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Designers: how do you find internal customers to chat with?

Floy181·Sep 16, 2021

Given that you have customers using your product, how do find who to chat with for design research? Are there any tools you use to track customers and the research conducted/findings for them? How do you share findings with others on your cross functional and design team?

teresaman·Sep 16, 2021

At Superhuman we've been doing ad-hoc research by reaching out to our customers via email, asking them questions about their workflow (to better understand how to think about a specific feature), or showing them early design mocks (to get their thoughts and validate our design thinking). We share results back via an email based on their responses (copy and pasted verbatism) as well as data in percentages, eg. x% of people wanted ABC.

JennyBounmivilay·Sep 17, 2021

Hi Teresa thanks so much for sharing your workflow. I’m really curious how others get access to their customers. What avenue do you use to get those emails? Do you have a database that you organise? Do you reach out to your customer success or sales team?

annamiller·Sep 16, 2021

Hi @floy181, nice to meet you on here. Here's what I would do: 1. Create a shortlist of customers that are potentially open to feedback conversations. These would be customers who are rating your product highly, giving feedback, engaging through customer support and any customers that seem like a good fit based on feedback from sales or other avenues.2. Create a feedback interview process (questions, wireframes, mockups) that you can take customers through3. Invite each customer to a call4. Record the call and have a document to track customer feedback, prob in a Google doc or Excel5. Create a deck of findings and recommendations to share with your teamHope this helps!

Floy181·Sep 17, 2021

Anna thanks for the in depth look into your flow! I’m curious how do you compile your shortlist? Is this usually always done through your customer success team and sales? Is there a database that you and your design team can turn to without the help of other teams? At my company it’s become a huge strain to constantly reach out to other teams to get specific customers for our research and I’m wondering if there’s a better way 😅

annamiller·Sep 17, 2021

Good points, thanks for asking. I had access to the customer base and a close relationship with the customer success team. If you're not too close with them or have a large team, I would arrange a meeting to collect the information with them or ask to provide it by email. Perhaps a meeting once a month or once a quarter with CS & Sales can help you get access to the data. You can also ask to get access to the CS system and get the customer info from there.