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This CX Mini Masterclass explores 3 low-cost unique customer experience research methodologies. Show host and customer experience expert, Julia Ahlfeldt, explains the benefits of expanding VOC efforts beyond the survey and focus group, several ways you can do this, and how to deal with potential push back around sample size. If you’re interested in learning about 3 simple VOC approaches that will help you gain new insight into the lives and experiences of your customers, then this episode is for you.
Unique customer experience research
Surveys and focus groups have long reigned supreme as the most popular Voice of Customer (VOC) approaches. And with good reason. If done correctly, they can yield valuable insights about customer experience. But, they have some limitations. They can be expensive and time consuming to facilitate. Both rely on customers reporting on what they think they do (which may differ from what they actually do). Surveys allow researchers to engage a large number of customers, but are always subject to bias and may yield limited insights. Focus groups provide a deeper look, but a group setting can impact what participants say.
Think of surveys and focus groups as the wide-angle lens of customer understanding. They’re essential, and you’d be lost without them. But qualitative research gives you something different: depth. It lets you get close enough to see what customers actually do, not just what they say they do, and that gap can be significant.
No single VOC methodology is perfect, and each one yields unique customer experience insights. That’s why it’s important to have a multifaceted approach that utilizes a mix of qualitative and quantitative tactics.
Customer interviews are a tried and true qualitative research method (and if you want to go deeper on what interviews can unlock, Episode 81 is a great listen). But there are other, less-obvious qualitative research approaches that are worth having in your VOC toolkit. Here are three more methodologies that are often overlooked, but easy to execute and surprisingly rich in what they reveal.
- Fly on the wall observations – Understand your objectives, grab a clipboard, find a discrete spot and just absorb. This is particularly helpful for filling in blindspots along the customer journey that don’t leave a data trail (e.g. retail before the point of purchase, a customer waiting area). It’s a great starting point for VOC research, as it normally generates additional questions that can be included in supplementary research.
- Job shadowing or “day in the life of” – A researcher spends time with a research subject while they do a particular task or just go about their day. The researcher should have clear direction on the objectives, but also the latitude to ask questions and engage with the research subject. This approach often yields surprising insights about things the research team never expected. It can be particularly useful in a B2B setting, where customers sometimes view their suppliers as partners and might be open to job shadowing as a way of helping suppliers gain insights that can improve products and services.
- Journaling – this last approach is all about unleashing the customer with a mandate to record their actions, thoughts, feelings, emotions or observations on a specific topic. It’s a great window into customers’ lives and what they actually do. The age of smartphones opens up many options to make journaling easier for researchers and participants. Instead of logging actions in a physical journal, participants can take photos, screen grabs or video testimonials about a certain activity related to the area of research interest. Commitment to participation is key, so this might be a place where it’s appropriate to use incentives or engage with a professional panel of research subjects.
Dealing with push back on sample size
When exploring these unique customer experience research approaches, it’s not uncommon to get questions about sample size. Anyone who’s taken a stats course knows that is important when you are looking at things like probability and predictive modeling.
On the spectrum of Voice of Customer methodologies, there is narrow-but-deep at the one end and wide-but-shallow at the other. A massive survey, for example, would be wide-but-shallow. There is the opportunity to reach a larger sample size, but limitations in the depth of perspective about a customer’s life. On the other hand, something like a Day in the Life Of study is narrow but deep. It’s obviously not feasible to shadow thousands of customers, but researchers can be smart about picking a few participants who are representative of a customer segment, and then back the findings up with a statistically significant survey campaign.
Think about observations, shadowing and journaling as complements to, not replacements for, traditional VOC research like surveys and customer activity data analysis.
Transcript
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Welcome to Decoding the Customer, a podcast about customer experience and how to realize customer-centric change in today’s dynamic business world. I’m Julia Ahlfeldt, certified customer experience professional, business advisor, and host of this program. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you’re new to the show, welcome.
If you’re a returning listener, thanks, and it’s great to have you back. This episode is part of my CX Mini Masterclass series here on Decoding the Customer. These weekly episodes are published each Thursday and designed to be punchy, bite-size overviews of key customer experience concepts and ideas for how you can help your organization thrive through customer centricity. Whether you’re new to the field of customer experience, are preparing for the CCXP exam, or are a seasoned professional looking to brush up on a few basics, this series will help you improve your knowledge, skills, and performance to stand out as a CX professional.
This is episode 79, the second episode for April 2020. Today, I’m going to share three ideas for gathering voice of customer insight. These are methodologies that are often overlooked, but can provide unique insight into customers and the context of their lives. We all know that customer understanding is so important for CX management.
In fact, customer insight is often the very first port of call for organizations that are just getting started with their CX evolution. That’s because if we don’t understand our customers, there’s absolutely no way we’ll be able to deliver a good experience. Let’s put it this way. If customer experience management were plotted on a monopoly board, voice of customer would be where you pass go and collect $200.
We’re all familiar with surveys, focus groups, and even customer interviews as great ways to collect customer insight. But I sometimes think that these are overplayed and that there are countless other methodologies that yield rich insights, often different insights than you would get through these more traditional approaches. So if you’re interested in learning about three voice of customer approaches that you might not have thought of before, but are simple, low cost, and yield different insights than what you get from surveys and focus groups, then stay tuned. As always, if you’re out and about while listening to this and hear something that you’d like to remember later, don’t worry about writing it down.
You can find an overview of the key concepts we’ve covered today in the show notes for this episode, which are on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com, or decodingthecustomer.com. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not here to say that surveys and focus groups aren’t useful. They absolutely are.
And it’s for good reason that these methodologies are so incredibly popular. That said, each Voice of Customer research approach has its advantages and its disadvantages. That’s why I think it’s important to use a variety of approaches so you can get a more robust and comprehensive understanding of your customers, their needs, their motivations, and the context for their life. So today, I’m sharing three unique, alternative Voice of Customer methodologies that you might want to think about adding to your arsenal.
The first is called fly on the wall observations. It’s amazing what you can learn about customers just by watching what they do. This is particularly helpful for filling in blind spots along the customer journey that don’t leave a traditional data trail. For example, retailers often have a lot of insight about what customers purchase because that information can be gathered through loyalty card programs and at the point of sale.
But before that point, there’s little insight about how customers move through the store, what they pick up, what they might consult to make their decisions, etc. I’ve also used this fly-on-the-wall observation approach in a banking context to understand how clients move through a branch and what they do while they’re there. I think this is a great place to start your voice of customer research. Understand your objectives, grab a clipboard, find a discreet spot, and just absorb.
You’ll probably find that this approach generates questions. Resist the urge to intervene. But, think about how you might be able to answer those questions through another approach, like follow-up interviews, a focus group, or an analysis of customer activity data. Observations won’t yield all the answers, but it may open your eyes to new aspects of the customer experience that you hadn’t thought of.
The next voice of customer approach goes by several names. Job shadowing, a day in the life of, walk a mile in their shoes, whatever you want to call it. This VOC methodology is about deep immersion in someone’s life, work, or their routine. It’s pretty straightforward.
A researcher spends time with a research subject while they do a particular task or just go about their day. The researcher should have clear direction on the objectives and what they’re looking to learn. But they should also have latitude to ask questions and engage with the research subject. As with fly-on-the-wall observations, I find that this approach often yields insights about things that you’ve never suspected.
I found it to be particularly useful in a B2B context where customers often view their suppliers as partners and are open to job shadowing as a way of helping suppliers gain insights that can improve products and services. The third and final voice of customer methodology that I’d like to cover is journaling. The first two approaches rely heavily on researcher observations, but this last approach is all about unleashing the customer with a mandate to record their thoughts, feelings, emotions, actions, and their observations on a specific topic. If you’re a food manufacturer, perhaps you’re looking to glean insights on customer eating habits and their feelings about their choices.
Asking customers to log this over the course of a week can yield some pretty cool insights. The prevalence of smartphones has opened up a lot of options to make journaling easier for you and your research subjects. For example, you could ask your research participants to take photos, screen grabs, or make video testimonials about a specific activity related to your area of interest. This approach can yield some fascinating insights about the context of customers’ lives, particularly if you open it up to photo or video journaling.
As you might imagine, a challenge with this methodology can be getting the research subject to engage with journaling and to do it consistently. This might be an instance where it’s worthwhile to look at incentives or possibly even a panel of participants that have agreed to take part in this type of research. If that’s not an option, see if you can engage with some of your brand advocates or super users, those who have a stake in the success of your product offering. They might be more willing to consistently participate.
Before I wrap things up, I’d like to address the question of sample size. Because it’s an important one, and where I think many CX professionals get pushback on some of these lesser used Voice of Customer research approaches. On the spectrum of VOC methodologies, you have at the one end narrow but deep, and at the other, wide but shallow. A massive survey would be wide but shallow.
You can reach a larger sample size, but you’re limited in the perspective that you can glean. On the other hand, something like a day in the life of is narrow but deep. It’s obviously not feasible to shadow thousands of customers, but you can be smart about picking a few participants who are representative of a customer segment. And then, back up the findings with something like a broader survey if you think you’ll get pushback on the sample size.
Think about observations, shadowing, and journaling as complements to, not replacements for, surveys and customer activity data analysis. If you’re looking for help with voice of customer research or turning insights into experience improvements, please get in touch. I’d be happy to explore how I can help. You can reach me via email, tweet, or LinkedIn message.
My handle is at Julia Ahlfeldt, and my full contact details are also listed on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. I hope that you’re enjoying the show. Please share with others who might be interested or head on over to iTunes and rate the podcast. This helps others find the show.
I’ll be back next week with another episode. I’ll see you then.
If you’d like to checkout more of these CX Mini Masterclasses or listen to my longer format CX expert interviews, check out the full listing of episodes for this CX podcast.
Decoding the Customer is a series of customer experience podcasts created and produced by Julia Ahlfeldt, CCXP. Julia is a customer experience strategist, speaker and business advisor. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional and one of the top experts in customer experience management. To find out more about how Julia can help your business achieve its CX goals, check out her customer experience advisory consulting services (including CX strategy, voice of customer and culture change) or get in touch via email.
