12 Ways to Utilize Other Departments in User Research
Taylor Palmer ·
Research & Testing
UX designers should be aware of other teams and departments that have a wealth of customer data and insights. They might even talk to customers more than you! Instead of competing with these teams, designers can partner and collaborate with them.
Here are some things to look for as you begin looking around your current company:
- Which teams have automation tools or reporting features that can funnel information to you?
- Which teams confront the strongest customer pain? Some teams (like Customer Support) hear it all day long. They can help you identify it.
- What are leaders in the company saying? You’ll know you’re succeeding when you hear leadership recommend this kind of collaboration between teams.
Remember that you should own the integrity of the customer insights you actually apply to your designs. Though you can source data from many different sources, you shouldn’t always use it. It’s up to you (and your team) to filter and prioritize the best data.
I reflected on my career (so far) and identified 12 ways I worked with other departments to further my research efforts. Hope you’ll take some inspiration here for opportunities on your team!
- Including Customer Success in the planning process
- Creating a customer advisory board
- Creating a shared feedback repository
- Collaborating with your customer support team
- Getting access to recorded sales calls
- Participating in the sales process
- Traveling to on-site sales visits
- Analyzing reports from sales calls
- Conducting new hire usability tests
- Sharing “voice of customer” reports
- Review designs with customer education
- Centralizing customer outreach
- Conclusion
1. Including Customer Success in the planning process
On one of my former product teams, we invited a member of our Customer Success team to sprint planning every week. Customer Success usually helps customers succeed after they have gone through the sales process. They may offer training and resources to help them adopt new products.
This team member would walk us through a data dashboard and then give us her impressions of the week. She helped us feel urgency and highlighted big problems. She helped us channel the customer because she had been on the phone with them all week.
I loved having her there to augment whatever other research we had already done (or were planning to do). It felt like we were starting our projects one step ahead.
What to watch out for:
- Sometimes this is only one data point. You may need to cross reference these perspectives with other research sources.
- Sales and CS teams may be more motivated by their current clients than the needs of the broader customer base.
2. Creating a customer advisory board
A customer advisory board is a group (or board) of engaged customers (or potential customers). They usually agree to advise about various topics on a regular basis. They are often domain experts.
At various companies, I’ve seen this done as a quarterly onsite, monthly outreach, as-needed—or all of the above.
Different departments may own the board: Product, Sales & Success, or Marketing. In these cases, the UX team should work to be a partner with the leading team.
Customer advisory boards are common for small or large companies. Small startups who do not yet have many paying customers will sometimes assemble a board to get early feedback. These individuals likely want to use the product when it’s in a more finished state.
Usually, this agreement involves an exchange of goods. Teams may offer discounts, early access, swag, etc. to thank the group for their ongoing participation.
What to watch out for:
- Be careful not to bias yourself by relying too much on this group. They can connect you to real situations and use cases, but they are also motivated by their own needs (that might not benefit your broader user base).
- Don’t wear this group out. Use them regularly but not constantly. You want them to be your biggest advocates, and that means respecting their time.
3. Creating a shared feedback repository
On my current team, anyone can log submit to and view our repository of customer feedback. It’s a hacky setup involving posting in a Slack channel, which gets picked up by Zapier and dropped onto an Asana board.
(I wouldn’t recommend Asana for this, but we were already paying for it. Check out the Research Repository section of the Design Tools Survey for better alternatives.)
It’s a cool way for the whole company to work together and for every department to be heard. The product team also ends up with an ever-growing dataset of customer feedback.
Most submissions to the repository include information about the customer who originally requested the feedback. We can use this information to cluster or organize submissions. We can reach out for future research projects (or send them a personal note that we finally included that emoji of a woman in a turban that they wanted in the product 😊).
What to watch out for
- Someone has to be in charge of curating and cleaning this thing up. It’s a big job. It needs regular pruning (probably weekly, depending on the size of your company).
- You’ll need to approach it like a database: how will you keep it organized? How will you manage duplicates? How will it scale? What will you need from it in the future?
4. Collaborating with your customer support team
I don’t collaborate with the support team… I currently am the support team! (Only once every five weeks or so, because we rotate).
Most support teams face many highs and lows. They engage with customers who experience problems and pains from your designs. Rarely, they may also encounter someone who only reaches out to praise your amazing design decisions (savor these!).
The support team is a gold mine of customer interactions. Here are a few different ways to collaborate:
- Join the support team for a short time (like me): you do the full job and understand what it’s like to handle incoming customer requests.
- Shadow the support team. This is sometimes called a “listening tour.” You join calls and conversations to observe behavior.
- Hold cross-functional meetings. You could meet with the support team regularly to discuss the most common problems or requests they’re facing
- Software access: depending on the software, you may be able to get a free viewer license so you can search and view customer conversations. In this way, you could gather data and potentially reach out to customers that match your target profile.
What to watch out for:
- Sometimes people who contact support are your classic “loudest voices in the crowd.” You don’t always need to cater to them.
- As with any data point, step back and find out if the issues they’re facing are representative of a larger group.
5. Getting access to recorded sales calls
Like your support team, you may be able to gain access to sales software. Some sales teams use software to record calls (for reviewing, training, or monitoring).
Some software will automatically record sales calls, tag them, and transcribe them. It’s worth reaching out to your sales team to see if they have something like this.
If you’re able to get access, you can listen to real conversations with customers, tag calls, and search by various criteria. It’s a great place to gather data if you’re working on a highly-requested feature.
What to watch out for:
- A sales call is not a research call. The sales team is usually motivated to convince the customer to purchase. They’re not trying to learn from them in the way a researcher would.
6. Participating in the sales process
My design work sometimes overlaps with the needs of a potential customer in the sales pipeline. When the stars align this way, I will work with sales to speak to these customers. I may show them sample designs or prototypes (and ask them about their needs and workflows).
Doing this makes the customer feel heard, and I’m able to learn more about what customers are looking for. Customers usually feel like they’re getting special treatment because they’re talking to someone who creates the product!
Sales wants me to solve these customers’ problems so they’ll use our product. So do I!
I remember one sales call where the customer requested a walkthrough of a new feature. Instead of explaining it, I asked if they would be willing to walk through it and ask us questions. Essentially, I started a user test on the fly. It went very well and I learned a lot from the conversation! However, I would suggest giving the team a heads-up before doing this unless you have a very good relationship with the team.
What to watch out for
- This usually doesn’t happen on a reliable, predictable cadence.
- Don’t over-commit to something that will ruin the sales deal. Talking to potential customers is a special art.
- Once again, this is not a low stakes situation. Money is on the table, sales rep wants to convince them, customer wants to get what they want
7. Traveling to on-site sales visits
Remember when we all actually traveled to physical places for work? Some of us still do, but it’s definitely not as common.
I once accompanied the sales team to one of our clients, Nike. At the time, I was designing an improved Org Chart feature that was used by their team. I met several employees, helped with trainings, and—most importantly—bought discounted Nike shoes from the employee store.
In my experience, they love having designers there. Designers can answer questions about how things work, discuss the upcoming roadmap, and even sketch solutions to their problems in real time.
This is also ideal for contextual inquiry and viewing users in their natural habitat.
What to watch out for:
- This type of travel is very time-consuming. Multiples days of travel for only a few customer touch points.
- Each research session can be extremely in-depth. Think about what you need in this phase of your project.
8. Analyzing reports from sales calls
If you work with a Sales or Customer Success team, they probably use a customer relationship management tool (CRM) of some sort. Those CRMs have reporting tools for a team member to fill out a form after a customer interaction.
I once worked with a lead to add questions to that form that benefitted the UX team. I could then filter and analyze calls with certain criteria. Sometimes I even reached back out to the people I targeted.
This was a gold mine of data. It was only a small task for me to coordinate and propose questions.
Unfortunately, I left the team shortly after this was implemented, but would love to try it again.
What to watch out for:
- Make sure you actually use it. This can burn bridges if a team bends over backward for you and you don’t make good use of it. At least let them know you don’t need it anymore.
9. Conducting new hire usability tests
If your company is hiring, there are probably new employees coming in the door every couple of weeks.
I know new hires aren’t your target user. However, they are usually willing to give you some of their time and don’t have a deep knowledge of what you’re working on. A simple task-based test through a prototype can be a quick way to keep learning.
Also, it’s a cool way to meet new people on different teams. After being at the same company for several years, I would bump into people who would say, “I remember you doing a test with me on my first day!”
On one team I even coordinated with the HR department to automatically add calendar events for new hires.
What to watch out for:
- Make sure you catch these new employees before they’ve had any company product training. Otherwise, you might only be testing how effective their training was.
10. Sharing “voice of customer” reports
Once per quarter, several teams would gather anecdotal information from their customer interactions. They compiled this into a slide deck they presented to our product team.
It served as a great way to compare incoming customer interests to our existing roadmap. It also included a spreadsheet with various profiles or customer types for filtering.
What to watch out for:
- This can be a ton of work. If it’s not working, pull the plug
- You may be able to automate some of this using earlier ideas on the list (automated sales recording, feedback repository, etc).
11. Review designs with customer education
If your company offers training from specialists, these individuals have a great understanding of the first-time customer experience. They might run webinars, give product tours, answer customer questions, and more.
If you work on onboarding or education in any form, these team members can be your collaborators.
My biggest benefit from sessions with training teams was their messaging proposals. They heard the words new customers used and knew how to speak to them. They would sometimes review my copy and say something like, “No one calls it that. Use these words instead.”
What to watch out for:
- This is not information directly from users. You could use time with these team members to spark new ideas or hypotheses instead of a replacement for user research.
12. Centralizing customer outreach
A common issue for UX teams is colliding with other teams who do customer outreach (like marketing or sales). Too many uncoordinated emails from the same company can frustrate users (including me).
My former teams solved this by consolidating all our customer outreach to one tool (Marketo) to avoid spamming customers. Working together like this may also give you access to marketing resources. This would allow you to send bulk emails and use dynamic templating functions.
Sometimes this can also help from a legal and compliance standpoint. For example: if you’re not legally allowed to have customer contact information on your own machine.
What to watch out for:
- Make sure the new process doesn’t slow you down too much. The benefits can be worth it, but you may also hesitate to reach out to customers due to the extra steps.
Conclusion
I hope this list inspires you with one or two ways you can collaborate further with the teams around you!
I believe many other teams at your company care about customers. They possess valuable datasets about them. I don’t think UX teams have a monopoly on customer data or valuable customer ideas.
What ideas are missing from this list? How have you worked with other teams?
