Experts of Experience
#58 The ROI of Listening: How Brands Are Winning with User Feedback
Wed, 27 Nov 2024
Is your company truly listening to its customers, or are you just paying lip service? On this episode, Michelle Engel, Chief Product Officer at UserTesting, challenges the status quo of customer feedback and discusses the pitfalls of ignoring customer insights. She shares key strategies that top brands use to ensure their offerings resonate with real users and explains the transformative power of truly understanding your audience.Tune in to learn:How integrating human insights can transform customer experiencesWhy data alone doesn't explain customer emotions and experiencesWhy personalization is key to addressing diverse customer needsHow integrating customer insights across departments enhances strategyHow AI can significantly speed up the process of gathering insightsWays technology can transform customer interactions for the better–How can you bring all your disconnected, enterprise data into Salesforce to deliver a 360-degree view of your customer? The answer is Data Cloud. With more than 200 implementations completed globally, the leading Salesforce experts from Professional Services can help you realize value quickly with Data Cloud. To learn more, visit salesforce.com/products/data to learn more. Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org. –Are your teams facing growing demands? Join CX leaders transforming their AI strategy with Agentforce. Start achieving your ambitious goals. Visit salesforce.com/agentforce Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org
Chapter 1: What are the two sides of customer experience?
When I think about customer experience, there's two sides to it. There's how do we not disappoint our customer and how do we delight our customer? And somewhere in that trade-off is an investment level and expense of what you're willing to spend towards these goals. You're not measuring. You don't have a strategy. You don't know how you're performing. And for every business, it looks different.
It's about understanding what is going to make an impact across how you think about your customers and their journey and where they interact with you and all of those points.
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood. Today, I'm excited to be joined by Michelle Engel, the Chief Product Officer at User Testing. We are going to explore how integrating human insights, one of my favorite topics, into product design and marketing is really transforming customer experiences across industries.
Chapter 2: How does user testing transform customer experiences?
Michelle, so wonderful to have you on the show. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. For our listeners who have not heard of user testing, can you give us the quick elevator pitch just so they know what we're talking about?
User testing is the leader in helping brands and retailers and companies out in the world to have conversations with real humans around customer experience, product development, marketing, To really bring in human insight into whether it is the how they are thinking about new solutions and product delivery to digital transformation. But it is a platform where our customers can come on and.
set up a study or a test or a conversation, however you want to think about it, connect to a real human and bring in that insight into their business process to really drive better ROI, better results, because they're not going down the development process or the launching a marketing campaign and then finding out later that doesn't resonate with a human or doesn't have product market fit or, you
doesn't actually provide any type of brand value in doing that and that there might've been a better way. So ultimately we're about helping our customers really deliver the best customer experience that they can by having conversations at scale with their customers.
So it's easy to go, you know, grab your uncle who maybe has an opinion and ask him what he thinks about something, but it's a little bit different if you're looking to do that with a hundred of your customers or a thousand different people prospects and things like that. So that's really where we play.
It's something I'm so happy that user testing exists. And as I've been preparing for this interview, the thing that really dawned on me was some of the best advice I ever received in my career was from a boss who said, before you do anything, Talk to our customers. Don't spend time building out that solution or that service or working with the product team on that product.
Talk to the customers first. And it's like obvious, but at the same time, it's not what... We always think to do because we're in our own little bubbles building the things that we believe are best. And that's great. But our customers are a wealth of knowledge and can help to guide us in where we're actually spending our time and our energy.
Yeah, and I think that what is interesting in what user testing does is part of the reason people don't always talk to their customers is it's hard. It takes effort. It takes dedication. Depending on your role, maybe you don't have easy access to them. Maybe there's...
lots of people who manage that relationship and you need to get a lot of approval to do it, or you're just not in a part of the organization where that can easily be done. And with user testing, we're sort of doing that hard work for you to find those people. So we're connecting you to humans who use your product, to have experienced your brand and making having those conversations easier. So
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Chapter 3: Why is it crucial to talk to customers before building solutions?
And a lot of times it's not black or white, but there just might be some nuance and better ideas and ways to iterate before you invest dollars into building something. So maybe the concept is right, but it has a slightly different flavor.
And you know that ahead of time and you can build that way versus sort of starting throwing it out, finding out nobody really likes it and then going back to the drawing board.
I mean, we can spend a long time building things that our customers don't really want. I know from being on the post-sale side of things, I've definitely had the frustrations of the product team working really, really hard at a solution that they promised us would solve our problem and then we roll it out and... it doesn't really drive the outcome that we were hoping.
And my team is then still in the weeds solving problems with customers manually instead of having a product solution that kind of alleviated that pain. And so I can really understand the ROI on investing in something like this early. And like you said, it's not...
that easy, depending on the company, depending on the business, it's not always easy to get in front of your customers and actually see how they are using your product. And so I'd love to understand who is testing on behalf of your customers? Who are these testers that you're bringing in to actually see how it's being used?
Yeah. From a customer perspective, I love user testing in that we have such a range of customers and they're doing such interesting things. And so from a customer side, we have everything from your sort of big tech that builds a lot of software and they want to make sure they're not frustrating their users or that the newest thing that they're building is really going to resonate.
So we see a lot of that. But then we have a lot of the brands that, you know, and interact with, whether it's airlines or banking and financial services, where it's really about delivering a great experience for the customer. And they're testing a lot of different things. So you could
easily imagine how you might want to test an app and how you might pick your seat and how you might check your account balance. But what about testing things like the interface that the customer support team is working with and how fast they're able to answer questions and get the information they need and the usability of those tools?
And then we've had customers who use us to test physical products. What's the packaging experience like, the unboxing? What is the smell of the potato chip? They'll use our mobile product to go into a hardware store and look at the product on the shelf and give feedback of what they're thinking when they see it on the shelf. So a lot of different use cases from the customer side.
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Chapter 4: How can user testing improve task completion rates?
I have invested months into trying to collect the right bits of information to architect the right argument so that I can make, so that we can make this little change that I just know is going to be so appreciated by my customers. But it's always felt like, why do I have to work so hard to get everyone else to see what I see? Wow. I really appreciate what you're doing.
Yeah, I was talking to a customer today who's a very large organization and it was top down. Their CEO really believes in listening to customers and understanding how they perceive different parts of what they do. And so- When someone comes in to convince her to spend money on something, to prioritize an initiative, she always asks if it's gone through our platform first.
And she wants real customers, real prospects, and what their opinions are, what their usage is, and how receptive they are to the concept or the idea before she's going to greenlight something. And I think it's a critical part to how you can... help speed up the time to decision-making, right? So-
Sometimes getting to a decision is really difficult when you love who you work with, you're very consensus driven, people are passionate, they care very deeply about the customer, and everyone is trying to do the right thing. But there's a lot of data, there's a lot of conflicting information and opinions.
And a lot of times what we're there for is sort of decision making support, how you can help speed up the time to a decision and how If you're debating something in a conference room, someone can go into user testing, create a test, set it off to run. And by the time the meeting's over, you at least have some input into what the right answer might be.
Oh my God, that's so valuable. I work with a lot of leaders where we'll do workshops to really dive into the mind of the customer and talk about who is our customer. And I do lots of research in a much more manual way than user testing. So this is all helpful for me. But we really dive into the mind of the customer. And then at the end, we talk about what are the questions we still have?
What do we need to test? Who do we need to talk to? What do we need to do to answer these blind spots? So that we can make the right decision because it's so often, I see so many teams do this. It is impossible to make a decision without the right information, but we are trying to, because that information, we don't know where to go to get it. We don't, it's a lot of effort to go and get it.
And it feels like we can just decide on our own without actually having to go through setting up meetings and meeting with customers and doing all those things. So this is... This is solving a lot of problems that I know a lot of people struggle with because making a decision without actual customer information is going to waste a lot of time. Yeah, for sure. A lot of time.
How do you think about different customer opinions? You know, we talk a lot about personalization. We talk a lot about how everyone wants things to be more suited to them. How do you work with your clients who have, I mean, I can even think about an airline where you have elderly people who have a difficult time with technology and then Gen Zs who are just like native users of technology.
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Chapter 5: What role does empathy play in understanding customer experiences?
Yeah, just that matching up of the intuitive understanding of what you're looking for and what those patterns are. And yeah, it's all... how you can creatively meet those needs and address them 100%.
But we have to listen and we have to see what are those needs, even if they're not stated as a need. I think most of us have no idea some of the friction or problems that we have in our day-to-day lives, because we don't consider them to be problems because we've just become used to it. But then once we have a solution, it's like the Starbucks thing. Why would you wait in line?
Like I was actually waiting in line at a Starbucks the other day. And the person at the front desk is like, why are you all here? You don't need to do this. And we're all like, oh, that's true. And so we all pull out our phones and like make our orders.
Or the ones that I tend to do a Target pull up and pick up your order thing. And I'm like, it'd be great if I could just add the Starbucks that's now in the lobby of the Target, add my drink. And then like literally the next week, like got added to the app. And I was checking me out. I was like, would you like to add a drink for pick up? I'm like, yes, yes, I would definitely.
They were listening to you. Natural way of finding those complimentary parts that can help make the customer experience so much better. Yeah, for sure.
So you're an experienced product leader. You've been in this space for a while. I'm curious to get your opinion. What do you think most businesses miss when it comes to customer experience?
When I think about customer experience, there's sort of two sides to it. There's how do we not disappoint our customer and how do we delight our customer? And somewhere in that trade-off is the investment level and expense of what you're willing to spend towards these goals. And there are definitely people out there who would say, you want to delight your customer and that's how you can...
retain them and increase lifetime value and all of these things, we need to delight them. And then there are certain cases where it's like your customer's expectation of this interaction with you when they call customer support is so low. That a small improvement in addressing that would go such a long way. I think it's a little bit about that sort of bang for the buck.
Like with the Target example, having the ability to get the Starbucks there is probably going to make me go to the Target over the grocery store, right? It's just a lot easier. It's all combined. But in other cases, it's like a small improvement that's probably not going to drive my loyalty and not going to drive... sort of repeat purchasing.
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