How UX Research contributes to building user-centricity at Khatabook

Contributed by Kiranraj Govind — User Research Manager Khatabook

It is a proven fact that most successful businesses have products and services aligned with user needs. It is easier for brands to succeed if they constantly listen to their customers and act on their legitimate feedback. If customer listening was so simple, why do brands fail at all? Why doesn’t every company just talk to their customers?

Here’s what we think are the multifold challenges with regard to user feedback at different companies.

1. Sometimes there is a lack of strategic inclination toward Customer centricity in the management. User research is often perceived as an activity that can potentially slow down the pace of a launch
2. The resource allocation for research is not prioritized as compared to marketing or sales efforts.

In this article, I am going to specifically talk about my experience of leading UX Research at Khatabook and how as a customer-obsessed organization there is a strong emphasis on constantly listening to what our users want at Khatabook

Khatabook was always an organization that emphasized being close to users and also getting feedback from users at every level. When I joined Khatabook we already had an in-app survey tool that would help us get contextual feedback from our users. Over a course of time, we built UX research practices like depth interviews, usability testing, and contextual inquiry to build a deeper understanding of users and build true customer-centric product roadmaps

A lot of the research we did cater well to the kind of objectives we wanted to achieve; however, we also wanted to explore and be closer to our users at the moment when they are using our products. Hence, originated an idea to create a pool of users who can reach out to us anytime they have a suggestion to enhance or improve their product experience.

What was the Objective of Anytime User Feedback?

1. We wanted users to tell us exactly what they wanted while using our products without us having to reach out to them. Also, often users forget the feedback they wanted to give when you reach out to them when they are not using the product.
2. Build better connect with users so that they can turn into product consultants for us.
3. We did not want this initiative to turn into customer support where users only raise a problem ticket. This initiative ran much deeper in terms of user understanding, engagement, relationship management and productising the feedback.

The Process:

1. Identify users who are genuinely interested in sharing feedback — In our case, we had run a survey with our users to check their intent
2. Post the initial consent: We personally reached out to users, checked their inclination to be part of this exercise and walked them through how they can contribute. This process becomes very important as a lot of users in the initial survey may have said yes but later may not want to participate having the right users helps in making the panel more effective
3. Once the user’s consent is well established we created Whatsapp groups where users could share feedback as and when they had anything to share
4. Our product managers and designers were also part of this group so they know the types of suggestions coming from users.
5. Over a period of time, this group also started serving us well in recruiting users for new research as the users had a degree of familiarity with us which in the B2B space is very difficult to establish.
6. The flip side is we also get into situations where sometimes users share feedback which ideally needs to be directed to customer support. We internally collaborated well with the Customer support team as well and made sure that we are resolving the issues along with generating feedback.

The Outcome:

1. We met the primary outcome of the exercise to have a mechanism where users share feedback on the products and our product and design team could interact and understand issues in detail on the go. During product launches, this initiative served really well as we were able to solve a lot of minor issues which still existed after the beta program and internal testing
2. The cost of maintaining the groups is very minimal compared to recruiting the users through external agencies
3. We also started a monthly cadence involving product, design, analytics, and marketing teams where the feedback collected through different consumer channels was discussed and we brainstormed new approaches to tackle them. This session also guides on building product roadmaps for the future.

Illustration of the feedback we receive from our customers

Khatabook product team engaged in an immersion session absorbing user feedback across different channels

Sometimes the process of involving users in product building and enhancement can seem more difficult than it is but when done well this really helps bring in insights that are highly actionable and valuable.