5 Reasons Why You Should Interview Customer Service Staff as Part of UX Research on Customers
There’s usually an element of artificiality in scheduled UX research sessions. No matter how skilled you are at interviewing people, no matter how realistic your scenario, participants know that they’re going through a simulation and/or recalling a past experience. And, frankly, it can be challenging to get someone to tell you the truth when you’re paying them!
That’s why we’ve found it valuable to talk with service staff as a supplement — and sometimes a corrective — to our UX research with customers. By conducting exploratory interviews with customer service representatives, particularly phone agents and managers, we can learn more about:
- Patterns in customer behavior
- Usability problems, especially those heightened by stress
- Customer emotions in various situations
- Specific use cases that our recruiting or controlled sessions might not account for
- Disconnects in how a company organizes its service staff and applications
For the purposes of this article, we’re defining customer service staff as any member of your company who communicates directly with customers (or prospective customers) on a daily basis — or manages those who do. That may include your phone sales team, your in-the-field repair experts, your digital help desk response squad, and any number of different kinds of employees. The key is that they have exposure to your customers’ needs and experiences on a regular basis. In short, they have their collective finger on the pulse of what users like and what makes them go berserk with irritation.
As consultants, our outsider perspective on a company or organization leads us to ask questions about topics and issues that our clients may take for granted. When we talk to customer-facing staff, we’ve uncovered huge systemic problems hiding in plain sight… that we never would have suspected if we had talked to customers alone.
1. Customer service reps deal with real-life problems all the time.
Phone reps talk with people in the heat of the moment. They have to navigate the unfiltered confusion and urgency of the situation. As UX researchers, we often have to remind our participants to be brutally honest. Phone agents don’t have to ask; they get customers at their huffiest and most annoyed.
Customer service staff, such as phone counselors, are particularly helpful in giving UX researchers insight into crisis situations. Let’s take the example of an app that allows insurance policyholders to request emergency roadside service in case of a flat tire or a breakdown. You can’t exactly wait by the side of the road for somebody to have car trouble, then ask them to use your app.
But if you talk to emergency road service phone dispatchers, they may be able to identify friction points that come up again and again among agitated callers. Do many users say, “I was about to ask for help in the app, but I couldn’t find a way to give you my correct location. It was awful!” Or maybe, “I didn’t get a text confirmation. How do I know that you’re coming to help?”
Small issues that customers might forget or gloss over in a test session might be magnified by the tension of the real-world situation.
Possible questions to ask customer service reps:
- What specific problems do users complain about the most [related to X]?
- What are the most common questions that you get [about X situation]? How do you answer those questions?
- What stresses customers out? How do you calm them down?
- What specifically seems to inspire confidence during a difficult situation?
- What resources/information do customers ask for? Is there an easier way to give these to them?
- Do customers ever mention the app or website to you? What do they say?
2. Service staff can often summarize trends from hundreds, even thousands, of calls and sessions.
Many phone agents and other customer service specialists can draw on a vast knowledge reservoir of possible scenarios. They may bring up some important cases and variations that your research did not uncover (or at least did not probe to a significant extent). While listening to sample recorded calls can be extremely powerful, the advantage of interviewing reps is that they can summarize the key takeaways from the many, many customer interactions.
For example, we did some sales-oriented research on rideshare insurance, designed to protect drivers who earn money through Uber, Lyft, and similar on-demand riding services. When we spoke with rideshare drivers who were shopping for insurance, we detected an awareness problem. Not all rideshare drivers understood that they needed a special kind of insurance.
However, we didn’t realize how serious that awareness problem was until we spoke with the phone sales team who specialized in our client’s rideshare insurance. They reported that the insurance company frequently had to cancel policies because rideshare drivers bought regular auto insurance and not rideshare insurance. Callers were often frustrated because they had been denied coverage for a claim and had to use Uber’s or Lyft’s built-in coverage instead.
Maybe these policyholders didn’t know the special insurance product existed. Maybe they did know but didn’t recognize the consequences of not getting it. Either way, the gap in understanding opened the possibility of a strongly negative experience, the kind that leaves a bad taste in a user’s mouth for years.
The lack of clear communication about rideshare insurance not only cost our client prospective customers, but also lost them existing customers.
As a result of our interviews with phone agents, we created stronger web content to target awareness issues. We also recommended changes to the client’s regular auto quote flow to direct rideshare drivers to the appropriate product.
(One word of caution: bias affects everyone, including customer service experts. Be sure to check any patterns or trends in your findings from qualitative interviews with analytics and your own testing results.)
3. You’ll get the big picture of how customer- and employee-facing applications work together — or don’t as the case may be.
Do your service reps, particularly those working in the field, have the tools and access they need to help your customers? The answer may surprise you. Some customer-facing specialists are working at a major disadvantage: they cannot see what customers see. So how can they be expected to troubleshoot for your customers?
For example, while looking for ways to speed up complex car accident claims, we interviewed several damage inspectors for a large insurance company. These inspectors serve as major contacts for policyholders during the claim process. However, the inspectors could not access the customers’ self-service application. They had no idea what the application even looked like!
When customers asked, “How do I upload my receipt to the website?” these expert inspectors had to reply, “Sorry, I don’t know.” That’s definitely not something you want to hear as a customer. And if your company wants to increase self-service adoption, you need to make sure that your employees are well-informed on self-service options.
We presented this finding to our stakeholders on the business side, and they resolved to include the customer service application in inspectors’ training program.
4. The customers you need to talk to the most may be unlikely to participate in research — but very likely to call your service team.
Customers with low written literacy and/or tech literacy may feel intimidated by the prospect of participating in moderated UX research.
For one of our clients, a large metalworking machinery company, we found that the customers most willing to talk to us skewed towards the tech-savvy side of the customer base. However, a significant portion of the company’s audience uses computers only when necessary. We had a hard time recruiting these customers for moderated sessions, despite using a variety of tactics and incentives.
So we turned to the client’s customer sales and service team. In the course of selling machines over the phone, these metalworking experts often deal with customers who have low web literacy.
The client’s reps sometimes guide the callers step by step through the website to get them to a specific product page. As a result, the phone reps could tell us where less tech-savvy users get stuck. For instance, some button microcopy that seemed self-explanatory to more advanced web browsers did not make sense to less fluent computer users. These site visitors did not click through to the product pages because they did not understand where the button would take them. We updated the text so that it was clearer for a wider segment of the client’s customers.
5. You’ll be giving customer service staff a voice in your company’s UX decisions.
Within large organizations, ideas tend to trickle down. While that makes sense in some cases, we believe that everybody benefits when the flow of ideas runs both ways. The business side of operations usually discovers something new when we present findings from interviews with customer service managers and reps.
In The Effortless Experience, Dixon, Toman, and Delisi discuss how buy-in from contact centers is crucial to reducing customer effort and thus improving loyalty: “The reality is that little of what senior management says or does matters in truly driving change — instead, frontline managers must be empowered to drive the cultural change and make the new behavior stick at the individual level.”
While interviewing phone agents and managers for a UX project is a far cry from giving them a stake in defining company policy or culture, those interviews can be a revelatory first step. Chances are, the people in direct daily contact with your customer base have plenty of good ideas about how to deliver satisfaction more efficiently.
