Becoming best friends with Customer Experience Team
Research - User Interviews
Regular, consistent shadowing of our CX team at Betterment has been one of the most rewarding, eye opening, and worthwhile things I have done as a designer. As the lead designer for the Operations Efficiency squad, I established a shadowing program for our CX team members to better understand snags in the team’s workflow. I sought out opportunities to make our internal tools and integrations more efficient.
However, I immediately realized that not only was I discovering ways to improve our tools, but that shadowing is a great way to quickly get insight into the issues, problems, and questions that our customers have about our product and company.
Setting goals for companywide shadowing
I wanted to share this experience with others so they could use these insights in their own work.
With 3 goals in mind, I began hosting weekly shadowing sessions, extending an invitation to everyone in the company to observe the workflow involved in handling cases over chat, phone, and email.
Give management, product managers, designers, and engineers the opportunity to gain actionable insight into the types of problems customers have with our product.
Gain better understanding of the questions potential customers reach out with before signing up so that we can better address their needs.
Give more exposure to our CX team—after all they’re our main connection to our customer and know our product inside and out.
I take collaborative notes with my colleagues in Dropbox Paper (I'm a huge fan).
Refining the process and making insights sharable
We're constantly iterating on the process, but at present one member of CX connects their laptop remotely to a large screen in a conference room. We have a CX teammate in the room with us to give commentary and color to what’s happening on the screen and on the calls we listen to. I take a running log of notes that is shared with all colleagues at the session, and I encourage them to take notes as well.
We shadow for 60 minutes and spend the last 15 minutes discussing, brainstorming, and collating notes based on what we saw and heard. We sum up action items, both immediate fixes and things to consider for the product roadmap in the future.
Post-shadowing followup survey for attendees
Following up, feedback, and constant improvements
After each session, I send out a short follow up survey to the colleagues who attended to give them the opportunity for suggestions or feedback. It is very important to me to constantly improve the process and make sure everyone is getting the most out of this time as possible to ensure we're gaining actionable insights to improve our product.