – Financials
The suggestion button seems very easy to implement and rollout, with a majority of the functionality and design already existing. The financial impact of these changes seems impractical to estimate, and a better way to look at this is as an internal benefit to the Office Product team to continuously improve the products.
Notes and Assumptions
Prices
- Home Family $100 per year
- Home Ind $70 per year (Blended rate $85)
- Business $6-22/month/user, (basic to premium) Blended rate of $14
Business/Home Ratio 75%/25%
