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The "secret sauce" for customer experience projects
Jun 7, 2007
"Why should we hire you?"
A potential client recently asked me - in not quite those words - what sets the "customer experience" method apart from other user experience and usability vendors she was considering.
I went over the basics of the method - setting business context, conducting customer-led research ("listening labs"), creating a customer-focused strategy - and then I added one more thing.
"While I firmly believe in our method," I said, "our 'secret sauce' is something really simple. It might even sound trivial, if you haven't tried it."
The potential client said she was all ears.
"OK," I said, "Here it is, the one thing that most vendors ignore, but we insist upon."
And then I told her:
We get the stakeholders to watch the labs.
In other words, we get all the decisionmakers for the website, or product, or service, to take a full day away from the office to sit in a quiet observation room to watch customers using their service. They all watch together, and then they discuss what they observed, after each session.
After more than ten years of customer experience consulting, I'll tell you confidently that there is no better way to build consensus about improving the customer experience than to get stakeholders to observe customers first-hand, in person, in real time, right in front of them.
Consider some of the barriers that come down, just by getting people to sit in a room together to watch customers:
- "Fiefdoms" disappear. No one argues for their pet feature when they see customers failing (or succeeding) in the same way, session after session.
- Departments talk the same language. IT, marketing, executives, designers all see their customer - in the flesh - the person who pays their salary! - as the person to learn from.
- Everyone sees that customer experience is a strategic issue to address, across the whole organization, not a collection of tactical tips 'n' tricks for Web developers.
- Perhaps most importantly, stakeholders across the organization understand - from first-hand experience - how important it is to conduct customer research. (It continues to amaze me how few companies ever have any contact with real, live customers.)
Of course, not all customer research is equally effective. My experience is that non-directed research (not highly scripted traditional usability tests) gives the customer the best way to show their experience; and one-on-one research is much more effective in getting honest feedback than focus groups, which are subject to group dynamics and the bias of the facilitator.
But whatever method one chooses to use - and they all have their place and their effective use - it's surprisingly helpful to get the stakeholders there to watch.
- - -
See also:
- More about "listening labs," non-directed research
- More about the customer experience method (PDF)
So, after telling her about the "Secret sauce", did you get hired ?
I can attest that this approach work amazingly well and sells ideas/concepts that can't be captured in after-the-fact presentations. Additionally, we have gone as far as granting "veto" power to anyone who attends research over those who have not.
Yes.
My experience is that it is also best to have stakeholders observe customers in a "listening lab" environment. It's also valuable to get stakeholders to observe customers using their product/service in real life situations. Get out on the floor or out in the field and observe the use of your product/service. This helps reduce the effect/bias the customer may feel from being watched or from not being in their usual environment. Depending upon the situation, it may restrict your ability to interact and ask questions. Either way, I am constantly surprised by the number of senior executives who don't interact with customers on a regular basis.
I completely agree, I believe usability testing can be used to get stakeholder buy-in as most stakeholders never interact with their customers and therefore don't understand customer experience design methodologies. From my experience we did this on a regular basis at a company and found stakeholders started booking their space upfront and had to move to bigger labs to cater for all who wanted to sit in.
This will sound very cynical, but another benefit of client stakeholders attending lab sessions is that they can use/abuse what they observe for their own purposes and agendas. They can refer to what they saw in the lab in future conversations, presentations, and meetings with their colleagues and management. Anytime someone can refer to what they saw in a usability lab they immediately gain a lot of credibility. Naturally, the flip side is that they can selectively remember the things that support their agendas and overlook the things that hurt it. So sue me for being cynical here, but hey, a big part of the job of a consultant is to make our clients look good.