Over at the lonely marketer blog (link), there is a lovely story about how one person has created a change within their organisation, which has had wide ranging impact. Put simply, to find out about employee opinions regarding various themes, an employee puts two chairs out in the busy walkway at the company campus, adds a sign about the theme she wants to find out about, and invites discussion with whoever wants to sit down and talk.Â
At first this was met with opposition by management, but is now embraced by them. The results have been overwhelming, and there are often queues of people who want to sit down and give their insights.
The thing I like about this is its simplicity. Its not a hi-tech solution, its a simple and direct means of getting dialogue that gives numerous insights across traditional boundaries. And I bet it gives a huge number of relevant insights, insights that probably wouldn’t come from formal questionnaires or surveys.Â
The same can be done with user insights. Maybe not in exactly the same way, but using really simple interview techniques to create a dialogue. There is often a barrier to doing something like this, just talking to customers, and I don’t know where this barrier comes from. It is a really cheap and effective way of rapidly gaining valuable insights. Â During the AT-ONE workshops we have conducted interviews with customers, often through informal means, and it always surprises me how this changes your understanding of a problem, creates associations to other (often new) service aspects and how willing customers are to talk. In fact, customers often have a pent up need to talk. Â Informal customer insights are valuable and a great addition to traditional survey based customer information.Â
Great customer insights come from three major sources, which we encourage as part of the AT-ONE method and at our school.Â
1. See the user – observation of customer behaviour with a questioning frame of mind reveals things that users often take for granted. (Jane Fulton Suris book “Thoughtless acts” (link) shares some of IDEOs experience in this area and is great inspiration.)
2. Hear the user – talk to customers with a semi structured agenda.Â
3. Be the user – go into the role as a specific customer (use persona information to do this) and go through the service journey as if you were them. Again with an observational and questioning frame of mind.
Throughout this, the focus should be upon gaining customer insights that give direct input to making change (what Jane calls “Informing our Intuition” – more here about this). This is an area that designers are good at, observations, reflections and converting insights to innovative solutions. Unfortunately, design doesn’t have a long or deep tradition of collecting user-insights in this way, but we see this is changing.