Harnessing Continuous Customer Listening for Business Success

Abigail Birmingham at UXDX Community: Empowering UX Research & Customer Listening. Video: https://youtu.be/vhnL_-etBk8

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.

Why continuous customer listening

[00:00:07] Abby: Great, thanks, Roy, for that introduction, and thanks, Tyler. That was a really fun talk and a great segue into what we're going to talk about today, which really lives in between those big user research projects that Tyler just talked about. So I think this is a great segue. I'm really excited to talk to you about continuous customer listening.

[00:00:29] A little bit about myself and what brought me to this talk today. I'm Abby, I'm the director of product, as Roy said, at Waste Dynamics. Our primary brand is Dumpsters.com. We are a nationwide broker of dumpster rentals and other site services. I've been here for over six and a half years, and in that time I've had a lot of opportunity to work on products and experiences for a lot of different customer segments. You'd be surprised how intricate and complex the waste industry can be, but we cater to a lot of different folks.

[00:01:04] We have a B2C market where we work with homeowners who are emptying out their houses or doing DIY. We work with construction companies, from the smallest mom-and-pop one-man band all the way up to the multi-billion-dollar nationwide construction and renovation companies. We also have a really large network of our suppliers, our haulers, who provide the dumpster rental service. And then we also have products that we build internally for our internal folks, our sales and our customer service. What I've learned over these years is that each of those customer segments brings its own complexities, and you have to find really diverse ways to understand their needs, because it's not always as easy as just talking to a customer. Sometimes you have to be unique.

[00:01:54] A couple of pictures on that slide. I went ahead and rented my own dumpster and got to follow the same process that a customer would. You can see my son there. This was a couple of years ago, but he was infatuated with the whole process. It was a good learning experience. We also got to drive along with our drivers, so that's me enjoying the sunrise at the landfill. It was a great way to understand what our customers needed. But what I found with these complexities is that we had to be innovative, and so we built a system to teach our teams to be a little bit more smart about how they go ahead and listen to their customers.

[00:02:35] Before we dive into today, I want to make sure that we bring along two assumptions. Assumption number one is that customer centricity is key to being successful in business. Now, if you don't agree with that and you still need convincing, this is not the talk for you. There are a lot of resources out there that you can learn from and be convinced by, but today we are going to assume we all know that that's valuable. Assumption number two is that continuous discovery is critical to customer centricity. If you're going to be working for your customer, you can't just learn about them and listen to them when it's convenient for you. You have to do it continuously. And again, if you don't understand the value of that, today is not your talk.

Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it does

[00:03:25] If we're not talking about the value of being customer centric and the value of continuous discovery, what are we here to talk about? What I've learned in talking to a lot of different product managers and product designers is that there's a huge gap between understanding the value of customer listening and actually executing on it. At our company, our CEO likes to use this quote a lot: every system is perfectly designed to get the results that it does. The idea is that whatever system is driving your company, your organization, your team, whatever behaviors you're following are going to get the results that they're designed to get.

[00:04:12] A lot of times when folks talk about continuous discovery or continuous listening, they want to do it but they're not getting there. I find that that is because they're relying on systems that are flawed in the area of continuous customer listening. One example is driving your customer research only on product development or feature development. You have this feature that you're going to develop, so now we're going to go out and research, listen to our customers and find out what they need, and we're going to focus on that problem space. That's great, and I'm not saying don't do that. What I'm saying is that if you only rely on that as your trigger for customer research, you're going to miss a lot of things, because there may be insights that are unrelated to that problem space but could in fact be more impactful for your customers, and you're going to miss them if you're focused on that one problem space.

[00:05:13] Another system that I see that is flawed in terms of bringing continuous customer listening is one that revolves around prioritizing research on quarterly planning, or monthly or annual, however you do your roadmap. The trigger is: we're going to start our roadmap for the next quarter, so let's do this big customer research plan. Again, that's great, and I'm not saying don't do it. But if you only focus on those times to do customer research, you may be getting the breadth that you're missing in that first system, but you're missing your timely insights. Our customers' worlds change just as fast as our worlds change, and if we're not listening at every moment we're going to miss some key things. It's also going to be a lot harder for you to adapt, because you're missing those insights, and it may be too late if you're only doing it once a quarter, for example.

[00:06:13] So what system can we build? This is a system that we built on our team, and I've introduced it to several of our product teams here. It's around three phases: make it simple, build the habit, and bring it to life.

Make it simple

[00:06:30] I don't know about you, but I have heard so many times in product management, design and research talks that you should just go out and call your customers. Talk to your customers, pick up the phone. Which is great, but then you think to yourself, that's just not how things work here. Customer research can be really daunting to some folks, and this could be for a lot of different reasons. It could be that you're working in the health space and privacy concerns are a big piece of it. It could be that you're in a more enterprise B2B space, where you are constantly faced with red tape put there by your sales team. Or you could just have a really small team and be strapped for resources. Whatever the reason that customer research seems really daunting, it gives us a really easy excuse not to do it.

[00:07:25] But it doesn't have to be hard, and it doesn't have to be daunting. Customers are always talking, and to listen to them doesn't mean you have to talk to them every time. Now, I'm not saying you don't ever have to talk to your customers again. If you're able to, that is always the best way. What I'm saying is that if you have a hard time getting in front of your customers, don't let that be an excuse to not learn about your customers' needs and their pain points. People are more likely to do something that's easy or simple than something complex. So the key here really is a little bit of upfront work to make customer listening a lot easier.

[00:08:13] How do we do this? Step one is to find where your customers are talking. As I mentioned, customers are always talking, whether you're listening or not, and so it's up to you to go out and find those channels. Are your customers leaving reviews? Are they providing churn feedback or lost-reason feedback to your customer support or sales teams? NPS verbatims, bug reports, social media: anytime your customers are talking about your company, your product, your experience, your service, whatever that may be, you can listen to them.

[00:08:51] And it doesn't always have to be direct channels. You also have proxy channels. Your customers are talking to your support team, they're talking to your sales. Leverage those interactions to learn about your customers. We had a really good example within our team. We had a request feedback form, where our account managers, on behalf of their customers, would request information from our billing team. I was able to get insight into those requests to see patterns and interesting insights into what our customers were asking for over and over again. And guess what: within weeks we could easily deliver that information into our customer-facing tools, so that they no longer had to request it from the team. We would never have found that little nugget if we weren't listening to that channel.

[00:09:44] Step two: once you've listed all of those obvious channels that you're aware of, think about anything that's maybe untapped. Are there places where you're not providing your customers the ability to give you feedback? In your application or your product, is there a place they can go to give feedback? If not, can you build something like that? Are you taking advantage of all the review sites, like Capterra if you have a SaaS platform, Trustpilot, Google reviews? And then there could be unique places. Maybe your customers are talking on a subreddit, you never know. Maybe you could build that community if it doesn't exist. Think about those potentially untapped channels and be creative.

[00:10:30] Once you have all of those listed, create a really easily accessible library for them. You can do this in really any tool that you already use. Our product development team uses Jira and Confluence very heavily, so we created a customer listening page in Confluence for each one of our teams, where they can quickly go and get links to places where their customers are talking. This could link out to your chat feature, where someone can read chats between your customers and your support team. It could link to Tableau dashboards or visualizations where you compile a lot of feedback. It could be links to social media channels or groups where you know your customers are talking. Really any place you can go, have it accessible in one or two clicks, so there is no reason you can't take five minutes and listen to your customers.

Build the habit

[00:11:23] The next phase is building a habit. You can't start out, do this once or twice and then forget about it. The key word is continuous, and to do something continuously you need to build the habit. One of my favorite books is Atomic Habits by James Clear. If you haven't read it, I really do recommend it. It's great not just for work but for your personal life, if you're trying to run that marathon or keep your house clean. He talks about how small changes in behavior, when repeated consistently, can compound over time to produce significant outcomes. Listening can't be a one-and-done thing. You have to do it continuously.

[00:12:07] How do we build those habits? One way is to think about the four laws of behavior change. The first law is make it obvious: design cues that trigger the habit. If you think back to those systems we talked about earlier, you don't want to always design your cues around feature development or around quarterly planning. You want to design some of those cues to make it more consistent, more recurring, on a daily or weekly basis. So think about things that will trigger you. Is it a weekly time slot on your calendar where you set aside time to listen to your customers? Personally, I have two recurring meetings on a day, and one tends to run over, and I have about 10 minutes in between those meetings. We all know 10 minutes is not enough time to get anything actually accomplished, but 10 minutes is exactly enough time to listen to your customers. So I like to use that time each week to click into one of those channels and do a little bit of listening.

[00:13:08] James Clear talks in his book about the idea of habit stacking. If there's something you already do on a daily or weekly basis, try and use that habit to build your next habit. One example: we pull our metrics weekly for our product teams, so while I'm pulling those metrics, it's a great time for me to also pull some qualitative insights from my customers.

[00:13:34] The next step is making it attractive: use temptations to make it appealing for our customers to talk and appealing for our teammates to listen. A lot of times it's sharing feedback that's negative. We all love to share the positive, that feels really good, but we need to find ways to make it more appealing to share the negative. So find ways to celebrate learning from your customers. Not celebrating learning that you're not doing the right thing, but celebrating learning that you have an opportunity to grow, to expand, to change, to solve their problems. Celebrate that learning whether it's positive or negative, so people don't feel afraid to share those negative insights.

[00:14:26] We already talked about making it easy, but it really is about reducing the friction. Don't make it feel daunting to listen to your customers, because then you're definitely not going to build that habit. But if it's something simple that you can do really quickly, there's no reason you can't squeeze customer listening into your week.

[00:14:45] And then make it satisfying. We all know that learning from our customers and building products that solve our customers' problems are going to lead to business outcomes, but we can't wait for those long-term outcomes to drive our habits. We need to make them more immediate. Whether it's praising another team member for sharing or rewarding yourself for taking that time. For example, if you put that meeting on your calendar and it's the one meeting that you can easily avoid, and I've definitely done that plenty of times, but you stick to doing it, find a little reward for yourself, and really build that habit.

[00:15:31] The other key is the role of your environment when it comes to building habits. At Dumpsters.com we strive to be the most customer-centric company in the waste industry, so our organization is always talking about our customers. We're always reviewing their feedback, whether it's positive or negative, so it's really easy for us to start to build that habit. But even if your company doesn't have that type of environment, it doesn't mean you can't start building it. One of my favorite things to do is to start a lot of my meetings with the question, "What have we heard from customers?" This really puts folks on the spot to share insights that they've learned from their customers. Whether you're having a meeting with sales or customer service or with your product development team, each one of them should be listening to your customers, and each one of them should have no problem bringing some insights into the meeting. Building that muscle will help build the habit over time.

[00:16:33] You can also do things like include your customer listening insights in presentations. Even if you're presenting quantitative metrics, there's no reason why you can't put a quote in there. Any chance you have to share the insights you've learned from your customer listening habits will give you the opportunity to build that environment.

Bring it to life

[00:17:01] The last stage is bringing it to life. Please, please, please don't go out there and listen to your customers all the time and then let it fall into a black hole. You have to do something with those learnings. I break these down into three different steps. Step one is centralize: you want to gather all of this data into one place. There are a lot of tools out there that allow you to do this, whether it's note-taking tools like Notion or other more sophisticated tools, Pendo, Canny, UserVoice. There are so many tools out there, some that often have AI capabilities to help you synthesize things. But just because you don't have one of those tools doesn't mean you can't build a really easy place to centralize this data.

[00:17:50] Again, we use Confluence. We try to limit the number of tools that we use, so we found a way to build a library within Confluence, and we found it's really great because we can tie our product development Jira tickets in with those Confluence listening pages. But whatever tool you like to use, make sure that anytime anyone is learning about your customer, they put it in this one single place so everybody can take advantage of those learnings.

[00:18:16] Step two is to synthesize it. You want to regularly triage this information. You don't want to make this ever-growing list that you never know what to do with. On a regular basis you want to go through, prioritize relevant feedback, pull out something that's actionable and bring it to the top. If you regularly do this, and you build the habit to triage it as well, it won't ever feel as daunting.

[00:18:41] The third step is to mobilize, and there are two parts to mobilizing. There's the idea of socializing these customer insights. That comes back to sharing them in your daily standups: can everybody share a customer listening insight that they've heard? Again, in presentations, in conversations, can you find a way to bring these up? Just because you're not going to build anything or do anything about that insight today doesn't mean we shouldn't share it, because you never know what somebody else could have learned that could tie two things together. So always find ways to share these insights with your team, across channels, with anybody within your organization that you're talking to.

[00:19:26] The other idea is prioritizing action for those insights that really do show relevant impact, whether to build features, change communication or switch processes, whatever that insight drives. Prioritize those and delegate folks to take action on them. Is it getting into your backlog? Is it starting to brainstorm ways that you can act on it? Whatever that is, make sure that you're prioritizing those accordingly and then taking action on the ones at the top of the list.

A workshop to take back to your team

[00:20:03] I want to leave you with a takeaway, because there's nothing worse than going to a webinar or a talk and hearing a lot of really great ideas, or even just confirming things you already knew, and then getting back to your desk and thinking, "Okay, that was great, now back to work." So I want to leave you with an option to take to your team. This is a workshop that I've built, that we've run in our teams and also run with some companies outside our organization, to start to build this habit within your team. I really suggest taking an hour to do this and including all of your product development team. Whether you're a small team with only a product manager and an engineer, or a large team that has access to user research and QA, anybody who's working on the product can be involved. It doesn't take a long time, and you can see how quickly you can get results and how quickly you can start listening to your customers.

[00:21:00] Start with an introduction. Talk about customer listening and why it's important. Just have an open discussion, because there may be some who aren't convinced of that value. Then do this brainstorm exercise with your group, so that it doesn't fall on you, and you can brainstorm with other folks who maybe have more insights than you. List all of the direct ways in which you can listen to your customers, list all the proxy ways that you can listen to your customers, and list the names of customer support and sales reps who are more open to having these conversations.

[00:21:38] Then practice it. If you don't build this muscle and practice it over and over again, you're a lot less likely to actually do it. This is a great opportunity to ask the folks on your team to practice it right then and there. Whether you want to break out individually or in pairs, go ahead and choose a channel that you've listed in that group brainstorm and just start listening, whether that's for five minutes or 10 minutes. You'll be surprised what you can learn in that small amount of time. Then have everybody pick one thing that they heard that you could take action on, brainstorm ways that you could take action on it, and share it with the group. Then have a discussion about how easy that was. Talk about how it doesn't have to be daunting, and it's something that you can work into your day-to-day.

[00:22:31] Then, as a group, brainstorm how you can incorporate customer listening as a habit in your daily work lives. It may not seem obvious to you, but someone on your team might have a good idea, and we all know that the more heads you put together, the more information and the more ideas you can get out. Find ways in which you can build habits within your team and within yourself, and start having those conversations today. And then as a wrap-up, make sure you set goals, and moving forward, pick one of those ways and start doing it. Because if you don't start taking action now, you're going to be in the same place, with the same system bringing you the results that you're already getting today.

[00:23:13] I've written up this workshop, so if you want to take it away, you can scan that QR code and it'll bring you to the link, or you can go to my LinkedIn and find it there. If you do want to take this back to your team, I really implore you to do that and start seeing the results that our team has learned how to get. With that, I'll stop and see if there are any questions.

Q&A

[00:23:40] Host: Thank you for that, that was really insightful. I'm a big fan of James Clear's book as well, so if anybody hasn't read Atomic Habits, I highly recommend it. Just to remind you, if you have any questions, please do comment on whichever platform you're watching on and we can put those questions through to Abby. I'm going to start with one of the biggest challenges, particularly in a B2B environment, which is how you get access to your customers. I know you mentioned potential proxies. Is there any specific advice in the B2B space that you might have for people?

[00:24:15] Abby: We have felt that exact same challenge. Other than finding those proxy ways and talking to those sales reps, there are other ways you can listen to your customers. One of the examples we found is that there are trade groups that our customers are talking in and listening to, and it's really interesting to follow those channels. Whether that's a Facebook group, because some of our B2B customers are very old school and still use Facebook, but they have this community that they've built there, and they'll ask questions about software and about their business. So I can sit and listen to understand what they're interested in. Or, for those that are a little more sophisticated, follow what they're following, read comments on the articles that they're reading. They're always talking, whether it's directly about your product or your service or not. There are always insights to be had, so sometimes you do have to be a little bit creative and find those different channels where they're talking.

[00:25:21] Host: Awesome. It's a good reminder not to overlook some of the channels that you might not think of, but your customers could be there.

[00:25:31] Abby: Absolutely.

[00:25:34] Host: The other one, on making it simple and the Confluence side: how do you deal with data rot and things getting out of date, and how do you maintain that as well as trying to collate everything?

[00:25:49] Abby: Absolutely. These lists can get really long if you're doing your job right, and you want to make sure that you're not leaving that data to sit. It is really about regularly triaging it. You have to build the habit not just to listen but to go through that data. I think it's really great when we can tie Confluence and Jira together. If we do take action on something, we try to tie that Jira ticket back to the insight that's in Confluence. It's very easy to tie those things together, so you can easily see which things we've already done. Those can fall to the bottom of the list so we don't have to think about them again, or maybe we want to follow up on something we did to see if it truly got the impact we were looking for.

[00:26:36] It is really important to continue to clean that, because when you go back to use those insights, that's going to be the cue to trigger it. If you're doing roadmap planning and you're going to look at those insights, that is a great cue to build the habit of triaging the data and getting rid of some of that old stuff. I highly suggest dating everything when you're centralizing that information. Try to put a date on when you found that information. Where you were listening and when you were listening is really important to keep that data clean and relevant.

[00:27:14] Host: Excellent. And is that a centralized responsibility? I'm thinking of a team where you're trying to encourage everybody to put in everything and manage themselves, and the risk of somebody being overzealous in tidying things up. How do you manage that in a decentralized rather than a centralized role?

[00:27:36] Abby: You really have to think about how that works for your team. There are product development teams that are really small, where you can all say, "Yeah, we all own this." Or there are really large teams where you may have to decide that everybody can insert data, but these one or two people are responsible for purging it or keeping it clean, whether that's the lead product manager, the lead product designer, the UX researcher, whoever makes sense on your team. If you have a small team and you have that triangle of product manager, designer and developer, and you all understand that you're working together and talking all the time, then it's really not important. But as you get larger, it's absolutely important to dedicate one person to be responsible and accountable for cleaning it up, even though they may not be the one doing it every time. They are owning that job.

[00:28:32] Host: Makes sense. Well, I think that brings us pretty much to time, so I just want to thank you once again, Abby, for sharing your story.

[00:28:40] Abby: Thank you.