Expert advice for nurturing relationships with customers
Earlier this year, we held a panel session to learn some best practices for creating a successful User Experience Program from members within our design organization. The User Experience Program connects our product teams to our customers to provide feedback opportunities.
As researchers within the Data and AI division, Robin Auer and Rebecca Knowe built up user experience programs on their respective products. Lisa Chen built up the user experience program for two products: Cognos Analytics and Planning Analytics.
Getting started
In Robin and Rebecca’s case, they both joined their product teams and discovered there were no customer connections established for the purposes of research and design feedback. While they both went about it in different ways, they leaned on their business stakeholders to help them get the initial contacts they needed.
For Robin, he asked everyone he could who had access to customers such as Sales, Product Managers, Customer Success Managers, and Senior Technical Staff Members (STSMs). By leaning on his colleagues, he was able to get his foot in the door with a couple companies.
Rebecca asked one of the product managers to pull a list of customers who had used the specific tool she wanted to test in the past 90 days. She sent the customers a survey and asked if anyone would like to provide further feedback. One of the respondents agreed and Rebecca has been working with that person now for over 3 years. “It’s super cool to develop that relationship with someone over time,” Rebecca said. “I’ve gotten to see how he’s gone from the only data scientist at his company to leading a team.”
As a design strategist, Lisa really advocated for the designers she worked with to connect with their customers more. In 2017, she got her team to have a session called “Meet the Designers” at IBM’s annual conference, THINK. The session happened immediately after the product managers’ session that introduced the roadmap and the designers did a Design Thinking workshop to validate the roadmap. “We had 40 sign-ups right there,” Lisa recalled. “I don’t think they even knew that was an option.” After that success, development and product managers became interested in leveraging the design team to refresh the brand.
Challenges of establishing and maintaining the relationships
The key to growing and maintaining a customer program is trust. Not only trust between the program manager and the customers but also internal trust. Lisa and Rebecca talked about establishing trust with the customers, while Robin talked about trust with internal stakeholders.
“Establishing the relationships wasn’t the problem,” Lisa said. Over time, the problem evolved into making sure there were enough research activities for the customers to participate in. In order to keep customers engaged, they need to be working with IBM at a somewhat regular cadence. Lisa’s challenge arose from not have a clear pipeline of activities, so she’d have to go to the researchers, designers, and even product managers to make sure the customers had activities to engage with.
However, for Rebecca, her challenge has been making sure that the customers she works with don’t get overtaxed. On her team, there are typically 4–5 research activities every month with designers and product managers wanted to engage with customers. Over time, she found that sending out a monthly email with a list of the activities to the customers proved to be very effective. It enables them to sign up for the activities that interest them.
Robin relies on his internal stakeholders to forge those customer relationships. “When they trust you, they’ll help you,” he said. His team’s invitation to join the User Experience Program has now made it onto the end of every product manager’s customer facing presentations, which helps bring in customers.
In the beginning, he started with three companies that he worked with. Even if you start working with a smaller number of companies, over time that will grow. He still works with one of the original three companies, however he is routinely engaging with 150 customers from 12 companies.
Best practices
Building a community was extremely important to Lisa. Her team does quarterly retrospectives with all the customers they work with where they demo something new, share the roadmap, and highlight research findings. They invite customers to share their industry problems. During the pandemic, she set up informal live streams on the IBM Community where they talk with customers about how they use the product. It grew really organically and built the camaraderie between customers.
Over time, Rebecca found that the best way to keep her customers engaged was to invite them to a feedback session as soon as possible. She found that if she did just an onboarding call with the customer, with no opportunity to give feedback, she didn’t have as high of a success rate at getting the customer to come back for another session. She’ll usually bring in a design-led study so that the customer can look at something new and exciting that’s being built.
It’s important to make sure the customers understand that their time providing feedback to IBM is well spent. The worst thing is when they say, “We’ve already told you about this problem so many times. Why isn’t it fixed?” Robin has found that sending out a quarterly newsletter helps customers stay in the loop of what the team is working on. He’ll include opportunities for future research sessions but also takeaways from sessions and planned changes to the product.
Advice
“Just like any relationship, you need to invest in it,” Lisa wisely said. It’s important to remember that customers have many demands and time commitments. When the pandemic first started, they took a break for a quarter and stopped asking their customers to participate in research sessions. “We told them, ‘We’re here when you need us, but we won’t actively recruit for a quarter,’” said Lisa.
Rebecca’s advice: Don’t be afraid to try new things! “I made every mistake in the book.” Through trial and error, she’s come up with a great process.
Robin’s advice: Always be personal with them. Focus on having a good relationship with them and listening to their needs. Add your own personal touch when you’re interacting with customers. For Robin, he always likes bringing chocolate to his workshops. In fact, at a recent virtual workshop, one of the customers remembered that and asked where his chocolate was!
It takes time and work, but establishing these customer relationships is a very valuable and rewarding practice! It’s what our work in the user experience profession is all about.
Rachel is a user experience researcher and strategist on the IBM Cloud and Cognitive Software Research Operations team. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.
