Tap into customer touch points across your organization

And build a better 360 view of your users!

As a designer for the enterprise space you may find that some degree of complexity exists not only for you, but for your customers as well. Even the process for a customer organization to obtain and adopt new products can be lengthy and involved, with many steps and different personas along the way. For instance, individuals making buying decisions are rarely using the product hands-on. And the user base itself is often further split by product administrators, and end users.

As enterprise designers, we want to reduce complexity. But how do we first cultivate and then continually feed an understanding of our customer’s journey? Connecting directly with users through research is always an obvious answer, and our greatest tool. But it’s not the only means available to us!

You can more quickly build toward a 360 view of your customer’s journey by tapping into the many customer facing teams and artifacts within your enterprise organization.

From technical marketing, to technical writers, sales and customer support, there are teams that either work on the frontlines interacting daily with users (known in some orgs as “the field”), or create content that directly influences their experiences. If your company is like VMware and has made this wealth of knowledge and resources internally accessible via field archives (known internally here as “VM Vault”) or other team archives, why not take advantage of it? Leverage both artifacts and people. Meaning you can connect with colleagues in these roles — treat it like a user interview, or benefit from diving into their documented insights.

I’ve worked on a couple different products while at VMware, and I found each time that leveraging these resources accelerated my learning and helped form a more, well rounded understanding of my users.

Customer facing teams and artifacts live in all phases of the journey

Let’s take a look at a very high-level customer journey and explore how various customer-facing teams & artifacts plug in. The following is roughly based on VMware’s organizational structure. However, the recommendations in this article can apply more broadly to most enterprise-focused, product companies.

The point here is not to capture each and every last customer touch point, but to highlight that collectively these are a valuable resource within both VMware, and your own companies to take advantage of. This rich ecosystem of customer insights and influences can help you understand, assess, and fix any gaps in the overall journey.

Learn phase

It’s valuable to take a step back and build awareness around what exactly our companies are pitching to prospective customers. Whether it’s through various marketing channels (webinars, blogs, etc.), or pre-sales engagements, how do we position ourselves and what key value propositions do we highlight? If you haven’t already, familiarize yourself with the messaging on your customer facing product website. This is one of the initial touch points that prospects have with us and it’s important to know what we deliver in our product story.

What are prospective customers thinking?

A treasure trove of insights sits within the technical marketing and pre-sales teams. These roles are either creating content that will be consumed by prospects, or they are in the field interfacing with them directly and regularly. During conversations with pre-sales, I’ve found that they can share trends around customer perceptions during the “Learn” phase, due to the volume of their customer engagements. Why do customers prefer us over the competition? What are some of the tipping point features? How often are prospects for our emerging products net new vs. existing customers? And what are common misconceptions that prospects may have when first considering a new VMware product?

Insights from technical marketing

Technical marketing managers are the folks who write the playbooks for the field. Due to the deep technical nature of some enterprise offerings, they relay the why/how/when to use our products. Recently, through a combination of technical marketing artifacts and user research, I was able to uncover that some portion of our customer organizations were not using key product features as designed. This was quite a disconnect (what we do about that is a different story). The insight I came upon was based on 1) direct conversations with users around their product behaviors and 2) knowing what we officially tout as the intended way to use our software. The latter was accelerated by digging into some of the technical marketing managers’ artifacts — namely webinars, blogs and internal presentations. This was immensely helpful especially early on when I onboarded to the team, since the core value propositions of my current product offering had been defined well before I joined.

In this example I benefited from the knowledge of the Technical Marketing team. But it’s not a one-way street. It’s not only important to understand what concepts and workflows technical marketing describes as important to our end users, but as product designers we should also partner with them. After all, their work is based on the product requirements and experience that product management and product design establish together.

Try / Buy phase

Whether your company offers a free trial or a similar way of evaluating product benefits, develop a sense of how potential users try out your products.

Understand introductory content

The virtual infrastructure space is not simple, and bringing customer environments into an on-premise based trial can be too involved for some prospects. One avenue that VMware offers instead is a program called “Hands-on-Labs”. This simulates what it’s like to use key flows and capabilities within our products. Designers at VMware should step through a Hands-on-Lab or two — enough to get a sense of the primary concepts, tasks and features that users are introduced to. Imagine yourself as a new user. How might what is presented help? Are there gaps? Is there consistency with the product story that was delivered earlier in their journey? If you have similar programs in your enterprise organization, check them out.

Further insights from the field

Sometimes product evaluations are done through a more elaborate process, especially for enterprise products which may require onboarding customer data. At VMware, some customers choose to do a proof of concept (POC) with us. Solutions engineers and architects often help with these. SEs as they are known, are part of the broader field team and work alongside pre-sales, as experts on the technical aspects of solutions. It was through conversations with solutions engineers that I discovered how arduous it can be for customers to stand up POCs for the product I worked on. Apparently, these prospective organizations were required to address certain prerequisites within their virtual infrastructure environments before they could fully evaluate us using their data. This amounted to a very manual, tedious, and non-standardized process. The challenges here were not due to VMware, but still slowed down further evaluation. Was it possible to automate this process for our customers? The solution wasn’t that easy, but just knowing that this problem existed and hampered product adoption was pivotal. It was eye opening for me as a designer who was trying to understand the full customer journey. Knowing is half the battle!

Use/Grow phase

This is the part of the journey that designers are typically associated with. But there is much for us to learn here from other groups including technical writers and customer support — just to name a couple examples.

Self-service help

Help systems can be underemphasized at times within the larger customer journey. However they meet a critical need when the user is in a pinch and needs a quick answer. Often, they are immersed in-product, within the context of a specific task or flow. How do I do xyz, or what is this concept and how will it help me? As designers we are better equipped if we learn just how easy or hard it is for users to find answers to their problems. Be it in a self-service manner through in-product help, or external help documentation. And particularly for the features and capabilities that we design. Here again is an opportunity to collaborate more closely with another team — technical writers. As product designers we share a border with them in the overall journey. A tighter integration between the product experience itself and getting help can only produce a smoother user experience.

What isn’t working well?

As designers and researchers we know how powerful it is to hear directly from our users. Along those lines — -have you ever listened in on a customer support call? These exchanges are unique in that customers typically only reach out with problems, and often with a fair degree of frustration. If the support team in your company allows for these kinds of “ride alongs” take advantage of it! Or maybe look into establishing these kinds of opportunities. You can also try listening to recorded calls. Whether live or recorded, you’ll get to hear the customer sentiment and how they describe their very real problems in their own words. And we as designers know how much more impactful that makes the feedback.

Tracking issues

The customer support channel, along with other field teams usually funnel issues and service requests downstream. Often this goes into a backlog that makes its way to those building the products. Get a hold of this list and periodically review it with your cross-functional partners. I’ve found this gives you visibility into the hot issues. And also helps build a clearer picture of the UX debt within your products, based on real-world scenarios. Referencing actual customers will also go a long way when trying to prioritize fixes.

What has worked well?

Switching gears, find out what success looks like for customers during the Use/Grow phase. Whether through the product website or via your field organization’s artifacts, delve into some key customer case studies. Granted, case studies are intentionally written to spotlight the positive aspects of an experience. Yet they are still indicators of what customers and your organization consider success. What business problems have your products solved for customers, and with what features/solutions in particular? These customers could also make great candidates for doing future research with since they’ve already partnered with your organization before.

Putting this all in practice

None of this is meant to replace user research. Hopefully like VMware, you have an amazing research team that provides guidance on conducting your own studies! So tapping into these various customer touch points is meant to augment the research you do, and give additional perspectives. That said, this may feel like an overwhelming body of information to consume. But you don’t have to dig into every last channel. Just remember these are at your disposal. You can cherry pick / tap into the resources and teams based on your immediate needs.

Key steps you can take:

1. Know where to go in advance. 🔎 Get familiar with some of the resource repositories these teams have (if made public). Then you can dig into relevant artifacts when the need arises.

2. Form initial relationships. 👋 Connect with some of the folks from various teams mentioned here. Good to have some contacts for when you find you need more information down the road.

3. Actively partner. 🤝 Find opportunities to collaborate with some of the teams that are closer to your phase of the journey (e.g. technical writers, technical marketing managers). This can unearth opportunities to collectively improve upon the user experience.

Part of our job as product designers is to design experiences that tie up to business value. The additional perspectives you can gain from these customer touch points will only buoy those efforts. So check out a customer-facing webinar, a sales powerpoint deck, or chat with a field person over coffee. Just like you, these individuals are responsible for our customers’ journey — through their direct interactions or by crafting content and experiences along the way. And most likely, they will also learn something from you!