CX Mobile App
“Day in the Life”
This Customer Experience mobile app was used mainly by frontline users to check on the pulse of their customers. These folks on “frontlines” of retail, banking, and hospitality could see ratings, respond to complaints, and read survey responses all within the app. The product team wanted to explore ways to not only increase engagement, but also find areas of opportunity for future features. With this study I explored how a typical frontline user leverages the app in everyday use. I uncovered their pain points, and identified gaps in the product where typical daily tasks were not supported.
Remote sessions allowed us to connect with customers across industries.
My Role
As the manager and leader of the UX Research team, I still contributed to our body work by doing hands on work with our products. In our division of labor, I was the research owner for our mobile CX app. I collaborated with the product lead for the app to understand the questions they were trying to answer, and also worked with our more tenured designers to understand historical UX decisions for the app. I proposed an exploratory study based in contextual inquiry that would help us to understand the jobs our mobile users were trying to do as a starting point for new features and improvements.
The Challenge
This research initially came about based on a proposal from an executive for gamification in the app. This executive theorized that gamification would increase traffic and use of the app. Through my many years of product experience, I was skeptical of this high investment idea, and instead of jumping to concept testing, proposed we answer the following questions first through a more open ended study.
What can we remove without disrupting the experience?
How can we share data and insights in a digestible way?
How can we provide insights from small data sets?
What makes users feel competitive in the app?
What everyday pain points is the app not solving?
These questions drove to the core of what our product team was actually trying to do with the app — improve the overall experience, add value, and increase adoption and engagement. These questions were based on some previous research as well as app traffic and use metrics.
The Process
1. Investigate the user experience
While the product team had stats on what pieces of the mobile experience were used the most, understanding those in context was key to this project. The mobile product team was receiving pressure to gamify the app to increase usage, but questioned if this was the right investment. To answer our research questions, I created a script to have users walk me through the ways they not only use the app, but also the context in which it was used. Users took time from their busy days to chat with me, often calling from cars, back offices in retail stores, or in between meetings.
Based on my background in UX design, I had my own critiques of the app, but was surprised to hear users rave about how useful the app was to them. This remains one of my favorite parts of research — having your assumptions challenged and being wrong!
Top Usage Themes
Quick and on-the-go - Users are glancing at the app in between sales, checking on stores, and meetings. They aren’t spending a lot of time on the app, instead using it to check the pulse and respond to disgruntled customers when they can’t be on their computers.
Diving deep - With their limited time, users still dive deep into all of the customer feedback — including reading surveys one by one.
Distributing feedback - Managers take the time when their employees are mentioned to share that feedback with them. Whether it’s constructive or positive, they either make time for coaching or screen shot and pass along.
2. Areas of Opportunity
Based on these insights for how users were using the app, there emerged new areas of opportunity. Understanding how they used the app, and what workflows existed beyond it helped us to reassess planned product builds, and think creatively for solutions.
No time for games
Based on the on-the-go nature of our users’ roles, there wasn’t time for games in the app. They use the app for quick insights or to complete necessary tasks when away from their computers. Adding gamification wasn’t recommended as a strong product strategy for increasing use and engagement.
Additionally, when talking with users about competition and games, many seemed adverse to the overall idea. Instead, expressing interest in finding more ways to collaborate and share insights and strategies with teammates and even internal competitors (other stores etc.). How could we capitalize on their desire to collaborate and work together to improve their own customer experience practices?
Insights and action for small data sets
While our company’s ability to draw insights from massive data sets was powerful, for these frontline mobile users, they were rendered basically useless. Their data sets were too small to effectively use these powerful tools, but they still had a great need for insights and actions based on the data they did have. Instead of reading every feedback survey from customers one by one, how could the product evolve to not only show effective insights, but also recommend actions?
Coaching
As mentioned previously, managers using the app took feedback that mentioned their employees and either delivered the positive praise (often via screenshot), or worked with them to improve if the feedback was constructive. This demonstrated a gap in the product where folks were using the app to deliver coaching to employees, but there was no function in the app to support this action. Additionally, within this company’s portfolio of products was one that helped call centers deliver coaching to their employees. With this internal subject matter expertise, a tool to support coaching could be a really successful feature for further engagement from users.
3. Impact
While many of the new features remain in gridlock for development, there were some tangible output based on this research:
Validated mobile friction points
Expanded mobile module library based on user personas
Helped build alignment between web and mobile report building
Improved demos and implementation
4. Future Research
This exploratory research was foundational in helping the mobile product team build out their roadmap. While lots of great insights were revealed, other areas demonstrated a need for more research. Based on the framework of the UX research process, we uncovered some pain points and understood typical use, but fell short discovering best practices. A study on mobile “power users” was initiated based on the insights from this research.
Additionally, recommended was concept testing of any features or design created based on the areas of opportunity — ideally based off of a design sprint.
Conclusion
This research demonstrates how truly valuable UX research can be in the product lifecycle. While our product owners and executives can provide amazing vision and strategy, taking the time to not only understand our user, but test concepts can help to avoid costly investments in features that might not get a lot of use or provide value.
From this research, not only did we test the idea of gamification, but we came to understand how our frontline users truly engaged with our product. This user segment was not often engaged in research because it was difficult to find a sample, and much easier to talk to their corporate leads who would often relay their feedback. Talking directly with our primary user provided insights that not only highlighted low lift concepts but also revealed larger conceptual areas for growth.