Product Discovery Guide : Desk research and goals
In this chapter we'll focus on Root cause analysis and Setting up the goals.
This article is part of Product Discovery Guide Series:
Topic • Overloaded Customer Care
- Product Discovery Guide Series : Intro
- Product Discovery Guide : Identify the problem
- Product Discovery Guide : Desk research and goals
- Product discovery guide : Brainstorm and Prioritise
- Product discovery guide : Plan, Deliver and Evaluate
Desk research
Desk research is nice technique which is nothing more than putting all the data you gather about the problem into one place so that you can get to the bottom of it.
In our case it was “Overloaded customer care with 40 000 emails per month”. We started to ask why we think it is happening and what is happening behind.
Follow the board in Miro called “Desktop research — root cause analysis”
Look at the data you can gather around the topic
I checked the Google Analytics and found out that:
- More people are coming from website than mobile app (560 users clicks on Email contact per week)
- 4000 users visits page “/contact” per week
Most frequent topics coming via e-mail are:
- Package location
- How to manage mobile app
- Problems with COD (=cash on delivery)
- Return packages
- Request for change the contact details
- Redirect the package
- Client section management
- Others
Check user behaviour
- I went through anonymous user recordings in Hotjar. I was looking for users who visited page “/contacts” and what did they do on the website
- A watched around 30 recordings and soon it started to be quite obvious that people are lost on the websites, they tried to search for some information across the whole website but unfortunately they were not able to find the answer and ended up on Contact page to find the email address.
- At that time there was no dedicated page for FAQ, all the FAQ were spread across website in sections at the bottom of the page
The output of Desk Research looked like this:
Do you see some patterns already? I hope so :) Our root cause was that people were not able to find the information on the website so that they reached to customer care with questions they could find by themselves.
How to do this process by yourself? When you have the problem statement, start gathering everything you can about the problem. What really helps is to repeatedly ask yourself and others “Why do you believe is it happening?”.
- Verify with data —either explore by yourself or if you have data department in your company, ask them to help to put all data around the topic together.
- Talk to user facing departments — sales, customer care and ask them what are the reasons the problem occurs?
- Check user behaviour — can you get in touch with users of your product? Look at how they interact with it and when they stuck in regards with your problem
- Involve user research — if you have User research department, ask them to help you to gather data around your topic from user researches, interviews, feedbacks
Now everybody is usually excited about throwing ideas how to solve the problem but before we jumped into that, set up the goal first. Why? Goal helps you to track the progress — are we on the right track? It helps you to stay focused on the goal and ask yourself a question — Does it help to reach the goal? And last but not least — you have nice milestone to celebrate when you reach your goal.
Set up the goal
How do you recognise that the problem is resolved?
In our product discovery we identified that the problem is overloaded customer care with 40 000 e-mails per month which causes delay in first time reply and customer satisfaction. We sat up together with customer care team and I asked when would we feel that the problem is resolved?
Follow in Miro board called “Set up goal”.
After several rounds we agreed on these goals:
In 6 months
- 81% of issues will be resolved within 24hours
- Decrease number of received emails by 70%
- While keeping in mind to remain user friendly and simple
Output in Miro looks like this:
When you set up your goals make sure they are:
Specific: Everybody around should understand what would you like to achieve
Measurable: You have to be able to say if you hit the goal — see to our goals, part with percentages is the measurable part of the goal
Actionable: You have to able to do the actions by yourself or with help of people from your company
Realistic: We say “sky is the limit” but let's be realistic with your goals. If we set up our goal to “Decrease the number of email to 0”, it would not be realistic to achieve it
Time bound: Set the milestone to your goal, it helps you to keep track on whether you are on the right direction or not. In our goal the timeframe is 6 months
Before you jump to solution, always set up the goal, it will help you to stay focused, prioritise and set up the expectations within the organisation you work at.
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