UX Researchers as Glue: Building partnerships to leverage feedback for impact
Consider this: as a user researcher, you may facilitate five customer conversations each week, but there are hundreds more conversations happening between your company and its users. At PlanGrid (an Autodesk company), each of our Customer Support Heroes has an average of 150 chats with users each week. Our sales reps may consistently have 10 conversations per week. Our Customer Advocates speak with 6–8 customers every week. There is rich information in these conversations that can directly benefit our work in building and improving our product, but it is often left untapped by the product teams. UX researchers can be the glue that connects the information gathered by these customer-facing groups to the product development process.
At PlanGrid, a key role of the UX research team has been to build partnerships with Customer Support, Customer Advocates, and Sales. Our partners broker more productive relationships with customers, and they extend our ability to learn from users.
In this post I will:
- Introduce our partners and the nature of their interaction with customers
- Share how we have leveraged these partnerships: as relationship brokers and extension of UX research
- Describe how we built and maintain the relationships
UX Research Partners
Customer Support
Customer support heroes respond to every customer who chats or emails into PlanGrid. Through these interactions, they discover bugs, teach users how to use the product, or hear requests for new features. That means Support Heroes are doing product quality control, identifying usability issues, and learning about what our users need that isn’t in the product today.
Customer Advocate
Our Customer Advocates play a pre-sales role, helping customers make purchasing decisions, and a post-sales role, helping end-users successfully adopt the product. They have both subject matter expertise and deep customer and end-user knowledge.
Sales Rep
Our Sales Reps manage the relationship between a customer account and the company. They help customers understand how our products can meet their needs and facilitate the purchase, renewal, and expansion of product licenses.
Leveraging Partners as Customer Relationship Brokers
Knowing which customers fit our criteria for a study can be difficult. Further, reaching out to customers and users to conduct research without having any prior relationship can yield frustratingly low response rates. For both of these challenges, having a relationship broker — someone who knows the needs of both sides and can make fruitful introductions — helps us quickly get access to the customers and end-users that will provide the best opportunity for learning.
Customer Advocates and Sales Reps both make excellent relationship brokers.
Our Customer Advocates can help us more quickly identify customers who fit our recruiting criteria, thanks to the breadth of customers they interact with. For example, last year we were conducting research into the ways that customers standardize on our products across their company. In order to learn what this process looks like, we needed to talk to customers at the leading edge of the process as well as customers who were less far along. Customer Advocates made introductions to the right variety of customers for research interviews that allowed us to build a model of the standardization journey.
It might have taken months of talking to customers to see the pattern of how they evolve over time in their use of our product. Instead it took only a few weeks, since Customer Advocates pointed us to the right range of customers from the start.
Similar to Customer Advocates, Sales Reps build up trust with a wide range of customer accounts over time. As a result of this trust, an introduction from a Sales Rep has a much higher chance of resulting in contact with the customer. Sales Reps know who the “product champion” is within customer accounts, as well as who the “detractors” are. Depending on our research goals, we may want to talk to champions as well as detractors to hear different perspectives.
Product champions are the ideal first point of contact with a customer as they can provide “warm” intros to end-users for research studies. On a recent trip to Dallas, we had four days of research on site with our end-users at four different companies, resulting in rich insights in a very short span of time. This was possible only with the introductions made by our incredible sales team.
Leveraging Partners as an Extension of UX Research
As UX researchers, it’s important to understand the source of our information. The following illustrates the type of information we get from each of our partners:
Customer Support — Feature Request Funnelers
The body of feedback captured by the support team is a gold mine of information for the product team as a starting point for UX improvements and new areas of opportunity.
To more easily mine this trove of information, the UX research team developed a tagging system where the Support Hero gives each piece of feedback an “object” tag, representing the feature, plus an “action” tag, representing what the user wants to be able to do with that feature. (A shout out to our amazing, award-winning support team here, as none of this would be possible without their hard work and collaboration.)
We use this data as a starting point to learn more. For example, shortly after we started this tagging process, we saw the trend of users requesting to be able to compare sheets (aka blueprints) on our web platform.
However, we wanted to better understand the user need behind the request before simply building what users were asking for. We reached out directly to the users who made this request, and through a handful of 1:1 interviews learned that users want to compare sheets on web before publishing their sheets for the purpose of identifying critical changes between versions of the same sheet. This need is different than what we gleaned from just the requests themselves, and has led us to consider a new set of functionality that could be far more valuable to our users than simply allowing them to “compare sheets on the web.”
Customer Advocates — Guides and Translators
All of our Customer Advocates come from the construction industry. They have a subject matter expertise, and can relate to — and translate — the needs and challenges of our customers. The information they gather during the purchasing journey — from demos or pilots of our products through product adoption planning — is rich with detail about customers’ needs and challenges, often down to the end-user (not just the buyer/decision-maker).
For example, after the launch of our new Submittals product last year, our Customer Advocates gave hundreds of demos. Customers were extremely vocal about two particular pieces of missing functionality relating to a user’s ability to involve multiple people in the Submittals workflow. Thanks to Customer Advocates’ sharing feedback from these demos, we quickly identified what the product team needed to start building next. The product team alone could never have handled the same volume of 1:1 feedback sessions.
Over time, we’ve trained Customer Advocates to listen for the core need in their conversations, rather than to simply pass along a request for a particular feature (aka solution).
Sales — The Buyer Perspective
Finally, Sales Reps can play a role in extending our knowledge from a buyer and market perspective. Sales Reps hear about the strategic goals of our customers and how our products and services do or don’t fit with those goals. They learn about what motivates buyers (in enterprise software especially, this is not always the same person as the user), and how buyers compare our product to our competitors. This information gives us a picture of the overall market, and where we must orient our products strategically in order to stay relevant and competitive.
Many of our Sales Reps also come from the construction industry, and we leverage them similarly to Customer Advocates when we’re exploring a new topic or when we need to craft a realistic scenario for a concept or usability test. We’ve set up a channel in Slack called #construction-experts to be able to quickly tap into our subject matter experts.
How to Build Partnerships
At PlanGrid, we’ve developed fruitful partnerships, but it didn’t happen overnight. Three key steps help us develop and maintain our partnerships:
- Understand partners’ goals
- Make the feedback loop visible
- Maintain a regular cadence of interaction
Understand partner goals
Each group has its own set of goals — in a way, they are another type of “customer” to the UX research team. Understanding their pain points, motivations, and goals and showing this understanding through your actions will develop a level of trust that is the foundation for everything else. For example, we listened as the Customer Support Heroes explained that they hear the same requests over and over again from customers. Support Heroes desperately want to be helpful — it’s what makes them win awards, after all! — but they didn’t feel like they could do much besides thank the user for the feedback and hope that the product team would see it. It was clear to us that we needed show Customer Support how feedback impacts product decisions.
Make the feedback loop visible
A core objective of our work has been to make sure that the feedback flowing in is visible to everyone in the company. This shows that there is a “destination” for feedback, and holds our product teams accountable for reviewing and considering this information.
- Capture — Sales reps, customer advocates and support heroes log feedback through our chat tool or feedback email alias.
- Categorize — support heroes tag all feedback.
- Share — a Looker Dashboard makes the feedback visible to everyone. When the same object + action category sits in the #1 spot on the feature request dashboard for many months in a row, it’s difficult to ignore.
- Prioritize — product establishes a roadmap based on the feedback (and other inputs). This gives customer-facing groups insight to how the feedback is being incorporated into the product development process. Ultimately customers should see the impact of their feedback through improvements to the product.
Maintain a regular cadence of interaction
Finally, we’ve established a regular cadence of interaction with the Customer Support and Customer Advocate teams. Once per quarter, the UX research team “visits” their weekly team meeting. We give updates on research that we’re conducting and hear about what’s on their minds. Creating a regular space for listening makes it easier to ask them for help when we need it.
As UX researchers, our craft is in gathering the right (minimally biased) information and helping our teams make sense of that information to make good product decisions. Part of our craft must also be to connect the dots of the information available to us via various channels. Not only can we glean valuable information from our partners’ interactions with customers, these partners can help us identify the best customers to approach for research, a critical and often time-consuming part of any UX research study. To increase the impact of UX research in your organization, develop strong partnerships with customer-facing groups. You will become the glue that makes the company stick together — and makes your product sticky for your users.
Thanks to…
, , Christine Lee, Meera Ramachandran, Kim Pita, , and for their feedback for this post!
And of course, to our amazing Customer Advocates, Customer Support Heroes, and Sales Reps.
