This Call May Be Monitored (For Product Improvement Purposes)

Three months ago, I started a regular ritual of spending half an hour a week, listening in on our customer service calls at SEEK.

The idea was instigated by a conversation with my manager and my own desire to get a better understanding of how our users were interacting with our products.

That niggling feeling

I constantly have a niggling feeling that I am not spending enough time watching customers interact with the products I design, and that is one of the biggest failures you can make as a designer. Of course, we perform structured research and usability testing, but given the time pressures of working with multiple agile teams, I feel that I don’t do as much of that as I should.

At SEEK, we develop products used by millions of Australians of all walks of life, with varying degrees of computer literacy, yet I live and work surrounded by (for the most part) highly computer literate people. Even when we perform customer testing and research, the individuals who are more likely to answer the call to help with testing are the ones who are more comfortable using computers, especially while being observed.

Monitoring customer support calls

Before my first call monitoring session, I hoped that I would learn something every time I did this, but I was prepared that on some weeks the calls would be mundane and that I wouldn’t get much out of them.

Three months later, and I can comfortably say that not a moment spent with our customer support has been mundane or wasted. After every session I am walking away with an improved understanding of how our customers use our products, how they think, what they are finding frustrating and what is working well for them. While I’m not making major discoveries every time I put on the headphones, I am incrementally building my understanding of our customer base and growing my design confidence.

Three benefits of call monitoring

If I had to call out the key benefits of monitoring customer calls, they would be:

1. Developing empathy. Seeing and hearing things with your own eyes and ears is a critical step in creating better, more usable products. By observing real customers first hand, you put aside your own role and status and begin to understand others’ mental models and how they experience your product.
2. Understanding why something is an issue. While I can always reach for the rich statistics our customer service department produces to find out the top five issues with our product, that does not tell me why our customers are struggling with a particular issue. Hearing a customer explain the issue first hand, from their unique standpoint, does.
3. Keeping a finger on the pulse. We are constantly developing new products and features and are therefore affecting the way our products are experienced as a whole — sometimes, it’s hard to see the combined effect of multiple changes, the way a customer does. At the same time, our competitors are creating new products and features, and this affects the expectations our customers have of our products.

An unexpected benefit

While the insights gained from customers have been valuable, there has been another aspect of this activity that has been just as insightful, if not more so; In between the customer calls, I get to spend time chatting to the customer support staff. We talk about the previous call, whether it happens often, what variations of the given problem they encounter, what types of users normally have those problems etc.

The interesting thing is that the conversation often turns to ‘the customers are doing X because they expect to see Y and we are giving them Z’ — and these are words coming not from me, but from the customer support staff.

What I didn’t realise is that through talking to our customers on a daily basis, our customer support staff have built up not just knowledge of specific issues and bugs, but also a thorough understanding of who our customers are and how they operate. This is an extremely valuable source of knowledge and one I am keen to tap into more in the future.

Where to next

Spurred on by my own positive experience, I’ve started encouraging other team members and colleagues to do the same — allocate a weekly time slot in their calendar to listening in on customer calls. It has been great to see a product manager, a BA and a developer all take up the activity. Getting involved at this level is another small step towards becoming a truly customer centred organisation.