Reflection - Visualization in Automated Customer Experience

Challenge and Selection

Our company provides an automation first support and marketing platform. Our clients rely on our consulting team for actionable insights that will improve their customer experience. Clientele range across vertical and scale, our biggest challenge is proving meaningful ROI on contract expansions. The current measurements of value add we provide are high level, clients would like to see us drill down into more granular segments. With such a broad range of clients, it is difficult to determine exactly what interactions bring the most value as they each have their own unique ideas about what is most important.

As a part of the exercise of defining “valuable interactions”, we opted to collect a copious amount of feedback from our client base. We leveraged our consultant’s relationships with our clients to have candid and empathetic conversations regarding the value add metrics they’d like to extract.

Our next step was to make a decision on how to segment all the information we would collect. We decided to start with a more general segmentation of the data that would look at the overarching themes to help us identify and define our client’s needs.

To help us synthesize all the information we had collected, we opted to use a Visualization board as a tool since it would help us best understand, interpret and represent our client’s wishes.

Application

We leveraged a virtual sticky note board to collect all the information. To kick this project off, we asked each consultant to write down the client feedback they had received - 1 idea per card - and add it to our “idea generation” board. Consultants had 1 week to complete this activity.

We were then tasked with sifting through the data our client-facing team had collected. For this, we created a diverse internal cross-functional working group consisting of client-facing consultants, product, marketing and data analytics team members.

The next step was to task this internal team with identifying themes and patterns from the information collected. To do this, we divided the group into three groups of five and asked each

team to identify themes and sort the sticky notes to the corresponding theme. Each group was allotted 45 minutes to complete this. We reconvened for a 1H session to discuss overlapping themes, groupings of the sticky notes and outliers.

From there, we created a Kanban board to establish prioritization of the themes identified by our stakeholders. We asked each member of our client-facing team to review the board and upvote the themes that were most important to them and their clients. Client-facing teams had 1 week to complete this activity.

This provided us with insight into which areas we needed to focus on as a P1, P2, P3 and P4. Using this prioritization scale, our stakeholders met again to identify the design criteria required for our P1 themes. We leveraged our ICP (ideal customer persona) to establish the design criteria for each theme, this helped us to evaluate what the user/client need was and their expected insight (problem and solution).

This exercise allowed us to surface themes that drive the most valuable measure of interactions from the perspective of our clients. We were able to generate validated insights which we passed along to our Product team who in turn, produced actionable goals to move the needle.

Insight and Approach

VOC (voice of customer) is critical to product development. Our ability to leverage our first-in-class client-facing team to provide direct VOC statements allowed us to ensure we were focusing our efforts on what was most important. Furthermore, emphasizing to our clients that not only was their feedback acknowledged but actually put into action helped us solidify our client’s trust. Our ability to empathize with our clients was key to the success of this project.

Key improvements we could make going forward would be to create a focus group for the prioritization of the identified themes. Asking all client-facing teams to contribute to upvoting made for a lengthy process, in addition, not all individuals contributed with only ~40% of client-facing team members participating. By creating a focus group with a diverse sampling of our client-facing teams we could have reduced the turnaround time.

Overall, the visualization process was integral to us truly understanding the need of our clients and not making generalizations based on the opinions of a few client-facing/internal stakeholders. Our organization will continue to use design thinking approaches to innovate on our product whenever possible.

