Proven tools and processes to be truly customer-centred
User-centred design is no new thing. As a term it has held many guises long before the the digital age in areas such as human factors and ergonomics.
Being customer centred is a mantra that we all wish to believe we are following, but sadly this is not always the case. As I not so subtly alluded to in my previous post about persona’s, there is a danger that customer insight research is carried out solely as a check-box exercise destined to sit on a shelf for the rest of eternity. Only occasionally being referenced with complete disregard to the context in which the study was done and whether or not it is still relevant today.
In this article I will share my experience of what being truly customer-centred means through the lens of TravelPerk, one of Europes top SaaS startups. You will learn how we use constant communication and a suite of tools to build empathetic relationships with our customers. Let’s dive in…
Being customer centric without customers
When I first started at TravelPerk, we had zero customers. I know, I know… “How the hell can you be customer-centred without having any customers?”
Well, like most things in life you have a balance. In business you have a balance of what the customer wants or needs sitting alongside the vision and strategy of the company. In the perfect business these two factors will co-exist and progress in parallel, but that almost never happens.
Starting out, a business will typically have more of a voice of what it wants and then just hopes that the market that is being pursued wants the same thing. Then, as your customer base grows, this balance begins to shift and instead of the business making best guesses, it can now be informed by both prospective and active customers.
The network effect
All good businesses should have some idea of who they want to target. For me, TravelPerk’s target customers were clearly defined, giving me confidence to get out there and start reaching out to potential customers on LinkedIn. This was great in two ways: firstly, it gave me the chance to understand the product better by articulating what we offered to people who were completely unaware of who we were or what we did; secondly it meant that I was able to gather some upfront feedback, typically in the form of video calls or face to face visits.
Each of these phone calls or visits were paramount in gathering an expansive understanding of what these people needed in light of what we were offering, and most importantly identified where the gaps lay in our product or messaging. This led me to plot a fairly robust experience map that was shared with the team and helped to drive many product decisions thereafter.
On top of this, we also had some team members reaching out and cold-calling companies, selling what we had to offer (which for the most part was quite easy, as what we offer is completely free). I tried to join as many of these calls as I could to observe where people sat up and paid most attention, where they switched off and then what sorts of questions they were asking. Again, all of these insights helped flood into product conversations and helped us to make clear and conscientious decisions on what to focus on.
Early data gathering
Obviously these methods can be quite time consuming, so we also looked for scalable ways to gather feedback. We quickly put Usabilla in place, a tool that allows us to gather feedback from anyone visiting our website or app.
This way, if something was broken, and someone was kind enough to tell us, we offered an easy way for them to reach us and let us know. One click and they could highlight the issue, leave a comment and leave a score of their experience with the product. All of these data points can soon mount up to reveal some interesting patterns and insights.
Find out what they want (setting up a honeypot)
With few customers and even fewer resources, another method we adopted was to set up a “honeypot” on our marketing website to see which “features” our customers were enticed by. In short we listed a bunch of features that we had developed or had on the roadmap for the near future. Then, for each feature we added a “Find out more” button and added some simple click event tracking via Google Analytics.
Having this in place meant that after any campaign, event or publication (where we would see spikes in traffic) we were able to see what people wanted to “Find out more” about allowing us to focus more on the product development and marketing of those features. This served as an additional data-point helping us make smarter decisions about what mattered most to people.
How would you rate your experience?
Honey-potting was great for getting a sense of what prospective customers might be interested in, but for those who were already using TravelPerk, we used Promoter.io to gather the Net Promoter Score (NPS) from our customers.
After booking a trip, we email the customer asking for their NPS score with an option to offer some additional feedback. All of this serves as fantastic data-points allowing us to determine over time if we were trending up or down in terms of customer satisfaction and also if the new features we were building were contributing to increased satisfaction or not.
The importance of customer support
One thing that I was unaware of before starting at TravelPerk was the importance of the customer support team. Using a tool called ZenDesk, we offer users a way to request things that aren’t yet available within the product. Having visibility of these tickets and also speaking regularly with the customer support team gave us some qualitative insight into the types of requests people would have which would also allow us to see which gaps we still had in the product.
If they were asking for a particularly complex trip, we were able to see what sorts of requirements were needed, and in turn see how we could feed features and interaction flows to help meet these requests.
Your support team will always bridge the gap between what your product can and can’t do, so it is fundamental that you keep that team close as you continue to make product decisions.
Now, we actually have one of our customer support leads sit with the product team for one day each week to see how we can optimise our internal processes and to hear what sorts of support tickets are being raised in light of new features being released or conversely which requests are being made due to the lack of a features existence.
In the flesh
One of my favourite research methods is speaking with people, face-to-face, and ideally within the context of their environment. This is beneficial for many reasons, but the key aspects for me is that you get to see that person using your tools and services as part of their regular routine (not as part of a fabricated test) and also allows you to gather many contextual intricacies that would otherwise go unnoticed.
Take for example a persons desk—you can learn a lot about someone from their surrounding. Do they use calendars? Have post-its all over the place? Do they use notepads and pens? Have physical calculators? How organised is their folder structure on their laptop? Do they use lots of apps in parallel? All of these little details can be great conversation starters and often lead to some very interesting answers.
At the end of the day, we are all just trying to solve peoples problems, and getting closer to people allows us to get closer to their problems.
Many of my face-to-face sessions are recorded using a tool called Lookback.io which is great for capturing those sound bites or video footage that can be distributed around the team when highlighting a bug or a particular frustration. On some occasions, these snippets are collated and broadcast to the whole team during our end-of-week meeting. Activities like this really help the team to empathise with the people on the other end of the product, instead of just seeing them as numbers on some dashboard.
Staying connected
As we’ve grown from the tens, to hundreds, to the thousands of customers we have today, we’re constantly learning from the various channels we put in place. It’s been a key driver in informing our product roadmap as we move through each quarter.
We now have an ecosystem of tools which all cross-over in some way or another and give us many channels to refer to when looking for answers or ideas.
We use Intercom for in-app chat which gives our users a way of instantly getting in touch with us, allowing us to resolve their needs as quickly as possible. Having a log of these chats also allows you to see where people are getting stuck and what sorts of things are being asked for in that moment. On top of this, Intercom also offers us a way to segment and engage with certain customers to promote new features and later test their interest.
Closely linked to this, we also have a Help Center which offers solutions and guidance to some common questions that people have. We also have a hook set up to push a notification to Slack when someone searches for a term which does not exist in our Help Center. Again, this is visible to anyone in the team and let’s us see what people are struggling with and what sort of information they are looking for.
We are also still gathering our NPS score and feeding this into our company Slack account which keeps everything highly transparent and allows anyone in the company to get involved with product ideas or suggestions. Seeing the feedback coming in from customers also keeps us humble to the fact that in any moment we may not be serving the needs of current, or new customers.
Your customers will change over time, and so too should your product.
The finest details
Using a mixture of the aforementioned tools has given us great insights into how we should shape the future of TravelPerk, but there are a couple of other tools I’d like to mention.
Anyone who has ever done any research will be familiar with tools like MixPanel and Google Analytics but a real game-changer for me has been a session-recording tool called FullStory.
The former are great for seeing trends and keeping track of your goals and conversions but they are lacking that deeper level of “why” certain things happen. Seeing numbers may only be the veneer of something far greater. Why are people converting less? Why does it take two minutes for users to get through this step?
You could make informed guesses at these details, but what FullStory will give you is a way of seeing the users session before and after that metric you are tracking. It’s the next best thing to sitting beside your customers, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. On top of this, it has also proven a highly effective tool for uncovering and understanding bugs which may otherwise go unfound.
Don’t stop…
There is no single tool or process that will make your product bullet-proof, but understanding an amalgamation of all of these data points coupled with a constant curiosity will help keep your customers at the forefront of your product decisions.
Your customers needs and behaviours do not stagnate, and neither should your curiosity.
