About Tomorrow.io
Tomorrow.io is the world’s leading climate adaptation platform, providing weather insights to a broad range of industries. Powered by its proprietary weather intelligence, Tomorrow.io delivers weather insights to customers in areas such as aviation, mining, transportation, government, defense and
construction from offices across the US and Israel.
Since receiving its first seed funding round in 2016, Tomorrow.io has established a global customer footprint and the capability to provide actionable weather insights worldwide. Don’t be mistaken in thinking Tomorrow.io is a simple weather app! The team maintains a dedicated in-house weather science team. It uses proprietary models, tying weather to operational decisions. Enforced truck speed
due to poor expected conditions, train derailment risk caused by crosswind speeds, or even warnings for logistics, and providing notifications when packing at high humidity to avoid wastage are all part of what the team is capable of delivering.
The organization offers these predictive insights via a web application, maintaining global insights in real time. The team even plans to launch its own satellites in the near future. Led by Shimon Elkabetz, the organization currently supports a user base of more than 40,000 organizations from various industries.
The in-house product and weather science teams combine to provide convenient templates for vertices from on-demand delivery, sports and entertainment, energy and utilities, and aviation.
The Business Challenge
Like all areas of technology today, Tomorrow.io operates in a competitive environment. Whilst the team has the leading platform today, capable of providing reliable and accurate weather data, the team also recognize that continuous improvement is key to maintaining product fit and their position as the world’s #1 weather insights platform. For Aviv Mizrahi, Tomorrow.io’s Product Manager on the web application, improving UX and maximizing the accuracy of weather insights was key.
I needed a single tool to reinvigorate user feedback and give our web app user community a voice and ability to share their experience to help us improve.
The team needed a tool that could connect experiences of users in the field with their in-house weather science teams creating the insights for the application, a connection that was limited historically. By connecting the two, Tomorrow.io sought to allow science teams access to instances where modeling was incorrect to refine situational modeling further.
Any solution would need to integrate with existing toolsets where teams already reside; the aim was to collect, assign and action new insight, breaking down distance and siloed information, not create new siloed pockets of data. The final checkbox for the project was to ensure any changes needed to start collecting this improved user feedback couldn’t be intrusive or detrimental to the user experience, with Tomorrow.io prioritizing a simple, streamlined experience for its users.
The Userback Solution
Userback provided Aviv and the product management team a platform to capture, assign and action feedback.
When Aviv started looking, the organization was already using a legacy feedback collection tool on their website. Still, Aviv felt the time was right to reassess the market and judged that Userback was the best fit for their new requirements with its visual feedback and scope for deeper actionable insights.
Userback provided Aviv and the product management team a platform to capture, assign and action feedback without relying on precious and sometimes hard-to-garner developer time and ongoing support. For Tommorow.io, the deployment met expectations.
We were up and running and ready to collect feedback in around 2 hours.
The straightforward operationalization and ongoing management were simple enough for Aviv to manage solo. Starting with weather insights and the core value offering from Tomorrow.io, the team deployed Userback to allow the collection of feedback relating to weather directly from their user base in the event of a ‘miss’ on their predictive modeling.
Feedback was collected directly within the app’s GUI in a non-intrusive way. With User Insights each weather submission automatically attaches map IDs for greater context and faster action. This weather feedback distribution was automated, sending submissions directly to the organization’s internal #weather Slack channel, where the science team communicates, Aviv commented “The integrations allowed automated distribution of feedback for action. We’ve seen the assign and action portion of our feedback improve significantly.”
Userback’s User Insights contributes as a customer success and support prioritization tool for the wider team, allowing teams to respond to clients intelligently based on their tiered support model and close the feedback loop with those users making submissions through the newly implemented feedback platform.
More recently, Aviv has adopted the Feature Request functionality of Userback, gathering a user ‘wish list’ of functionality to contribute validated ideas able to be added to future roadmaps. With these feedback types collected in the same way, feature-related requests are directed to the team’s Productboard tool to review and assign.
The Results
Within 2 hours, Tomorrow.io had implemented a rapid, code-free integration for collecting real-time data from its users.
The adoption of Userback has helped Aviv and his team to solve the most critical areas of their user feedback lifecycle — Capture & Collection and Assign & Action — which were at the heart of the project. A side benefit came when Userback could help close the loop with priority submissions.
The platform has created a sustainable method of collecting highly contextual, visual feedback without the developer teams having to spend time providing ongoing support. Thanks to the straightforward, no-code Userback installation, the collection point has been seamlessly integrated by adding Userback directly into the Tomorrow.io web app GUI.
Userback’s integrations and ability to append CRM and other information to any submission have simplified the organization’s feedback Distribution & Action. By connecting previously disconnected back-of-house science teams with real insights from their community, Tomorrow.io has significantly accelerated response, triage and adjustment times.
The science teams now receive deep insights from real users thanks to the automated collection of user session info. This connectivity created from the user to the science team is a crucial step in continuous improvement, according to the Tomorrow.io team and one of the most important projects of the year, according to Tomorrow.io’s Chief Weather Office.
No business can close every single piece of feedback when relying on a manual approach. The User Insights, capable of appending additional information from Tomorrow.io’s CRM tools, makes rating and next steps clear for the customer success and support teams with no extra effort on feedback submissions leading to the effective closure of priority submitters and a more streamlined process.
The most recent addition of feature request collection, introduced once core weather forecasting implementation was complete, is now providing product teams new insights, ideas and validation on future features and functionality.
Adding these customer-led insights to product roadmaps is helping find and refine the weather insights platform and maintain product market fit as user preferences and the climate at large continues to evolve.
This has been one of our most important initiatives of the year.
Today, the future looks bright for the Tomorrow.io team, now in a position to gather continued user feedback directly from their web app and feed weather science teams the information they need instantly.
Science teams are actively refining their predictive models to the finest degree possible and ensuring the combination of data and analytics provided is validated by real user feedback from those on location.
