Building and Sharing Customer Insights
A guide to creating customer fact sheets
At Intercom, we obsess about our customers’ success, and for a researcher this is at the heart of what we do. In recent years we have increasingly focused on upmarket customers, while also growing ourselves as a company. To truly obsess our customers’ success, everyone at Intercom needs to know who our customers are, be familiar with their stories and understand their needs and challenges. However, in a fast growing company with a sharpened customer focus, ensuring everyone is armed with the knowledge to build for and sell to our customers successfully can be a challenge.
To begin to tackle this challenge, we on the Research, Analytics and Data Science team (Team RAD) identified that while we had the insights, the knowledge to arm our teammates with, it was scattered, siloed and inaccessible. To overcome this, we sought to create a single source of truth, an artefact that introduced our upmarket customers, who they were, what they used Intercom for and outlined the key challenges they faced.
Creating a simple, digestible one stop shop for all customer knowledge
We first began our journey to creating a single source of truth with an upmarket customer fact sheet. The aim of this was to introduce these customers, bringing this new segment to life. As with the creation of any artefact, it can be a daunting and time consuming task, but there are a few things we learned that worked well and enabled us to deliver something valuable, quickly:
1.Start small
At Intercom we believe in thinking big and starting small. For this artefact, we wanted to focus on the smallest piece first, the basics that everyone at the company should know. Ask yourself if you were new to the company what are the top 5 things which are business critical to know? Set the foundation, you can always build upon it later.
2. Use existing insight and content
We looked at what we already knew. On Team RAD we already had a ton of insight about our upmarket customers, scattered across the team. It was just a case of bringing it all together. Look at existing insights and ask yourself what do you know about your customers that others may not? What can you pull from past research projects that everyone at your company should know?
3. Collaborate to create a holistic picture
Work with others to get the information needed. This could be a collaboration between teams like Data Science, Biz Ops, Sales and Marketing or use a quick survey to gather more information from others. Pulling insight from different sources allows you to create a well rounded picture of your customer.
4. Keep it simple, stick to one page
When we actually brought all our insight and knowledge together, we realised just how much we had. We knew however, that in order to make it easy to digest and reference, we would need to stick to one page.When tackling what you should include, ask yourself what is the most valuable and relevant information to share? Sticking to simple makes it easily digestible and can be picked up by a new starter with little context.
5. Share and share again
Creating an artefact is one step, but if it’s not easily accessible and discoverable, it’s a waste of time. Socialising this knowledge is key. To do this, we first “launched” our fact sheet in a company show and tell, and then shared over multiple channels in slack. But the key is to continue to reference it. Where else can you share or add an artefact like this? Can it be included in your onboarding material?
6. Aim to revisit and refresh
As we started small, we knew that we would have to revisit what we created. We asked for feedback, and come back to the content to ensure it’s fresh and in line with our latest insights. Capture questions and feedback via a form or link in the artefact and aim to review.
Build upon the foundational knowledge with deeper and targeted insight
Since launching our first fact sheet we have gone on to create two more, with a focus on specific use cases of Intercom. As we set the scene with the first, we could go a little deeper into needs, challenges and behaviours of specific types of customers.
As we had already gone through the process once, it was much faster and easier to build upon again, allowing us to create and share in a week. We used the same format, templating the one pager to include specific types of information and keep it consistent across the different artefacts we create. We have even included a template here for you to use and get started building your own!
Drive business change through socialising insight
Insights teams like RAD, often assume that others across the organisation have access to the same insights and knowledge. In a fast growing company, access to insight and knowledge often gets lost, and becomes difficult to share at scale. We forget that knowledge and insights often have to be shared multiple times in multiple different ways for it to stick. Researchers and data scientists can be the drivers of this business change by socialising knowledge to empower teammates to obsess about customer success.
Our customer fact sheets are just one of the ways in which we build, share and evangelise knowledge and insights about our customers across our business. In future posts we’ll share details about some of the other outlets we use or have explored in the past. In the meantime we would love to hear and learn from other teams. Have you had similar challenges in sharing insights and knowledge across your company? If so, how did you overcome it?
In Intercom, the Research, Analytics & Data Science (a.k.a. RAD) function exists to help drive effective, evidence-based decision making using Research and Data Science. We’re hiring data scientists and researchers at various levels across Dublin, London, and remote in the UK and Ireland. If you want to help shape the future of a team like RAD at a fast-growing company that’s on a mission to make internet business personal we’d love to hear from you
