From Merchants to Customers
The Finding Numo team wraps up its merchant research and moves on to customer research
Welcome back!
Our team is still heads-down in our research phase. If you read our last medium post published by Kyle, you can see we’ve completed merchant interviews. From then on, we’ve synthesized the findings from our interviews with merchants. We’ve also conducted guerrilla research on customers, and set up a booth at the Waterfront Shopping area to talk to conduct some think-aloud protocols.
As you can see, our team has been super busy, but we’ve been able to keep the energy levels up. Since we felt like we’re moving really fast, we decided to step back and reflect on how Sprint 2 went.
To do this, we conducted a Starfish Retrospective to understand each others’ thoughts on what we should:
- Keep doing
- Start doing
- Stop doing
- Do more of
- Do less of
This was a great exercise for us! We talked in detail about things we could switch up, like providing feedback to each other after interviews, rotating roles a bit more, and doing more team-bonding activities!
Merchant interview synthesis
To synthesize our notes from the merchant interviews, we did an affinity diagramming exercise, similar to what we did after our kick-off meeting.
A word of advice: dedicate a full meeting to this activity because it can take a really long time! It’s also important not to rush it because this is where we can find our key insights.
From this exercise, we were able to extrapolate some finding:
- Merchants are struggling to compete with online retail giants like Amazon
- Foot traffic into stores is declining
- Overhead costs are increasing
2. Merchants need a way to calculate value of marketing
- Lots of marketing options, but difficult to know the best ROI
- Join Rewards Network with goal of attracting new customers
- Skeptical of Rewards Network because metrics are unclear and potentially taking credit for returning customers
- Lack of awareness about what apps/platforms they are listed on
3. Merchants face a myriad of pain points with POS systems
- Several merchants have commented on inefficiencies of Clover & instead switched to Toast or Square
- Clover is slow and can’t keep up with the volumes of customers
4. Merchants turn to POS systems to help run daily businesses
- Provides metrics like, determining if customer is returning or new
- While choosing POS systems, merchants look for fast performance and if it supports integration with the current systems.
- POS could potentially help merchants gain trust in rewards programs.
We discussed these findings with our clients, and had a very meaningful discussion of the value of these insights and how it can feed directly in our upcoming research plans. Up next,
Customer Research!
During the Starfish Retrospective, our team identified that we want more of a goal-based approach to research activities. Having a clear goal about what we want to achieve out of a research activity helped us avoid focusing too much on tangential topics. To incorporate this into our customer research plan, we decided to create what we now call a Goal-Method Matrix.
To build this matrix, we first listed down all the goals of our customer research phase. This included learning how a customer decided the value of an offer, how they chose between two different apps, where they liked to use offers the most and their current spending habits, among other goals. Each goal was placed in a different row and different research methods were listed in the columns against them. For each goal, we wrote down questions we can ask in our research activity and placed the questions under one or more research methods it is most suitable for.
This Goal-Method Matrix helped us create proper plans for research activities like Guerilla Research, Booth Interviews,Think-Aloud Protocol sessions and surveys.
Guerilla Research
Our first customer research activity was Guerilla Research. From this activity, we hoped to understand how people are currently saving, if they are aware of card-linked offers and are using them already, what problems are they facing when using cashback offers, and which retail outlets would they most prefer having an offer for. We tried to target as wide a range of demographics as possible to get the whole picture.
We conducted our Guerilla Research in teams of two. One person would conduct the interview while the other person would record audio and take notes, when necessary. For recording the interview, a fellow MHCI student recommended us to use the Otter.ai mobile app. This app would record audio and simultaneously transcribe the conversation with timestamps. It also distinguished different voices and labels the transcripts with the correct person who spoke them. While there are definitely some errors that are produced, the app is mostly accurate.
Using the above approach, we conducted Guerilla Research in the following locations-
- Carnegie Mellon University
- University of Pittsburgh
- Target
- Giant Eagle
- Home Depot
The cumulative count of Guerilla Research interviews exceeds 25. We created interpretation notes for these interviews and are in the process of synthesizing insights through affinity diagramming.
Think-Aloud Protocol Sessions
The next customer research activity was Think-Aloud Protocol sessions with customers to understand how they use cashback offers through bank and publisher apps. We contacted several malls in Pittsburgh to request space to conduct this activity and received a supportive response from The Waterfront. Not only did they agree to give us some space to set up our table, they also provided us with a table, chairs and WiFi from a nearby Starbucks. We also set up a table outside the local PNC bank branch to get bank customers.
For this activity, each participant was given a $10 gift card. We used the Dosh mobile app and a prototype of PNC banking mobile app to test how customers used them. Through this activity, we wanted to pull information out of participants about what they expected from the app, how they would use it, if the app could potentially change their shopping behaviour, and which of the two apps would they use and why. At The Waterfront, we got 4 participants and 2 participants near PNC.
A challenge we faced during this activity was that participants often misunderstood us as people trying to sell something and were not interested in talking to us. We realized that we need to make it more clear that we are students conducting research.
We plan to set up a table again this week to talk to more customers. Also, we have begun reaching out to relevant online forums and groups to share the link for our survey. In our next update, we hope to show you the results and insights we got from our customer research journey.
Until next time!
