Getting to know your customers is both fashionable and a good idea. But if you work for a large corporation, you may find several obstacles to forming a direct relationship with customers. All is not lost; you can kick-start your customer research by looking within your company for evidence of user experience problems.
- Technical Support : Customer support is an area of great expense for most companies. If you have a technical support or customer service staff, you have a rich source of customer complaints and difficulties. Most technical support groups keep track of how many calls they get about a particular issue so that they can decide what to focus on. Commonly, these groups are also aware of trends in customer concerns. Too often, this information is not adequately employed by the rest of the company to actually make improvements in products. Find out what the top issues are. They might be complaints, or they might be “educational calls,” questions users commonly have about how to use the product. Also ask how much such a call costs the company. If you can make a fix to the product (or its documentation) that reduces call volume, and you multiply that reduction by the cost per call, you’ll know how much savings that fix can the company. if that fix reduces the number of products returned, or reduces abandonment of your service, etc. then it has even greater power.
- Training and Education : If your company provides training or education to its users, the trainers will know what parts of the product users have difficulty learning. Improving usability and intelligibility in these areas will improve customer satisfaction and make the trainer’s job easier. In addition, the trainers will be able to point out features that are difficult to explain. A feature that is hard to explain often hides a usability problem. Trainers will primarily be concerned with features and processes that the user employs during adoption, while they are setting up and getting to know a product. This is when most returns happen. Returns are costlier to the company than a failure to sell the product in the first place, so initiatives that lead to a reduction in returns have a direct impact on the bottom line.
- Technical Writers : The folks who write your product’s documentation will also be able to point out features that are difficult to explain or procedures that seem needlessly complicated. Asking a technical writer “what about this product is hard to write about” is not likely to receive a good response (tech writers are a proud bunch), so an approach that focuses on their impressions of the product and the amount of time they spent investigating one or another feature is more likely to be successful.
- Product Documentation : If this fails, read the documentation yourself. You may be able to detect passages that treat parts of the product too lightly, dive into excessive detail, or rely on convoluted explanations. Pay special attention to the “troubleshooting” section, if any. What would benefit from clarification in the interface, reduced user decision-making, improved information design, etc.? Are there troubleshooting operations that the system should be able to perform? Are there troubleshooting situations that arise from otherwise well-intentioned user action?
- Field Sales Staff : Outside salespeople have a unique view of the customer. Their job is to uncover customer needs and match those needs to a product, ideally one that your company sells. They are extremely competitive and may know more about your products and the competition’s products than anyone else in the company. They are intimately familiar with customer needs, especially those that potential customers ask about. And they have a knack for collecting pre- and post-sales feedback on a product. Their assessment of customer need is largely based on what the customer says rather than what the customer does , so be careful. But getting to know the salespeople can also shorten your path to customers; the sales staff will be happy that you re taking an interest, they will probably think that customer will also be happy that you are taking an interest. There’s a strong chance that a salesperson will see getting you in front of a customer as a triple win: the salesperson can use you as an excuse to visit the customer and show the customer that the company is interested in them and their feedback; the customer gets an opportunity to explain their unique situation and feel that the company is hearing them and valuing their input; and you get direct insight into both a individual customer and the sales process.
- In-House Sales Staff : Inside salespeople have another perspective on the customer; these folks are shepherding the most interested potential customers through the process of making a purchase. In addition to gathering all of the requisite customer and payment information, they must overcome last-minute nervousness and concerns raised by the buyer. The most common of these reveal product deficiencies, competitive weaknesses, or negative emotional components of the product experience.
- Try It Yourself : Whether or not you have ready access to users you should become one, even temporarily. Give the product a thorough tire-kicking, making special note of things that seem odd or are not well-explained, operations that seem complicated, places where you don’t have all of the information you need to make a decision. Trying it yourself will give you direct insight into the situations your users face and help you smooth the rough edges of interactive and informational design.
