In my last post, I wrote how we use interviews to learn about our customers. They allow us to ask them questions and in their responses we find insights and get inspired. In this post, I’d like to share some other ways we build empathy for the people using our products.
Support Rotation 💬
It starts from our first day on the job. Everyone that joins Automattic spends three weeks doing what’s called a support rotation. We learn about our products by reading support documentation and running through exercises. Once we’ve completed our training, we get to business and start offering support to our customers with our Happiness team. We start by answering inquiries by email and then upgrade to doing live chat.
After we complete our rotation we are released into our new roles with a wealth of knowledge about our company and our customers. That’s not the end though, once a year we return back to the Happiness for a week to offer more customer support. It’s a great way for us to keep in touch with the challenges our customers are facing.
Business concierge 💼
When people sign up for the WordPress.com Business plan they get access to a one on one setup appointment from a member of our Happiness team. The sessions are conducted over live chat or screen share and usually last around 30 minutes. The goal for these sessions is for the user to walk away feeling comfortable and confident building their site on WordPress.com.
In addition to helping our customers, we use these sessions to learn. Anyone can join in real time or listen to a recording at a time that suits them. There is no limit to how many sessions you can attend. After each session, the recording and notes are tagged and posted. Our support team uses these posts to generate monthly reports that give us great insights into who our customers are and the challenges they face. For someone like me that works on our signup and onboarding experiences the content in these reports is invaluable.
User research campfires 🔥
Every month members from across Automattic gather to share their stories about the research they’re conducting. We do presentations, have discussions, and talk about our processes. Through these sessions we hear about our customers and what we’re doing to overcome their challenges. It’s a great place to learn from each other and grow our skills a team. The meetups are recorded for people that can’t attend and serve as a reference to new people joining our team.
Web chefs 🍜
We are often encouraged to build sites for people we know or encounter. There is no better way to experience your product than using it in real world situations. With limited time, resources, and budgets you get a first hand encounter of the challenges people face using your product.
Out of all the activities I’ve written in this post, this is my favorite way of getting close to our customers and building empathy for them. The insights I’ve gained have helped me make better decisions in my design process and allow me to offer great feedback to my peers.
I’m always interested to learn how people conduct their research. What have you found to be an effective way of learning from your customers? Let me know in the comments below.
This post also appeared in Automattic’s product design blog.