Scaling insight for a better customer experience

For a while now, the relationship between customers and those they buy from has been critical to organizational success. Due to technological advancements and the rise of social sharing, customers have a lot of control, and what matters to them frequently changes. 

Today, 86% percent of customers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience. Not only that, but they’ve come to expect a stellar customer experience. Today’s customers seek highly responsive, customized, and delightful digital and in-person experiences that seamlessly match their lifestyles. How do organizations keep up? The answer is experience research. 

The journey to a delightful customer experience starts with research. Researching your customers using qualitative and quantitative methods and summarizing customer insight to align your employees with a deep understanding of what it’s like being your customer. This is fundamental in maturing your customer experience practice and achieving long-term organizational goals. 

Optimizing your customer experience starts with access to insight

Every team member should have access to and rely on customer insights. But getting there can seem daunting. However, as with any great feat, success comes from a study of the objective and identifying solutions and actions that ensure your success. 

For example, if you had to climb a mountain—let’s call it “Mount CX”—would you climb to the top without any preparation? Probably not unless you’re an experienced climber willing to take on the risks.

If you’re more cautious or experienced and want to supercharge your performance, you’ll seek education, perhaps mentorship and guidance from experts in your community. You’ll also bring tools that help you work more efficiently and ensure your success. 

You’re likely going to research what’s available to strategically climb the peak and then take advantage of that research. Doing so offers you security, confidence, greater efficiency in your efforts, and figuratively—but also, in this example, literally—a support system should you fall.

Researcher-only insight can create bottlenecks

Some organizations have centralized customer research teams. These teams comprise experienced researchers conducting all research to provide insights and learnings across the organization.Other organizations embed a researcher within each segment or department. The benefit is maintaining a high quality of research conducted and insights collected and shared. 

However, these structures come with challenges. One problem is overloading researchers with the needs of the entire team. When researchers are overwhelmed, valuable insights can go uncollected or be overlooked. This is when organizations suffer research bottlenecks. 

A UX researcher at a tech company told us, “We feel like we’re being stretched… [With] all of their requests, we’re having a hard time filling that need.” 

If we consider the metaphor of scaling Mount CX, researcher-only research is like having one expert climber trying to reach the summit with many non-climbers holding onto their back. 

Although intentions are good, progress is slow, and the journey is grueling. Suppose a researcher in this scenario faces a tight timeline. In that case, they might be desperate to get everyone off their proverbial back, which means giving teammates responses to one-off requests without going deeper for more impactful insights.

A research free-for-all can be chaos

To combat the challenges of researcher-only research, many organizations have adopted a more open structure where everyone does their own research, collecting the necessary customer feedback to meet their project needs. 

This alternative setup offers more control for individual teams but has drawbacks. While this approach matches organizational imperatives to be customer-centric, teams outside research may not understand the optimal ways to collect answers to support their objectives. 

Plus, researchers are stretched thin trying to cram what often amounts to decades of education and professional experience into short training sessions. Quality of insights may suffer, frustration and confusion rise, and team members may not be generating the insights that will help them improve the experiences they’re working on. 

In summiting Mount CX, this structure is like an inexperienced climber scrambling to the top. The experienced climber (AKA our researcher) can only do so much to help hoist others upwards, but the effort is taxing and exhausting. Without a more organized effort, the reality is that few will succeed. 

If we combine these two ideas, we realize that whether you’re scaling an actual mountain or improving your organization’s customer experience, a successful effort requires optimizing the use of resources, collaboration, and organization between team members and the right tools to enable efficiencies for all.

Scaling insight lies somewhere in the middle

How an organization decides to structure research responsibilities and resources should align with its goals and objectives. However, the ideal model lies in the middle of the two models described previously. We think of this as an “empowered” model, wherein all parties can gather the right-sized insights they need when they need them to build customer-centric experiences. 

On the one hand, it entails loosening the reins on research so that customer data can be collected when, where, and by whom they’re needed. But on the other hand, and equally important, it also involves creating a system that ensures that internal expertise and best practices are effectively documented and disseminated to maintain a high quality in practices and outcomes. 

Finally, we feel strongly that technology is a great enabler in this organizational transformation: to scale—to do more with less while maintaining a high bar of quality—technology is indisputably a key part of this change. It supports whole organizations in getting the insights they need while reserving research resources for higher-impact, strategic projects.

Who's involved and how they help

It’s widely believed that it is everyone’s job to help improve customer experience. We’ve identified three key stakeholders and their domains of influence in propelling and helping to scale CX best practices and research throughout an organization.

Executives

Individuals serving in an executive function are instrumental in communicating the vision for CX, serving as an advocate internally, and holding teams accountable. 

Select a solution that enables teams

With buying and approval rights, executives must ensure that their teams are armed with the tools, solutions, and other resources to succeed. This means being crystal clear on solutions they are evaluating—they are easy to use and yield the promised outputs. 

Tie team objectives into higher-level CX goals

Serving as the connector or the conduit to higher-level initiatives, executives should ensure that teams do not become myopic and that all activities tie into business objectives. 

Model customer-centric behavior

When sitting in on review sessions and presentations, executives should be kind but critical in asking, “Is this the right experience for our customers?” Ensure teams focus on customer needs when designing new products and solutions.

UX practitioners

As an expert in the field, the UX researcher serves a vital role as an evangelist, mentor, and trainer. 

Tie research into organizational objectives

Non-researchers often struggle with connecting their organizational challenges with conducting effective customer tests. The result is the launching of tests that do not yield useful insights and likely the eventual abandonment of the effort entirely. UX researchers should help teammates start on the right foot by identifying their challenges and offering suggestions on structuring a test and the questions they should ask to gather the right feedback. 

Offer resources and examples

Sharing templates or otherwise providing tasks or questions that a non-researcher can copy and paste is a great way to scale expertise. 

• Train teams on how to use in-product shortcuts, such as the pre-made research templates or saved screeners. 
• UX researchers can also create a library of templates that team members can easily use. Again, all resources must be aligned with business objectives to ensure that non-researchers are making the connection. 
• If best-in-breed tests are available to study or copy in the UserTesting dashboard, let team members know so they can search and click “Create similar test” to make a copy to customize and launch.

Stay organized with Workspaces

Organize your tests according to projects, teams, or whatever works for you and manage permission levels and access to different Workspaces. Workspaces can facilitate knowledge sharing, while private workspaces allow you control over top-secret or sensitive research projects. 

Follow the steps to become a trie influencer of evangelist

Make the most of opportunities to share work and to be available to help others. 

• Researchers should publish findings, along with the insights that helped them come to the conclusions, often and where others can access them. This can include sharing on a company wiki, a department website, or via 3rd-party tools like Trello or Slack. 
• Present at events (such as brown bag lunches and training) or hold office hours so that non-researchers can learn more about research and also know when and where to come for help and feedback. 

Establish a repeatable process

Let non-researchers know what part they are responsible for and where and when researchers can and want to be involved so that processes are clear and to prevent one-off interruptions. 

• If needed, communicate a review process and an approvals workflow to ensure that non-researchers do the bulk of the work upfront and that research experts can review before the tests are launched. This might be more important at the start of a non-researchers ramp-up period so they can get up-to-speed on an effective plan or test. Providing a template for teams at the onset can be very helpful in streamlining this process. 
• Or, indicate that research teams should be involved upfront to provide consulting and to establish a general framework before teammates finalize and launch their tests.

Doers

Other teams across the organization, or “doers,” including product managers or marketing team members, should work with research teams to gain foundational knowledge and lean on resources to continue building upon their skills. 

Identify organizational objectives and related questions

Research is a means towards an end—meaning it’s a way to get answers to your questions. So doers should start by listing out objectives or challenges, like, “Why are customers dropping off at this point in the workflow?” or “Why is the adoption of this feature so low?” or “How would this audience segment interpret this media asset?” Then start mapping out the task and questions that help secure answers to these questions. 

Lean on resources

Reach out to researchers within your organization for advice and assistance. These can include one-off meetings or setting up channels of communication digitally, such as a Slack channel or email group, or in person, such as office hours. 

At UserTesting, we have a team available to help via chat, email, and phone. We also offer 24/5 support and research packages for companies that want teams to have expanded access to research experts.

Users can access the pre-made templates, based on common objectives, available in the UserTesting platform. They can also access saved screeners to create audience targets without starting from scratch. Additionally, there is a Help Center with articles on how to use the UserTesting platform. 

Package and present

Gathering customer insights is part of a process that starts with identifying a problem and possibly some hypotheses, gathering insights from customers, and then ending with a conclusion. Create effective video highlight reels to share insights with stakeholders and executives. 

Scaling insight requires teamwork

As much as this guide has been about the respective roles and responsibilities related to scaling research, it’s important to note that the teamwork required to pull it all together is equally important. If providing amazing customer experiences is divided amongst multiple divisions, touchpoints, and individuals throughout an organization, everyone must do their part in being patient and generous, brave and proactive, and willing to step in when help is needed.