Turning Whingers into Winners - Stop whinging and engage stakeholders with customer feedback to drive positive outcomes!

Sarah Skold at UXDX Community: Winning Feedback and Solutions for Design Innovation. Video: https://youtu.be/HnoOYgnrEIw

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.

Introduction and a confession

[00:00:00] Sarah: Hi everyone, lovely to meet you all, and thank you for coming along to hear what I have to say. It's always humbling when people turn up to listen to you speak, and to be invited to speak to you at all. Before I begin: I'm in Australia, in Sydney, and I would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which I stand, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and I pay my respects to the Elders past, present and future and acknowledge their connection to Country.

[00:00:30] Now, I don't know everyone's backgrounds on the call or listening later on, but I'm guessing that you're here in this session because you might have something to do with product design. Maybe you're a product owner or a developer or a UX researcher, either wrangling stakeholders, figuring out priorities, understanding customers, or building really cool apps and experimenting with new technology.

[00:01:02] I'm going to start off by letting you in on a little secret, which is that although I've already been in the workforce for 15 years, I've only been working in this producty space for maybe three years. I think it is since 2020, so not even three years. So I may not use exactly the right terms, or I may say something strange, so apologies in advance for that. Please do jump in if you have any questions or if you need any translation, or want to pop a question in the messages or stream at all.

[00:01:39] I usually try to avoid telling people this, but most of my career has been in the dreaded HR land. Yes, I know, I'm lucky I got out the other side. Just kidding. It was actually a wonderful place to start your career, largely because it taught me everything that I know about stakeholder management and how to get what you really need from people, which is the crux of what I wanted to talk to you about today: how to turn whinging into winning, specifically whingers into winners.

Customer hat, product hat

[00:02:15] Let's start off with a bit of self-reflection. I want you all to take a moment to think about the last time you were having a good old rant about something, a real proper whinge. And I should clarify, the something I'm talking about is not your partner or your kids or your flatmate or your dog. I mean something that you were receiving, or not receiving as the case may be, as a customer. You may have even... hopefully my slides are going to work. Yes, there it is: sent that angry face emoji in a text to your friend or a colleague explaining what had happened. There were emotions and frustrations and possibly clenched jaws and deep sighs. Why does it have to be this difficult? Why don't they understand what I need?

[00:03:13] If you were lucky, you might have received an email later on asking you to fill in a survey about your experience. And if you happened to have a moment in your hectic life, you might fill in the response, which will go somewhere into the land of data for a little bit and ultimately, hopefully, land in the hands of a product, UX, developer type person who will care deeply and fix your problem. So I want you to think about that feedback, that thing that was really annoying you, that experience that you were having, and just bring to mind a word or two that really explains the frustration and emotion that you were feeling at that time.

[00:03:58] Now I want you to take your customer hat off and put your producty, developing person hat on, and read what you, the customer, might have written in your feedback. "How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?" Well, not very likely. And then, if you really had time, you might write some information in there about why. Now, with your product hat still on, or your developer hat, I'd like you to think about a word that explains how you're feeling after having read this information or seen this rating. I'm willing to bet that the word is not as strong as the first word that you used when you were explaining the experience as the customer.

An HR background and a move into customer insights

[00:04:56] Before I go on to explain more about my theory about turning whingers into winners, I probably should give you a little bit of context about my slightly weird HR background. Context is key, after all, and we will talk more about that later. I grew up in this opposing environment where my dad was a pretty high-flying banker and my mum was a nurse and then a coach and a caretaker. So one half of my influence was a lot about the data and the numbers and the facts and the figures and negotiating hard and winning, and the other half was all about how you felt and caring and nurturing and listening to others. And then I took this to the next level, as I said before, by working in HR, but in an investment bank myself. Again, quite a lot of opposing influences, now that I reflect back on it.

[00:05:51] After, as I said, a long time in HR, I decided that I wanted a career shift, because I thought there were other ways that I could help people, which was the reason I'd gotten into HR in the first place. And I took the opportunity to move into a role where I would be helping product owners and leaders understand their customers better.

[00:06:10] So this is my story, and we know every story has many perspectives, and I can only genuinely share mine, so take it with a grain of salt, but this is how I saw what played out. The team that I joined was full of really experienced UX designers and researchers and analysts. We were like a little consulting function supporting the development squads, with product owners, engineers, developers, testers, all super smart people with really sought-after skills. And I was none of these things at all. But I did know how to listen and how to engage with leaders and how to connect the dots. I was also a bit of a closet data nerd. I liked my Excel spreadsheets, and my new role really allowed me to indulge that side of myself by delving into swathes of customer feedback data.

Data, data, data, and still no action

[00:07:06] This part of the organization had implemented a voice of the customer program about a year or so before, and to their credit, many of the leaders were absolutely fascinated with the data that they were receiving from it. I was the one who was managing the survey platform, and I had requests from all over the business for new surveys to be triggered at different customer interaction points, or additional questions to be added to the surveys, dashboards to be created, results to be analyzed. Many of these leaders were looking at the dashboards on a daily basis, if not more frequently, and I was like, this is amazing. These leaders really care about what their customers have to say, and they're making data-based decisions. I heard that phrase a lot: data-based decisions.

[00:08:00] The months went by, and yes, many improvements were put into place, but I did begin to notice less interest in the data, and increasingly a frustration when similar themes were highlighted from month to month. To me, these ongoing themes indicated that these were really big rocks, things where we could really move the dial. Yes, they were quite difficult things, but surely we had to do them. Eighty percent of our detractors were saying that this was a problem, or sixty percent of customers were falling into this particular bracket, or the survey platform was showing us that NPS would increase by X if this topic was addressed. Data, data, data. We had so much of it.

[00:08:47] And then the UX researchers were engaged to provide more in-depth insight, and they spent weeks interviewing and synthesizing and collating these compelling and beautiful reports. More data. And yet I still felt that there was a lack of action. What was starting to dawn on me was that data and research, while super important, are not enough on their own. In fact, sometimes lots of data just creates lots of noise, and the noise becomes so constant that it starts to be ignored and justified away.

[00:09:29] These were some of the things that I started to hear after all of this data was put in front of people's faces. "Those customers are just an edge case. They aren't our target market anyway." "Only old retirees have time to fill those surveys in." "We're obviously asking the wrong questions." Things were just being justified. The excuses started to really pile up, and I was like, what am I missing? The data is all there. Why is it being dismissed?

Taking an executive to a customer interview

[00:10:03] Then one day I had the opportunity to bring a senior executive along to a customer interview I was doing, and it was an absolutely fascinating experience. The same old issue was raised. Here we go again, I thought. The executive will maybe brush over it, and then we'll talk about it after the interview and he'll tell me that that customer's just an edge case. But that wasn't what was happening. I could see that the executive was really engaged and interested in the conversation, and he kept delving, asking more and more questions. Why this, why that? The good old five whys. It was actually working. And the customer was engaging and eloquent and shared all this context that had led up to this feedback.

[00:10:50] It was honestly like seeing a light bulb turn on or a fire start. Suddenly there was passion and energy and drive to solve this problem, and miraculously there was some budget as well. And I was like, what the heck? I've been telling you this for months. Clearly my influencing skills are terrible. And maybe they were. But once I got over myself and realized that I should just be happy with this end result, my takeout from this, and what I observed as I put this trick into practice on multiple future occasions with senior leaders, with product owners, developers, customer service representatives, lots of different people across the organization, was that genuine connection and building empathy is a hugely powerful thing. Much more powerful than the data, in my humble opinion.

Empathy diluted until the action was lost

[00:11:47] Now, after this brief stint as a customer insights manager, I've ended up as a Scrum Master. And anyone who is a Scrum Master, or has a Scrum Master, should know that we do have a bit of a bias to action. Inaction and apathy lead to waste, and we really don't like waste. So reflecting back on it now, I do feel like a lot of the time and effort that my team and the organization as a whole had spent on building this customer-focused team was quite wasted. That, and also, I guess, the time and effort of the customers who were providing us with this feedback and information was also wasted.

[00:12:33] We, as the customer experience team, had some empathy for the customers, but we weren't the ones building the product or making the priority decisions, so we could only try. And then the product owners were receiving it on a piece of paper, as a data point, but the story was often second-hand or third-hand or fourth-hand, or sometimes not even included because it wouldn't fit on the slide. So the empathy that can be created from that storytelling and connection was diluted and diluted until it was lost, and the action was lost.

Turning emotion into action

[00:13:16] So I guess what I've tried to take now into my development team that I'm working with is to get the whole team immersed in understanding and building out that customer experience. I would rather that we have fewer data points and more actual connection with the customers, so that we can really understand and drive that action. Obviously, if you've got the opportunity to have both, then that's fantastic, and the data is always important to have, to be able to back up your hunches, or the way that you feel like you might be leaning after having had conversations with customers. But you can't miss that step.

[00:14:03] Because what you don't want is to be left with someone whinging about someone else whinging. In this middle role I was in this space, and I'm sure some of you have been in this space as well, where you have stakeholders telling you, "Oh well, they're just whinging," and then you're listening to the customers and they're whinging, and really you've just got whingers whinging at each other, but nothing actually happening.

[00:14:33] So what you really want to be able to do is turn that emotion, the emotion that you were feeling when you were explaining your experience or thinking about your experience at the beginning of this session. That emotion is pure gold. You want to turn that into action for your customers. You want to take the drive that your customers are giving you through the emotion they're sharing with you into your product, and be able to win, for want of a better word, the game.

[00:15:11] So that's really all I had to say about turning whingers into winners, and hopefully that is something that you can easily and quickly bring into your teams. I've found it's really fascinating to see how people respond when they're suddenly put into the shoes of their customers. My team that I'm working with at the moment is working mainly with internal customers, which does make it a little easier to access the customers. But quite often we'll be having a conversation and we'll just share screens, and the team will be sitting there going, "Oh my gosh, I did not realize how frustrating that must be for you, having to click here or press that or open this box," or whatever it is that they're having to do.

[00:15:58] So it's really given us much more drive, a level of enthusiasm. And it also helps the customers to feel that we're listening to them. They provide us more feedback because they know that we're listening to them, and then we get more insight into how we can improve the products that we're working on. So that's it.

Q&A

[00:16:22] Host: Excellent, thank you very much. There are nice examples of how to try to get those people on side who are the whingers, as you were saying. So if anybody does have any questions, please do, as I said, ask them on any of the platforms that you're watching on. We're monitoring all of them, and we'll pass those through to Sarah.

[00:16:48] I'd like to start, because I was thinking about an experience that I've had where it was very strange. We were working very closely with a stakeholder, and they were very personable one-to-one, but as soon as we would get into a broader meeting, like a steering committee type thing, that's when the whinging came out against us. So have you experienced anything like that, and how have you tried to approach those people, who, it's almost like in a public forum they're more happy to whinge than in a private one?

[00:17:26] Sarah: Yeah, I think that it is very fascinating to see how people respond in different group situations or different contexts. I guess if you have the opportunity to be engaging with someone on an individual level, then hopefully you will get a more genuine understanding of their feedback. If you have a large group of people and others are whinging, again for want of a better word, you do find that people tend to all turn in the same direction. I don't know if you've heard of the tests that they do where people go into a lift and face the wrong way, and suddenly everyone starts to face the wrong way because they're like, "Oh, this is weird, are we supposed to be doing this?" So there's a bit of that following effect that happens, which I think means that if you can get people on their own, you will get a better, deeper understanding of what's going on.

[00:18:30] I suppose there are so many elements when it comes to groups and how relationships are working. If it's product people that are all trying to compete for different priorities, or if it's leaders that want to look good in a certain light, it's very difficult to have that conversation and really feel like you're getting the right information out of people. But yeah, I would say try to keep the engagements as much as you can on a one-to-one basis, to really get that deep insight.

[00:19:02] Host: What happened with us is that we just went back and said, "Why do you keep doing this?" And eventually we got it out that he thought we were doing great work, and if he said it was good, then the company would move us somewhere else and go, okay, they're finished with you, and move us on to some other part of the problem. So he was whinging to keep us around. It's a strange one.

[00:19:28] Sarah: That is very strange. Like I said, you probably got that out of him one-to-one, and not when he was in the room with the stakeholders.

[00:19:36] Host: Yes, exactly. The other question, I guess, is just because you did have an eclectic background. Do you think that has helped you with that empathy building and understanding of where people are coming from, because you've had multiple hats?

[00:19:58] Sarah: Yes. It's very humbling, because I don't know a lot, so I find that the best leverage I can get is to understand other people and to try to really dive into their worlds. I think it's the skill that I've been able to hone really well in the last few years, because it's been the only skill that I really have in this space. But yeah, I think probably having worked with such a variety of people: when you're in HR and you're working across a whole organization, you're working from leaders all the way down to graduates, from tech people all the way through to bankers, through to whatever else you might be dealing with. So you have to be able to read people, which has definitely helped in this space.