Getting To Know You: How Customer Deep Dives Work At Seccl

Amy Lobé at UXDX Community: Ireland & UK. Video: https://youtu.be/zbEn6Yxwdoc

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

About me and Seccl

[00:00:00] Thank you so much for turning up to listen to me. My name is Amy Lobé, and before we get into my discussion around getting to know you, or my clients, I thought I'd let you get to know a little bit about me. I'm a product designer, I've got about 12 years' experience, and I am super passionate about accessibility, user experience, sometimes even design.

[00:00:27] This is little Amy, and I have always been obsessed with the way that things work. I was mystified when I realized that we didn't just design things in the best way they can be designed, and then mildly mortified when I realized that there isn't even a best way. So I was passionate from a young age, basically.

[00:00:56] I work for Seccl, and there's some official jargon on the screen. That means we are a business-to-business financial technology scale-up. Say that a few times quickly. Business to business is a whole different area for me to get into, but I am loving it. This is us. You might be able to spot that it's not our average day at the office. This is from our Pride celebration earlier in the year.

[00:01:27] I thought I would take a moment to introduce you to some of our engineers, because they are actually who the problem and solution that I'm going to take you through today are for. It is worth noting that it is really difficult to get photos of your growing team during a pandemic, and therefore I apologize that this slide is not as representative as it should be, and as it could be with the team members that we have today.

The problem: engineers who had never met our clients

[00:01:56] These people are the backbone of Seccl. They're the ones who make us seem whizzy and shiny and fast-paced and really up to date with technology, all those really important things that you want to display when you are a startup disrupting a massive industry. The problem was, they didn't feel like they could develop based on anything other than what was written on a Jira ticket. Jira tickets: the famous destructor of all creativity.

[00:02:35] Our teams are really invested in the company, so it seemed unfair for them to be striving for Seccl to succeed with only half the information they needed. They didn't know how to challenge the priority of different tickets or issues, because we weren't giving them the information that they needed to do so. In short, they hadn't met our clients, the people using our systems on a day-to-day basis, the ones they are developing for. Pretty standard for an engineering team, right?

[00:03:17] But how weird is that? You wouldn't expect me, someone who crafts experiences for people, to build something for people I have never met, and it just felt entirely wrong. I understand that in business to business things are sometimes slightly different, but our developers weren't even aware of what our clients did on a day-to-day basis.

Borrowing from discovery sessions and empathy labs

[00:03:47] I set about doing as all good designers do: stealing from my experience. At Seccl we really like to experiment. It keeps things fresh, and it keeps us from dwelling on things that aren't working. In the past, when I've needed to learn about something for a new client, perhaps at an agency I was working for, or any new project, I have run discovery sessions. These are broad, sweeping sessions in which you intend to learn not only about the problem that you are being briefed on, but also everything about the company that you are working with. I think that's a starting point, but this fix couldn't just be a one-off.

[00:04:36] This is a Government Digital Service empathy lab. When you're going to learn about accessibility, obviously a huge area of passion for me, this is a great way to get started. These labs have different equipment, goggles, headphones, sometimes even tape, to help you experience an access need. Once you have the experience of trying to use a digital tool with that access need, you suddenly get all sorts of ideas and empathy about how you can design better solutions for your audience.

[00:05:08] If we're talking about gaining empathy for your customers, let's look at some really experienced people at Clarks, the shoe shop. Every year they offer people who work in head office the opportunity to work in a store. It happens to be their busiest time of year, so it really helps them out with staff. But the people who go and do that immediately come back to head office with new ideas of how to make things better for staff and for end customers. So empathy is a really important factor in prioritizing and making sure your business is going in the right direction.

Customer deep dives

[00:05:50] Enter customer deep dives. We took the principles of a discovery workshop and the purposes of an empathy lab and combined them to create customer deep dives. A customer deep dive is presented to our clients as an opportunity to vent. If they've got any pain points, any frustrations, or anything that's really helping them, this is where they come to share it. Obviously we have other channels, but this is a really good opportunity.

[00:06:21] This is how we get the most from a customer deep dive. We don't approach the client with a set list of questions, as you would normally expect to in user experience research. We don't necessarily have a strict goal in mind. The approach is to tell them we would love to hear what is grinding their gears, what is making them happy or making their lives easy, and what processes they are actively going through at the moment. We're looking to make this research as close to ethnographic research as possible, so when we can, we would love to go into their offices, but for now we are doing it all remote.

[00:07:04] That looks a little bit like this. We have product managers, engineers, the head of propositions and myself in a call with one of our clients. In this call, our client is telling us all about her woes during a rebalance, which is a pretty standard thing to have to do in our industry. Luke, who is the engineer just beneath me in this picture, said that just seeing the system with real data, being used by someone with specific intent, when she shared her screen, was really informative. While we've got this picture of all of our faces here, normally what you're seeing is the client's screen as they take you through a process.

[00:07:53] In conclusion, as with all good experiments, it was a huge success. We now regularly, and for us that means every couple of weeks, run customer deep dives. We cycle through the various customers that we have, from those who are just onboarding and getting started with us to our longest-standing clients, and we have found out things that we never would have known with a narrower field of research.

[00:08:22] Here are some quotes from Kate Harris, one of our clients, saying how positive she felt about the deep dive session, and how simple some of the problems she thought she had actually were, but to our engineers they were a big revelation. And internally, James Bartlett, one of our product managers, I should say, thinks it's really crucial to build empathy with our clients and our end users, so we can make decisions that really suit their needs and their own priorities.

How we run them remotely

[00:09:00] Let me get a little bit more practical. Here is how we did it at Seccl. We have a bit of an unhealthy obsession with Mural. You might have used Miro, another online version, but we use Mural. With this collaborative whiteboard, we produce loads of Post-it notes around a problem, a potential solution, and then the pros and cons of that solution. We worked out that we needed to get these sessions working now, so we started them remote. Whereas at first I thought they couldn't be done remotely, we overcame the problem. Also, because they are remote, we don't want too many people bombarding the customer at once, so we limit the number of people on each live call and then host watch parties afterwards, where anyone can join, but they've got time booked out in their calendar just to watch and listen to customer feedback.

What went wrong and what went right

[00:10:02] What went wrong and what went right? Okay, so we're ready. We emailed our clients, and it was a slick email. I used HubSpot and everything. No one responded. It turns out that timing is everything. The end of the tax year is probably not the best time to ask your financial adviser clients to give you some feedback. Also, the email I sent was just too polished. It looked like marketing spam, if I'm honest. So I tried again using a bit more real language.

[00:10:51] Internally, I was worried. I had made a big deal out of this, and I was still pretty new to Seccl. I really wanted this to succeed. And it turned out okay. Eventually, with a little bit of poking from our fantastic customer team, we started getting responses. We also added it to the Net Promoter Score questionnaire that we send out, just at the bottom of that form: would you mind taking part in this, giving us some feedback? So people were in the right frame of mind. They were giving us feedback already, so it felt like no problem to give us a little bit more.

The rules of a customer deep dive

[00:11:33] On the day, it's really important not to overwhelm your customers or your clients. I brief the sessions in much the same way I do any research: there are no right or wrong answers, there are no stupid questions. The additional information is that there's no tailored aim for this session and we just want to listen, and actually, most of the time I would be silent.

[00:12:03] I then have some rules in place. These are the rules; I'll run you through them. I need two volunteers to take notes. One takes notes around emotions, and I want pointed, timestamped notes: customer was angry when talking, or customer seemed really happy. The other takes notes around the processes: started to show us the rebalance process at 10:04 in the meeting. We can combine those two. And when we use our platform for voice communications, it automatically provides a searchable transcript of the conversation, so I get extra notes, and the best thing about this is I don't have to take any myself.

[00:12:55] We have a chat channel separate to the meeting, and people who are on the call but remaining silent funnel any questions they have through me, so I can keep an eye on that and the client only has to listen to one person, me, for any questions. I then ask them, by them I mean Seccl, to keep chat in that other channel to a minimum, because I have to read any questions that are coming in. I always forget to record sessions, but luckily with 0.4 [?] I always get a helpful reminder from one of my team, so that works out well.

[00:13:38] And then possibly the hardest rule is that we are not there to solve the problems at that moment. We need time to listen to the problems, qualify them, do any further research, and then look at how they get prioritized with our other work. So we have an answer to questions like that, which is very much: thank you so much for bringing that up, we'll certainly take that away and have a look at it, and we'll keep in touch with you about any outcomes from that discussion.

[00:14:11] Those are my rules of a customer deep dive, and that is how they work. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you learned a lot from this talk. Please feel free to reach out to me; I'm always on LinkedIn. Or hopefully we will chat to each other someday. Thanks.