What Happens After Customer Research?

Aug 12, 2004

OK, here's the scenario. You're observing a day of customer research - listening labs, usability tests, focus groups - and taking notes. By the end of the day, having watched several users muddle through your company's service, you have a long list of ideas for improvement. The discussion with your coworkers at the end of the day gives you even more items for the list.

What happens then?

In the worst case, nothing happens - except that people go back to their cubicles feeling that their own pet peeves about the site were proven right. Day-to-day business takes over, and the long list of improvements never gets implemented. Soon enough, management discovers that the site still isn't performing, and the development team begins scheduling the next round of customer research.

In a better case, the development team assigns action items to various people, and over the next few weeks, several of the tactical improvements make their way onto the site. A few minor problems are solved, management notices a slight rise in "the numbers," and the project is deemed a success.

Indeed, the team in the second case might be deemed "customer champions," because they observed customers, acted on the findings, and created a slight - but still measurable - improvement. What could possibly be better?

Actually, there's a MUCH better way.

It's not that the second team did anything wrong; it's that they left out a main piece of customer experience work: thinking strategically. Simply going through a "laundry list" of tactical improvements is bound to lead to small, incremental, tactical improvements in the business.

It's also hard, when working from a long list of improvements, to prioritize the changes. The development team has 42 ideas of things to fix, and time enough to fix five of them. Which five will it be? Who makes the decision, and what's the basis for the decision?

All of these issues are solved by thinking strategically. Direct customer research should be followed by a phase [see below*] in which the team creates a customer experience strategy which organizes all the findings of the labs - and creates, holistically, a much bigger and stronger vision of the improvements to the service.

Creating the strategy can start during the labs, as the stakeholders observing customers discuss, after each session, what they saw. Throughout the discussions, the stakeholders begin to form a consensus about what the customers' unmet needs are, where the site's strengths and weaknesses are, and about the new or surprising findings arising from the customer lab sessions.

When labs are complete, the observers - development team, stakeholders, executives - should have the basis for a customer experience strategy: an initial idea about how to conceptualize it, and the beginnings of the consensus needed to support it.

Here's a less boring way to put it. If you observe customers carefully, and participate in the discussions afterwards - you might begin to see the outlines of "the elephant in the living room." It may be a bodacious "gotcha"; it may be a radically simple transformation of the site that no one thought of before; it may be a corporate taboo that you couldn't voice until the customers voiced it just then in the labs.

Keep in mind that customers' behavior and actions during labs merely set the context for the strategy. This is an important point: observing customers is essential to forming a strategy, but the customers themselves don't create the strategy. Just try asking customers during labs: "What's the strategic transformation of this site that will best improve the business metrics?" No. But from watching several customers throughout labs, you can begin to form a strategy, based on what they're doing, or not doing; where they're succeeding or failing; what they say or don't say. There are no hard-and-fast rules except to keep your eyes and ears open.

Perhaps not surprisingly, we find that it's the senior executives who "get it" the most as they observe listening labs. Junior staffers might latch onto their pet peeves - tactics about links or colors - but the VP of Marketing, or the CEO, will take in the larger picture about how customers are interacting with the business.

Don't misunderstand: Listening labs do create a list of tactical changes. Yes, it's all there for the designers and information architects to dig into (as they should): navigation changes, link colors, you name it. And we do recommend that the tactics be fixed. But THE TACTICS ARE SECONDARY - we focus primarily on getting that customer experience strategy created.

I recommend officially creating the strategy after the labs, once you've had time to digest what happened and to analyze the lab results. This also gives you a chance to bring the observers together again and get their buy-in on the strategy. Gaining that consensus, the nod to go forward with the strategy, is THE most effective way to ensure that meaningful changes will occur on the site. It's also quite easy to get the nod, if the stakeholders were present at the labs.

I'll finish with a personal experience, the most recent set of listening labs I attended - earlier this week, in fact. The stakeholders of this informational site came into labs with some ideas about tactics that needed to be fixed. By the end of the labs, most of the tactics were validated by customers; the stakeholders guesses were right. But that was secondary. What the client found most useful was the new strategy that emerged: a transformation of the site, which no one could have predicted, which stemmed from observing customer behavior, and which finally came to fruition by the collective efforts and discussion of the observers.

* Creative Good's Customer Experience Method (CEM) uses this terminology: After the direct customer research in Phase 2, listening labs, Phase 3 creates the customer experience strategy. Read the CEM whitepaper for more.

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