How to Create a Customer-Driven Culture
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Have you ever been the lone customer advocate? We’ll share our strategy for creating a customer-first culture, the successes and failures, and tips for how to adapt it to your own organization.
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How to Create a Customer-Driven Culture
- 1. DAWN NIDY // EXPERIENCE DESIGN L E A D E R K R I S T Y A V G E R I N O S / / U S E R R E S E A R C H E R How to Create a Customer-Driven Culture
- 2. HOW TO CREATE A CUSTOMER-DRIVEN CULTURE
- 3. ABOUT INTUIT HOW TO CREATE A CUSTOMER-DRIVEN CULTURE
- 4. HOW TO CREATE A CUSTOMER-DRIVEN CULTURE MISSION: To improve our customers’ financial lives so profoundly…they can’t imagine going back to the old way
- 5. ABOUT OUR TEAM JOURNEY HOW TO CREATE A CUSTOMER-DRIVEN CULTURE
- 6. THE MAGIC HAPPENS WHEN DEVELOPERS GET AND SEE CUSTOMER PAIN… THE BIGGEST SINGLE SOURCE OF INNOVATION IS TYPICALLY THE ENGINEERS. THEY KNOW WHAT’S POSSIBLE BETTER THAN ANYONE - MARTY CAGAN 6 “ ”
- 7. HOW TO CREATE A CUSTOMER-DRIVEN CULTURE 7 Stage 1: Understand & Embrace Stage 2: Practice & Build Muscle Stage 3: Empathy is in our DNA We bring it to you: Sharing Customer Insights Customer Panels “Empathy Kits” We coach & help you: Interview & Research Guides Skills Workshops Sprint Team Coaching We provide support: Advanced Skills Workshops Customer Recruiting Enable Insight Sharing
- 8. STAGE 1: UNDERSTAND AND EMBRACE HOW TO CREATE A CUSTOMER-DRIVEN CULTURE METHODS
- 9. METHOD #1: CUSTOMER PANELS HOW TO CREATE A CUSTOMER-DRIVEN CULTURE
- 10. CUSTOMER PANELS: PROS/CONS PROS Can get a wide representation of customer segments Can bring customers to a large audience A skilled facilitator can elicit a wide range of attitudes Brings the outside in CONS Only represents what customers say, not what they do Customers may be intimidated by a large audience (select participants carefully and prep them) Customers can feel judged or compared HOW TO CREATE A CUSTOMER-DRIVEN CULTURE L L L H H H Impact Expens e Time ATTRIBUTES TO CONSIDER:
- 11. METHOD #2: CUSTOMER VIDEOS HOW TO CREATE A CUSTOMER-DRIVEN CULTURE
- 12. MEET MARY (VIDEO) HOW TO CREATE A CUSTOMER-DRIVEN CULTURE https://www.dropbox.com/s/t4mll5s5v99fsze/Mary%20Revised%20Short%20 Cut.mp4?dl=0
- 13. EMPLOYEE REACTIONS CREATE A CUSTOMER-DRIVEN CULTURE THAT INSPIRES A LARGE ORGANIZATION I don't think Mary was a good use case. She clearly didn't have a business- oriented mindset. Mary still did not possess enough knowledge on using QuickBooks after being a small business owner over an year. They have a lot of passion towards their work. I feel motivated to work to make it simpler for them to pursue their passion without the burden of external factors. We need to do lot more to actually help our customers live their passion. It brings to light how complicated just keeping the financials are for small businesses. And this is on top of the actual product or service they are providing. “ ” “ ”
- 14. CUSTOMER VIDEOS: PROS/CONS PROS Skilled interviewing and good editing results in videos that lead to deep empathy Can show the context of a customer’s life to a large audience Brings customer insights to life (their own words are powerful!) CONS Video editing is time-consuming Some customers are intimidated by the camera HOW TO CREATE A CUSTOMER-DRIVEN CULTURE ATTRIBUTES TO CONSIDER: L L L H H H Impact Expens e
- 15. HOW TO CREATE A CUSTOMER-DRIVEN CULTURE Method #3: Emotional Analogies
- 16. CON 1 Collecting and Sorting Mountains of PaperworkAccountant Pain in Collecting & Sorting Data
- 17. ROLE PLAYING: ACCOUNTANT ACTIVITY HOW TO CREATE A CUSTOMER-DRIVEN CULTURE
- 18. HOW TO CREATE A CUSTOMER-DRIVEN CULTURE ACCOUNTANT ACTIVITY VIDEO https://www.dropbox.com/s/pilxrjanxgnmmjc/Accountant%20Activity%20Video.m p4?dl=0
- 19. ACCOUNTANT ROLE PLAYING - REACTIONS I could feel the urgency in getting the activity completed which reflects the reality of tax deadlines. Accountants are more flexible than I thought – I had a stigma that they are stuck in their ways, but I had to pivot a lot during the exercise depending on the clients, and it made me realize that Accountants have to adjust to accommodate their clients. HOW TO CREATE A CUSTOMER-DRIVEN CULTURE How did this make you feel? Stressful. Rushed. Time Pressed. Frustrated. Mary made me mad. “ ” “ ”
- 20. 14 MILLION AMERICANS ARE UNEMPLOYED. NOW IMAGINE YOU’RE ONE OF THEM. YOUR SAVINGS ARE GONE. YOU’VE LOST YOUR HOUSE. AND YOU’RE DOWN TO YOUR LAST $1,000. CAN YOU MAKE IT THROUGH THE MONTH? “ —PLAYSPENT.ORG ”
- 21. HOW TO CREATE A CUSTOMER-DRIVEN CULTURE
- 22. EMPLOYEE REACTIONS VIDEO HOW TO CREATE A CUSTOMER-DRIVEN CULTURE https://www.dropbox.com/s/r5e0ni4sdk5t1na/IgniteCompilationVideo.mp 4?dl=0
- 23. EMOTIONAL ANALOGIES: PROS/CONS PROS Can replicate the same emotion a customer would feel without recreating the exact situation and/or requiring subject matter expertise Can develop deep empathy in a short amount of time Creates the opportunity for reflection and understanding CONS Can be expensive and time- consuming to create Needs careful planning to execute well and be believable, otherwise people can fixate on the flaws HOW TO CREATE A CUSTOMER-DRIVEN CULTURE ATTRIBUTES TO CONSIDER: L L L H H H Impact Expens e
- 24. MAKING RESEARCH EXPERIENTIAL : DEVELOPERS Context was a large-scale contextual inquiry study with 18 internal developers Did a traditional research read out of top insights, followed by experiential activity HOW TO CREATE A CUSTOMER-DRIVEN CULTURE 24 Method #4: Making Research Experiential
- 25. CUSTOMER JOURNEY LINE HOW TO CREATE A CUSTOMER-DRIVEN CULTURE
- 26. CUSTOMERS WALKING THROUGH JOURNEY LINE HOW TO CREATE A CUSTOMER-DRIVEN CULTURE
- 27. EMPATHY MAP: SAY / DO / THINK / FEEL HOW TO CREATE A CUSTOMER-DRIVEN CULTURE
- 28. EMPATHY MAP: SAY / DO / THINK / FEEL HOW TO CREATE A CUSTOMER-DRIVEN CULTURE
- 29. MAKING RESEARCH EXPERIENTIAL : PROS/CONS PROS Brings research to life in a way that a traditional report cannot Solidifies your research findings and makes them more memorable Rallies the team around a customer and their problems – they feel deep ownership CONS Requires a lot of preparation Requires skilled facilitation Customers may be intimidated by a large audience (select participants carefully and prep them) HOW TO CREATE A CUSTOMER-DRIVEN CULTURE ATTRIBUTES TO CONSIDER: L L L H H H Impact Expens e
- 30. STAGE 1: UNDERSTAND & EMBRACE HOW TO CREATE A CUSTOMER-DRIVEN CULTURE Methods 1. Customer Panel 2. Customer Video 3. Emotional Analogies 4. Experiential Research _ Journey Lines _ Empathy Map _Pilot and experiment _Leverage what already exists _Content trumps production value _Mix and match methods to make it more meaningful _Make it required, not opt-in Tips & Tricks
- 31. STAGE 2: PRACTICE AND BUILD MUSCLE HOW TO CREATE A CUSTOMER-DRIVEN CULTURE METHODS
- 32. METHOD #5: HAVE LEADERSHIP INTERVIEW CUSTOMERS HOW TO CREATE A CUSTOMER-DRIVEN CULTURE
- 33. LEADERSHIP INTERVIEWING CUSTOMERS: PROS/CONS PROS Hands on experience and customer learning Reinforces how good of an investment customer learning is Leading by example/role modeling CONS Requires directive coaching up front because leaders have a strong tendency to advocate or teach Requires a time commitment from leadership team Potential for misinterpretation of customer views or problems HOW TO CREATE A CUSTOMER-DRIVEN CULTURE ATTRIBUTES TO CONSIDER: L L L H H H Impact Expens e
- 34. METHOD #6: SKILLS WORKSHOPS HOW TO CREATE A CUSTOMER-DRIVEN CULTURE
- 35. SKILLS WORKSHOPS: PROS/CONS PROS Scalable way to teach foundational research skills Practice in a safe environment and get in the moment feedback and coaching Can empower teams, especially when research resources are scarce CONS Difficult to create relevant and realistic situations to fit everyone Harder to replicate pitfalls in safe environment HOW TO CREATE A CUSTOMER-DRIVEN CULTURE ATTRIBUTES TO CONSIDER: L L L H H H Impact Expens e
- 36. METHOD #7: CUSTOMER OFFICE HOURS My team learned a lot today. Thanks for the opportunity to connect with other developers. HOW TO CREATE A CUSTOMER-DRIVEN CULTURE “ ” “ ” Thanks for setting it up. We move at a million miles an hour over there so it's rare we get an opportunity to stop and get an objective viewpoint on anything.
- 37. CUSTOMER OFFICE HOURS: PROS/CONS PROS Low barrier to engagement Gets teams or individuals to engage with customers who might not make time otherwise Encourages more frequent feedback throughout a project CONS May not be the ideal customer for each person participating Customers could go un-used Lack of a defined research plan can lead to less interesting outcomes (poor interviewing?) HOW TO CREATE A CUSTOMER-DRIVEN CULTURE ATTRIBUTES TO CONSIDER: L L L H H H Impact Expens e
- 38. METHOD #8: CUSTOMER IMMERSION DAYS HOW TO CREATE A CUSTOMER-DRIVEN CULTURE
- 39. CUSTOMER EMPATHY FIELD GUIDE HOW TO CREATE A CUSTOMER-DRIVEN CULTURE
- 40. CUSTOMER IMMERSION DAYS: PROS/CONS PROS Gets an entire team aligned on the customer in a short amount of time Energizing and impactful Gets people more comfortable with being uncomfortable – you’re all in the same boat You’re meeting customers where they are – it’s real life CONS Very costly from a time and resource perspective Logistics need to be orchestrated really well to keep a large number of people safe and on task Hard to sustain the momentum beyond the event itself HOW TO CREATE A CUSTOMER-DRIVEN CULTURE ATTRIBUTES TO CONSIDER: L L L H H H Impact Expens e
- 41. STAGE 2: PRACTICE & BUILD MUSCLE HOW TO CREATE A CUSTOMER-DRIVEN CULTURE Methods 5. Leadership Interview _ Interview Guides _ Research Guides 6. Skills Workshops 7. Customer Office Hours 8. Customer Immersion _Broadly & clearly communicate _Savor the surprises _Set your teams up for success Tips & Tricks
- 42. HOW TO CREATE A CUSTOMER-DRIVEN CULTURE FINAL THOUGHTS
- 43. WHAT TO CONSIDER FOR YOUR EMPATHY PROGRAM Expect a wide range of reactions, including skepticism and apathy Identify your champions & leverage them Managing the logistics _Tap into existing channels and operating mechanisms whenever possible _Introduce rigor around the program Get executive sponsorship Be patient & flexible HOW TO CREATE A CUSTOMER-DRIVEN CULTURE
Editor's Notes
- Thank you so much for joining us today. Dawn Kristy
- KRISTY: We know that user research, contextual inquiry, and deep customer empathy are not new concepts – especially in the world of user experience, and ideally everyone in your organization understands these concepts puts the customer first. But that is not always the case. In fact, time and time again we’ve seen companies and groups rely on their user experience team to carry all of the load when it comes to creating something delightful for the customer. So, what happens if you’re that lone customer advocate, or even a very small team of customer advocates, in a large organization? How do you influence the rest of the group? That is our story - and we strongly believe that when everyone in the company, and we do mean everyone, feels empathy deeply for the customer, then the work of the UX team gets significantly easier – not to mention better outcomes for the customer. So today we want to share with you our journey to create a customer driven culture in our organization.
- KRISTY: But before we can get into the heart of our talk, we need to set up a little bit of context. From the very beginning there has always been a strong culture of customer empathy and user experience at Intuit. In fact, the idea for Intuit’s very first product, Quicken, was formed 30 years ago at co-founder Scott Cook’s kitchen table while he watched his wife struggle to balance their checkbook. After observing her, he set out to find a way to make the process easier and simpler. In fact that very table is now part of a coaching corner in our mountain view campus where Scott and other Intuit leaders regularly coach teams on how to create awesome product experiences that delight customers
- KRISTY: And just in case you don’t know what we do at Intuit, we are a financial management company whose mission is to improve our customers’ financial lives so profoundly they can’t imagine going back to the old way. We have several flagship financial management products that serve a wide variety of different customers including accountants, small business owners and consumers we are sharing this with you today because these different products and different customer segments are an integral part of our story today.
- DAWN: Even though we have this great culture of customer empathy, not all teams are in the same place. For example we are in a central technology organization– we create platforms and technologies that other internal teams use to build their products. As a central team, we have a variety of customers: accountants, small business owners, and consumers as well as internal employees. Before I started, in 2013, our organization had not adopted the customer empathy culture of Intuit because they were focused on delivering back end services – but very quickly our senior VP realized those services also needed to deliver a value for the end customer, and that’s why we needed a user experience team. But then our VP had another ah-hah moment in a meeting when she realized that the engineers in the room didn’t understand the small business customer and therefore they weren’t going to be able to deliver the value they needed, and it couldn’t be the sole responsibility of the tiny, newly formed UX team. So she came to me, and that’s when we decided that we should start with the Deep customer empathy principal as the foundation for the organization.
- DAWN: And the importance of empathy for engineers was summed up beautifully in this quote from Marty Cagen during an interview at Intuit a few years ago. He said “the magic happens when developers get and see customer pain” because they know what’s possible and when armed both with that knowledge and the understanding of the customer pain, they are often the source of innovation.
- DAWN: We knew creating a culture of empathy was going to be a multi-year journey and we needed our methods to scale to all 500 employees. So we decided to start with the foundation: just getting everyone in our organization to understand the value of empathy as a concept and embrace the fact that they play a role in creating great experiences for the customers. This was not something that came naturally to most of them, nor did they have a lot of experience with it. After that, we move onto the second stage, which is all about helping them actively practice getting customer feedback and building their empathy muscle. Here we focused our efforts on coaching, creating guides, and leading workshops to build basic skills for employees to regularly connect with their customers on their own. The final step in the journey is that empathy is in the DNA of our organization. By this stage we’ll have a customer driven culture where all teams are customer obsessed. We aren’t here yet. (SLIDE Change) – in fact, we are somewhere in the middle of step two – but our hope is that when we get to this stage, the organization will proactively be reaching out to customers and focusing on the delighting the customer. Empathy is not just about research, but it’s also about design and making good product choices all the way throughout the software development lifecycle.
- Kristy: So now that you know what we did and why, we wanted to take you through some of the details of our journey so far, and share some of the methods we used in each stage. We did a lot of experimenting throughout this process, especially in that initial stage of the journey, and some ideas worked better than others! In this section we’ll share 4 of the methods we used to help our organization better understand and embrace a customer empathy mindset. With each method we’ll also share our learnings and help you decide if it’s something you can use in your own organization!
- Kristy: One of the first, and probably most obvious, things we did was to bring in a group of customers at the same time to share their experiences and opinions on a similar topic - otherwise known as a customer panel. This method works regardless of whether your customer is internal or external.
- Kristy: As with any method, there are both pros and cons. For us, we found that the panels allowed us to share a variety of customer types to a large audience in a short amount of time – and with the right facilitator, you could learn a lot from the customers. However, depending on the customer and the subject matter, it can be difficult to get your customers to open up and feel comfortable sharing. We saw this in a panel with tax customers who live paycheck to paycheck. They all had different financial backgrounds and priorities and you could see some of them start to clam up as they heard the other panelists share their stories – they got uncomfortable and opening up became more difficult for them. But panels can work well when the subject matter is more neutral – for example, we brought in 3 internal developers who had all recently on-boarded a particular service. They openly shared their stories, issues and pains with the process and were able to build off of one another because their common thread was not personal – and the team that built that service was able to get a ton of great learning and some empathy for their customers from the experience. For each method we are sharing today, we’ve also included some of the attributes that you may want to take into consideration when deciding if this is a good method for you and your organization. It’s important to note that all of these methods are about getting customer empathy, and all accomplish that to some extend, but some may be more impactful, time consuming or costly than others. For example, the customer panel, is relatively inexpensive to set up, but tends to have a lower impact when it comes to empathy. One of the reasons for this is that a panel focuses more on what the customer says and not what they do, but more than that, because you are interacting with multiple customers at one time, you end up getting a bit more of an overview which doesn’t usually allow you to develop deep empathy for any one customer on the panel. You and your organization can absolutely still get great learnings and insights from customer panels, but it’s unlikely to produce the deepest level of empathy.
- DAWN: Another way we brought the customer to life for our organization was through customer videos. Taking 500 employees, mostly engineers, out to meet customers where they live was not scalable for us – at least not in the first stage of our journey – so we brought the customers to them. In this case our research team went out and did in context interviews with customers, filming the entire interaction, and then we later cut down the videos to share the essence of who the customer is and how they work in ‘bite sized’ chunks. We are going to show you a sample of a video is focused on understanding the small business owner. Our customer, Mary, works from home, as do about half of small businesses, so we met her there, and conducted a 2 hour contextual inquiry about her and her work – and then we cut that down to a 12 minute video that we shared with the entire organization. Today we’d like to share a 2.5 minute snippet to give you an idea of what it looked like….
- DAWN:
- DAWN: With just a 12 minute video employees were able to develop some real empathy in a short amount of time. Several of the employees walked away feeling really connected to Mary and her struggles and were already thinking about ways they could contribute to making her situation better. As you can see by the positive reactions here. However, we know that there’s no quick fix to getting empathy and some people progress slower and that’s to be expected. Some of the more negative responses to the video actually showed us that the employee really did not get to a place of empathy for the customer. They were still disconnected from Mary’s plight, and critiqued her for being inexperienced or a poor business person. They just weren’t able to put themselves into the shoes of a new business owner and recognize the difficulty they might experience.
- DAWN: A good customer video with a skilled interviewer and careful editing can help people begin to develop real empathy for the customer. It can also show the context of the customer’s life in a scalable way (since we can’t fit 500 employees in Mary’s living room) and brings insights to life through the customer’s own words. The impact can be pretty significant, and in a lot of cases higher than the customer panel because the customer tends to be more authentic and comfortable in their own environment, but it’s still not as strong as interacting directly with the customer would be. Although videos can be extremely powerful and are typically not that expensive to create, they do take a lot of time and careful editing to create, and some customers may be intimidated by the camera.
- KRISTY: Another method we’ve used is Analogous experiences and simulations. Obviously the best case is that you can be with your customers in their situation or experience exactly what they do, but there are times when doing that is just not possible – like in the image here, do you really need to send all of your employees out to fix a water main break in order for them to experience the stress, panic and exhaustion the men in this picture did? Probably not!
- KRISTY: Sometimes your domain knowledge, or even lack of knowledge, on a subject can get in the way of you fully understanding what your customer goes through, but by utilizing an analogous experience, you can often create a similar emotional state. So let me set the stage for this next example: After observing accountants during tax season we learned that: Collecting documentation from clients is time consuming and painful Once documentation is collected, the accountant has to sort through mountains of paperwork to find what they need – clients would actually bring boxes like you see in this image, full of paperwork that the accountant has to go through. Missing or incomplete data is a problem that interrupts the workflow of the accountant and results in them having to continue to ask/nag their client So first we have collecting and sorting data – we know that getting data from clients is painful, and then once they have it, they have to sort through it to find what they need and discover anything that might be missing – and that causes disruption to the workflow. As a side note, these are pictures taken from a real accountants office – they get so much paperwork it fills every corner of every space in the office. So we wanted our employees to understand the pain an accountant goes through during the rush of tax season, but trying to recreate exactly what they go through would require significant tax domain knowledge, which our team did not have. Instead we needed to create an experience that would elicit the same emotions without needing the domain expertise.
- KRISTY: To do this, we used an online survey, simple word documents and dropbox to create the experience. Participants were asked to imagine they were an accountant during tax season: they had to communicate with fake clients throughout the process using open ended questions in the survey, (CLICK) They downloaded the client’s documents from dropbox, sorted through those documents to find and tally the ones with the name of a color on them. (CLICK) and then finished by entering the totals for each document type to determine the amount of taxes their client owed. They did all of this with a 15 minute time limit to simulate the rush of tax season.
- This short video shows about 50 of our developers going through the activity– just to give you a visual of how it worked…
- KRISTY: I’m not sure if you can tell from the video, but the experience itself is completely standalone – everything was monitored and paced through the survey tool, but we usually ran it as a group and then spent time debriefing afterwards. When we introduced the activity it was met with a fair amount of skepticism from the participants – mostly because it seemed simple and a little silly, but afterwards they were genuinely surprised by how much they learned and how much they could empathize with what accountants go through. They also shared that the exercise made them feel stressed, rushed and frustrated – all emotions that accountants can relate to during the very busy tax season.
- KRISTY: Another way to create a hands on emotional experience is through simulations. Simulations can help put you in the shoes of the customer even when it can be difficult or impossible to have the full or real experience Playspent.org is a simulation we used to help our employees get empathy for Americans living paycheck to paycheck (which is a shocking 75% of the population!) The simulation shows the ramifications of losing your job and the hard choices you have to make – something that would be difficult to have our gainfully employed staff realistically experience.
- KRISTY: This web-based simulation only takes a few minutes to go through and asks you to use your last $1000 and try to make it through the next 30 days. You are presented with situations and have to make a choice of what to do (CLICK) With each screen you choose what to do and your path and future situations change with it, (CLICK) Which creates a very powerful experience.
- KRISTY: Okay – last video!! This short video shows a group of employees going through this simulation. We filmed a few of their reactions to it and wanted to share that with you today, because we thought they summed it up better than we could!
- KRISTY: To wrap up, for analogous experiences and simulations, we have seen that they can replicate the emotion a customer feels without recreating the exact situation or requiring subject matter expertise. They can help develop deep empathy in a short period of time, but they can be expensive and time consuming to create – especially when you can’t find an existing option you can leverage or adapt. Careful planning and review are essential to ensure that it’s executed well and believable – otherwise people may fixate on the flaws and miss the point.
- DAWN: You may be wondering where user research fits into this program…This next method is really about taking research results to the next level. Our user experience team conducted a large scale research study focused on the internal developer at Intuit, but instead of just sharing the results through a report, we decided to make the insights more experiential and share them with the entire organization
- DAWN: To do that, we selected three of the research participants and worked with them to create a journey line of their experience.
- DAWN: Then we got our leadership team together and we started by sharing the overall results of the study in a typical research report out – and then we brought in those 3 participants and had them retell their stories aided by their journey lines, and the leaders were able to ask questions in an informal Q&A after. We also filmed the sessions (nothing fancy, just a camcorder and some external mics)
- DAWN: After the stories were completed we had the leaders unpack what they heard. To facilitate this we used an empathy map tool where you start by capturing the things you heard your customer say or saw them do, and then move on to what you inferred that they were thinking or feeling during those moments.
- DAWN: This process helped the leaders really step into the shoes of the customer and try to understand what they were thinking and feeling, which helped the research have a much broader impact. The leaders made a deeper connection to the research and walked away “owning” the results much more than they would have if we had stopped at the report out. Following this exercise, we took the videos from the sessions, journey lines and created instructions for how to facilitate the empathy map exercise and had the leaders repeat (and facilitate) these sessions with their own teams in order to get the information through all 500 employees in our organization.
- DAWN: Making research experiential can really bring research to life and makes the findings more memorable. It also rallies the team around the customer and their problems so they feel deep ownership – all which leads to a pretty high impact with regards to empathy. However, it does take a lot of preparation and skilled facilitation, which may make it hard to do this for every research effort! Another thing to consider is your customer – are they likely to be comfortable sharing their story or thoughts in front of a large audience? This is definitely something to be conscious of when considering this method.
- KRISTY: For the initial stage of our empathy program, we focused on helping the organization understand and embrace empathy and today shared with you some of the ones we found most promising. We also wanted to share with you a few tips from our learnings along the way…. 1. First, pilot and experiment – As we mentioned earlier, we experimented a ton with different methods, and often piloted them with small groups before bringing it to the entire organization. For example, the accountant activity went through multiple versions before we landed on what you saw today – the first few iterations were clunky and had too many components – participants started to lose interest, which diminished the impact we were going for. So as you adapt some of these methods or create your own, make sure that you test them with a smaller group to make sure the experience is really evoking the emotion and reaction you intend. 2. Our next tip is to leverage what already exists. We leveraged research done by the various product teams around Intuit to build empathy and understanding for the consumer tax payer, small business owner, and accountant. We used their reports, participated in and recorded some of their research sessions. We have also leveraged products and apps made externally when they fit our needs. Sometimes you’ll have to build everything from scratch, but whenever possible we encourage you to bring the awesome work that researchers have and will do to a larger audience 3. Another thing we learned was that video quality is not super important – we found that people were able to look past the often poor quality and in fact it may have actually worked in our favor. When we were trying to build empathy for the accountant customer, we used a video another internal group had produced as well as one we created. The other video was a very high production value and we considered using theirs exclusively since ours felt pretty amateur in comparison– but when we showed employees the videos, the feedback we received was that the low production value made it more real – they could tell it was a real person in their office and they felt more connected, whereas the more polished video felt inauthentic and like a marketing video. So don’t stress- if this is internal, just make sure the content is there – which does mean good audio! - and that will be enough! 4.We also found that packaging multiple methods together into a facilitated empathy kit was a powerful way to provide an overview of a customer group or segment. We mixed some of the experiential and hands on activities with videos and general research summaries to create our empathy kits and we found that creating the balance with methods we used, helped keep people engaged. Our employees love the videos and learned a lot from the summaries, but it was too easy to lose focus after a while – sprinkling in the experiential and hands on activities kept them interested and engaged. The facilitated kits we created took about 2 hours total, and could accommodate between 20-100 employees. It proved a good way to get a lot of information and empathy to the organization in a relatively short amount of time. 5. Finally, our last tip is to Skip the opt-in and just make it required… I know that sounds harsh, but many of our employees didn’t understand or buy into the empathy program it at first, so we had to start off by making attendance to the facilitated empathy kits required and another tip – track attendance, or at least threaten to! Once they start to understand what you’re doing, and see the value in understanding the customer, then you wont have to work so hard to convince them! ----- Meeting Notes (6/17/15 14:04) ----- change order on last 2
- DAWN: As we moved into the second stage of our journey, which focused on practicing and building the empathy muscle, we didn’t stop all activity in the first stage. They overlap a lot since everyone is at a different phase of the journey. Now we’d like to share 4 more methods we’ve had success with in stage 2
- DAWN: One of the first things we focused on in stage two was getting people in our organization to interact with customers directly – mostly through customer interviews. The first time we created research and interview guides to help them get started, and often recruited the customers for them, but we had them go through the process of actually interviewing the customer For our program, we specifically started with our leadership team. We knew they were steeped in the perspective of their stakeholders, but not as grounded in the day to day usage of the products and services they owned. We hypothesized that by better understanding their end users, they’d get more empathy and become greater champions of the program and role-models for the rest of the organization to follow. But then we asked them to do it again, the second time with less guidance. We found that some leaders were ready: they found their own customers, asked really good questions, and came back with interesting insights. Other’s, however, needed more help and guidance, which is where the coaching aspect of this phase comes in.
- DAWN: Customer learnings are significantly more impactful and powerful when they are heard directly from the customer, which is a huge pro for having your teams directly interact with customers. However, it can be difficult to scale this, which is why we started people who could have the most impact across the organization. By doing so, we were also able to show that customer learning is a worthy time investment. In your organization, those people of influence might be a leadership team, your PM community, or maybe your development managers. If you're doing this with your leadership, they are very busy, so working with their schedules can be difficult. There’s also a need for strong coaching and that preparation can be time consuming for you. There is also a potential for misinterpretation of customer views or problems– especially if the leaders are only interviewing one or two customers. It’s important to note that these interviews are not intended to replace user research nor should they be used to inform major decisions. That’s not the point – the point is we want to create champions who care about the customer and understand the importance of empathy. Managing that expectation will be important!
- KRISTY: As we expanded our interview initiative beyond the senior leadership team, we started to notice significant gaps in the people’s skill levels when it came to how they interacted with customers. We knew that part of our second phase we wanted to work on developing the skills and capabilities of our organization and decided that our first skill building workshop should be focused on interviewing! In this hour long workshop, we focused on fundamentals – first encouraging the participants to stop thinking of their customer interactions as interviews, and focus instead on listening and letting the customer drive the conversation. We also challenged them to let go of their solution and just be present in the moment with the customer. (CLICK) – After we went through some of the mindsets, we then had them practice these listening skills with one another using specific scenarios and taking turns being the interviewer, the customer or just an observer. (CLICK) We created little takeaway cards that outlined common pitfalls to avoid – such as talking more than the customer, or teaching instead of listening (CLICK) And best practices to focus on – like being present and asking open ended questions. The cards were guidelines we established that made sense for our team, but you could think about what would be appropriate for your own organization and create your own. I still see people with these cards tucked into their badge holders so that they are with them at all times.
- Although the workshop was relatively simple it provided an opportunity to establish a consistent baseline of skill across the group. Overall the participants learned a lot by getting in the moment feedback and coaching from the facilitators as well as their peers in an unthreatening environment. On the downside, the orchestrated situations and topics can feel a little inauthentic. During our workshop, one participant told me that they loved the exercise and the tips, but thought the subject matter made it easier for them to stay neutral and just learn from the customer. If the topic had been about their product or day to day work, they may have had more difficulty not falling into some of the common traps. Taking the time to create situations that are as realistic as possible, while maintaining that safe environment, will produce the best possible results. Skills workshops, in general, are not going to help you team directly feel empathy for their customer, but they will teach them the skills and mindsets they need to get more out of the customer interactions they do have – which we think is very important!
- KRISTY: And on the topic of customer interactions - another method we have used to help our organization directly interact with their customers is office hours. We noticed that although teams were starting to really understand and embrace the power of customer empathy, there was still a perceived barrier to getting access to their customers. The time and effort it takes to decide who, what and when was often enough to stop a team from connecting on their own – and we wanted to address that. So we created an office hours environment where we’d bring in customers and allow employees to drop in and connect with them. Our research team recruited a sampling of customers that we thought would be relevant to the majority of employees and then just sent out an email indicating when they’d be available and asking interested employees to sign up for time. With internal customers, we designated 20 minute time blocks and allowed 3-4 teams to talk to any one customer, but with external customers we usually go for 30 minute segments and limit each customer to two teams – so as not to overwhelm them. But you could do whatever works for your group! Teams were really excited to have a chance to talk to customers and share their ideas- especially because they wouldn’t have made the time to do it on their own. And they loved the fact that it took almost no effort for them.
- KRISTY: In order for teams to develop deep empathy, they need to be interacting with their customers frequently But because the investment is high, they weren’t doing it Office hours creates a nice, low barrier option for employees to get feedback from customers more frequently – at all stages of their product They are by no means perfect, of course We observed some teams coming into office hours with little to no preparation, which overall is not the end of the world, but in some cases that led to them asking very thin, opinion based questions But, kind of like the customer interviews, the primary purpose of these office hours is not to replace strategic research, but rather to help the teams stay connected to their customers day to day.
- DAWN: Customer immersion days are one of the most impactful and intense methods for taking an entire organization on the customer empathy journey at once. These are full day immersive experience with real customers. That means having everyone, YES everyone, leave the building and talk to customers on the same day. It is a great way to mobilize an entire organization around a singular goal and to create commitment. One example was an event called Unite, in which one of our divisions shut down operations for the day and sent everyone out to learn about what motivates their customers and how they think about finances. Accountants, small business owners and consumers were recruited for the event and busses were hired to take people out to their customers. It was an extremely effective way to quickly ignite a passion for the customer.
- DAWN: This artifact is an example of what we used during one of the immersion activities We sent employees out to talk to customers where they are, what we refer to as “in the wild” This field guide provides an overview of empathy, mindsets to consider and guidance for talking to customers in the moment. We’ve actually brought copies of these guides with us today to share with you – Although some of the content is specific to Intuit's customers, a lot of it can be leveraged no matter what the industry and you can always adapt the interview guides to work for your own company and products
- DAWN: Customer immersion days can be amazing. They get people outside, meeting customers in real life, and can really energize and align an entire organization. But they come at a very high cost. This is not something that should be done randomly The event needs have something meaningful to propel it – like a new strategy you want the organization to understand or rally around – otherwise it could fall flat Once people understand the value of getting customer insights and how it should impact the way they work, then your org could be in a position to make this kind of investment.
- DAWN: To sum up, the methods we’ve used in our second stage are really about helping the organization practice building empathy for themselves. As we continue along this journey, we’ll continue to do more coaching and experiment with additional methods, but we again wanted to share with you some of our takeaways so far: First, its so important broadly and clearly communicate the context and objectives of the program to all levels of the organization. We focused on clear communication with the senior leaders, but realized that as that information trickled down the management chain, they didn’t always hear the same messaging, so when we were trying to get their employees to do stuff, we sometimes found resistance. We really needed to ground all levels of employees in the goals of the program. Also savor the surprises – as you go through this journey you're going to learn a lot and have to try a lot of things in order to see what works and what doesn’t for you and for your organization. As you experiment, its important to embrace those moments you didn’t expect. For example, after we asked the leadership team to do their first set of customer interviews, one of our leaders actually went out on his own and did a bunch of additional interviews, recorded them and then shared a video montage of what his customers were saying and feeling about his product during an operations review. We didn’t expect that response, but it helped us think about how we could up the ante in the future and allowed us to show that particular leader off as a shining example. The surprises can be good or bad too – when we sat in on some of the leadership interviews, we found that some of them were not well prepared to conduct interviews and spent a lot of time advocating for their products instead of listening – this learning helped us decide on making our first skill workshop focused on interviewing and listening skills! Finally, make sure you set your teams up for success. When we set up the office hours, our primary goal was to help employees connect more often with customers– Although we accomplished that, we saw some mixed results for the teams who’d had very little experience interviewing customers. We quickly realized that offering in the moment guidance as well as more preemptive hands on coaching for teams that were less experienced would help them have better conversations with their customers which would keep them coming back for more. When you are trying to convince your team or organization to embrace customer empathy in their day to day, you want to make sure that the interactions they do have – especially early on - are as positive and engaging as possible.
- KRISTY: Our goal with this program was to create a culture of empathy across our organization instead of pinning that responsibility solely on the user experience team. It does not replace the need for user research or design on a team, but instead creates an environment where the strong shared interest and passion around the customer allows the team to work together to come up with more innovative and delightful solutions. We hope the methods we shared with you today will help you as you consider bringing empathy to your own organization.
- KRISTY: So we’ll leave you with just a few final thoughts on what to consider for your own empathy program: First, expect a wide range of reactions: UX folks usually have a thick skin, and you might need it for this!! We’ve been met with skepticism and even apathy throughout the process, but we just keep pushing and chipping away at the stubborn exterior of those that resist! But when you do find the people who get it, and are excited about what you are doing – grab them and celebrate them! Those champions are an invaluable asset. They can help you expand your program and reach audiences at a different level – it’s one thing for the developers to hear the user researchers talk about how it’s easy to talk to customers and they should just try – but it’s a whole lot more believable when they hear and see their engineering leader championing it. If you are going to go through the effort of creating a program, managing the logistics is a huge part of that. For us, we did things like create the Empathy Kits we mentioned earlier. Packaging methods together and curating that facilitated experience worked really well for us – especially because it allowed us to cover a lot of information at one time, which was key when dealing with busy individuals. Another way we made the logistics work was by tapping into existing channels. For example, we added our skills workshop to an existing operational review, and we’ve brought customer panels into all hands meetings. DAWN: Another thing we did was to add rigor around the program. We created a road map, deliverables, and treated it like any other program – which has been key in keeping the momentum. And whenever you can, get executive sponsorship. Having the senior VP behind us made this process so much easier. That’s not to say it couldn’t or wouldn’t have happened without her – but it would have been a much longer and bumpier road Finally, remember to be patient, and flexible. This takes time, and people progress at different speeds. There were absolutely times when we were frustrated and disheartened by failures or by people who saw no value in what we were doing – but we persevered. You may have to change course mid program to make it work for you and your team – but if your flexible and patient, you’ll see results. People have stopped us in the halls and asked when we’ll be doing the next empathy kit They ask for more opportunities to get in touch with their customers And sometimes we even over-hear them talking about customer empathy in the break room – all good signs! KRISTY: Thank you so much for your time and attention today – we have about ten minutes now for questions if anyone has anything they’d like to ask!