Customer Insights and Metrics: How CX Research Is Changing the Game for Market Research

okay okay i see that mark has joined in so we're going to go ahead and get started um hello everyone again my name is billy and uh i'm with accelerate research uh thanks so much uh for staying on uh if you're joining this the this is the first seminar that you're joining thank you if you're returning thank you very much as well um that was a wonderful talk that we just listened to about the retail environment um and what we are going to be doing next hold on one second uh we are moving on to our next conference um and as you're already very familiar with because we all lived in the world of zoom for a very long time it seems like we are at the mercy of technology so we pardon us if if we have any issues along the way um throughout um you know mark will be sharing his experiences with us and so if you have questions or things that you would like to to ask him go ahead and put it in the q a box and we will get to those um mark do you like to answer things along the way or do you prefer to keep things at the end i sure do i like to be as interactive as possible you know if i could see everyone that would even be better but um yes uh you know if you have questions coming up because i'm not sure if i'll be able to see comments from here but okay um i can i can look at the chat but i'm not sure if i can monitor a q a and i will feel those for you but i'll just make sure that i am uh giving those to you in real time okay awesome feel free to break in any time because uh there's a lot of material to cover wonderful so we're gonna get started right away uh like i said uh we have uh mark uh is it michael center nicholson it's michaelson my favorite mainland is mike markelson and uh and mark is the ceo and producer of cx forums and they're a place where people connect to learn and get inspired and what he's going to be um talking to us today is about how customer experience research how it's literally changing the game for all of us and that's a really exciting topic and i know i'm looking forward to it so i'm going to just go ahead and throw it your direction mark and you can get started awesome well although i think over the screen there if you if you can okay no i'm not so much all yours all right let's see what i've got in store for everyone okay i guess uh everyone can see my screen now and make it big for everyone there we go everyone see that okay looks perfect okay good um so we're gonna be talking about customer insights and metrics which really are changing the game for marketing research to get started on this i want to share a little bit of background and think about it each of us are different people at different times and circumstances so how do you actually understand what experience is and let you understand what the person is doing and sort of where they're coming from for instance you know you may know me as this guy i'm involved in conferences i'm involved in doing um research i've been doing it a long time so it's a professional me um at other times i'm parents and a lot of us are and we're nothing like we are in the professional life when we're doing the parent role and then a lot of us have hobbies and things and so mine just happens to be making music and so you'd never put two and two together with this stuff so how do you research these people well cx research also uses different approaches based on very specific needs and objectives and the experience really does depend on who you are and what you expect i remember hearing once in in and when i went to college in georgia i took a class about strategy and stuff and the guy made a really good comment he says experience is equal to your your expectations minus uh now your your experience minus the expectation so if your ex expectation is really great then the experience is probably not going to be as good like ever hear about a great movie or a great restaurant from a friend well guess what they think that's what they were saying they told you about it you go there and it's awful but anyhow my cx journey began in uh earlier in college actually i was i was a busker in europe had to make money and so creating experiences for that time was guitar standing in front of three corners at college i played a lot and that was actually creating experiences too when you think about it creating a big experience event and i also started a weekly magazine that magazine had surveys in it when i graduated i started i sold the magazine made enough money to start up at my company which was an advertising agency then i sold that there was i didn't care for advertisers as much as strategy and research i like understanding what people do and what they feel and that really became my mission actually early in life i came up with a mission to help people understand each other um after getting into the research fully we had like 40 people or so working in the form at the time and we were doing a lot of mystery shopping about five six thousand shops a month and started an association in that that industry uh that was fantastic very interesting a lot of conferences and stuff and then i got involved in doing research at trade codes conferences the big one remember the days of the big old uh com complex and all these things we have 50 000 people we were there doing the intercept interviews and focus groups anyhow 911 hit killed me i had to sell off all that stuff which was okay took a break had my daughter then i started threads qualitative research specifically to do online uh because i was kind of getting tired of traveling so much but to do online research it was still coming around starting to become more viable then i started the mobile research association a couple years after the smartphone was invented uh and then started organizing conferences and that's where we are today uh with cx forum cx fox started originally as a cxpa event which is the association of customer experience professionals and then i created uh during this whole time i've sort of reinvented that as cx4 now into what we're talking about uh the cx world is huge it's much bigger than just ux cx takes into account everything that's from the from the product development through to understanding what customer needs are through packaging distribution getting it to the store creating a store creating merchandising systems creating packaging getting it out it basically is farm to table okay whereas ux is really more focused on the interaction that we have with devices and and uh particularly electronic but it could even be other things now cx really does cover the entire brand experience um you know it's the heart of everything so it's the service design the ui design the product design i already yeah as i mentioned utility development and uh and all that part of customer experience um did a lot of work around designing stores for many years and products and packaging we never called it experience research at the time it was product design research it was uh ux study it was uh service design etc but all this stuff came uh i guess about uh 15 20 years ago when a book came out the experience economy i think personally i think bran i think the next generation has something to do with all this phenomena of texas we have customer experience the cx brand experience user experience employee experience i had a conversation the other day with someone and uh it was actually accenture and they they have a new thing they're doing business experience and so we we have this conversation around do we really need more x's i don't know you know it's becoming a little bit ridiculous but let's focus in on what research is doing in this industry i think you should be very excited about the opportunity for market research and customer experience world and i'll just give you one example if you've ever heard of qualtrics they uh they're a survey platform started about 15 17 years ago something like that sap bought them for nine uh eight billion dollars that's with b cash and uh and so the owners uh ryan smith and his family uh they had 97 care then they sold it then they took it public made even more money so if that that's just one participant in the cx business so think about it of the opportunities the idea of customer needs and understanding what that is is what's most important to clients when you're when you're thinking about doing research and it goes way beyond usability you've got to understand beyond the numbers even and a lot of people unfortunately are sort of focused on making uh cx only a survey i've heard that so many times and that's because a lot of people in cx that have responsibility for creating and running these programs really don't understand what real research is they know it as the nps score they know it as the dashboard but they don't really get it down into other things like testing reactions to marketing content understanding consumer behavior lifestyles complex in the wild experiences they don't get there a lot of times and it's funny because they don't understand things like recruiting study design basic stuff so the data sources in customer experience are just what we're used to in marketing research but it becomes a little bit stickier on the back end of analytics and speed to delivery so as you might expect there's a lot of qualitative research in the front end and i'm going to cover that in depth in a moment all types of methods for communicating with people understanding what their needs are on a qualitative level the quantitative metrics as i said they're kind of driving the the big dollars if you will in cx and that's the nps scores the csat scores the ces course customer efforts find a resolution for call centers and service problems and then there's a whole idea of journey analytics where you're actually monitoring every touch point making sure that you're on with every touch point you've got some sort of feedback coming in voice of employee huge part of customer experience you know it's it's not just the customer it's how we're doing and delivering it and what is the what is their uh point of view and perception and can they provide some input to improvements of course customer analytics uh it goes beyond sentiment data and this is where it gets really sticky because in the past in my whole career research was always siloed off from marketing you could not market to someone based on what they said in a survey response that was just standard practice best practice and every time we did telephone surveys in the past we'd say hi i'm with so-and-so i'm not selling anything we're not going to use your information against you something like that well now get what you can basically utter something in your living room voice analytics is going to pick it up and deliver that advertisement to you on facebook the next minute i mean we're living in a very tight digital world and that is being down to the individual level there's a lot of controversy around that as well as laws coming into play in europe california a couple other states you really can't have any private information pii is what they call it but within the world of experience management you know it's tied directly to individuals all the way down the line crm data transactional data voice of customer data operational data you know combined with all that is giving these uh companies an edge to understand what that customer experience is and be able to act on it whatever it is personalization mass personalization or if they have to tell someone hey your sign fell off from the front door they can do that very rapidly it's all about digital these days especially but it has to go back to the channel i still firm believer in uh high tech high tech if we're going to be back together it's going to be both hybrid and that i heard something the other day that still ecommerce is not anywhere near what it is in brick and mortar and it's like 20 25 don't quote me but it's it's not anywhere near so there's still a need for people to gather a need for people to go into places touch and feel stuff get interact and get feedback talk with other humans beyond the screen so there's other things too that come into play other panels might be online reputation any kind of ratings and reviews gosh there's a whole bunch of marketplace for those ratings and reviews mining that data is is huge a company called bizarre voice does they almost have a lock on the market you might say but all those ratings and reviews you get out there they're all analyzed constantly for product ideas for um sentiment for other things like distribution issues perfect veggies and then there's mystery shopping audits uh for those you're not familiar with mystery shopping basically it is an audit it's it's not really the opinion of the person or the shopper because they're trained to go look for certain things they may never ever want to go there as a customer so getting their feedback on would you come back or would you recommend it to someone it's not really pertinent as were you greeted within this time frame did they show you the product you asked for etc very yes and no binary structure of that one now there let's break down this whole world of cx research into before and after purchase so you might might frame that as um you know how are we doing and how can we improve that's sort of a big full circle if you will so before you have design research that could be anything from products services facilities packaging merchandising um marketing communications huge area other things might be um that you want to understand your own team and what their feelings are about stuff before you go design something and then after is is what the customer experience is when when they're in the in the shopping mall all the way through to consumption um and it's not always the same person for instance i don't think mom's wearing the diaper she's buying but we really can't talk to the baby about it so they're shoppers and then they're consumers if you will so that's roughly how things break out between before and after and design research is particularly fascinating for me i love this area because we often are trying to you know focus in on what everybody is doing and what they what they see and how they're acting and so we may ask them about stuff and we may look at maps and the map is not the actual territory it's just the rendering of it it's a visual representation but when you start getting with a design team and they bring this voice of customer and bring the customer feedback to their design process it gives them better guidance on what people are really doing versus what they think should be done as as illustrated on the uh the past to the left so the elements of cx design research become a little bit um there's a lot of different areas there's human elements there's the uh informational elements there's infernal things going on what you want as far as desired outcomes generally the the design research is going to be more qualitative in nature it's going to have a lot of observational research and you can just out there and watch that trail and see which way people are walking before you lay the asphalt you focus on identifying those needs for products and services whatever that might be so a lot of the work we do is is using us a lot of the methods we're always used to ethnography which i enjoyed the presentation earlier that was fantastic mobile ethnography in particular you can get into people's homes or lives wherever they want to share it has to be iterative and agile so in other words build on what you know as you go through design research don't stick to this is the way we designed it we're going to stick on these questions every time you may have answered the question already let's move on let's change the question to stay up with it with the customer especially over a long long period of time and and this is really a design study a lot of times has an outcome and then it's over right you create the theme but you might want to revisit that thing at some point continuous improvement's a big part of cx and it's across organizations and panels when you get involved in doing cx research particularly for something like journey map and you need to include all stakeholders and what you'll learn in cxworld is there's a whole bunch of silos there's people in charge of human resources that people encourage product design people in charge of ip things a few you know all around store operations everyone needs to be included at some point and they you have to get their buy-in so in journey mapping is one way to do this and journey maps are particularly inter are used a lot in customer experience uh and the durian maps basically detail the experience from what we call the zmod or zero moment of truth all the way through to consumption and you know some even argue that it goes full circle again so it is informed by qualitative and quantitative data and the maps are interesting in the world now there are some that are data driven in other words they're in the cloud and you can input your data and have your data automatically update maps uh to understand where troubles are uh the down cycles are generally lower emotions or you know better exports experiences versus the higher one and there are a lot of different platforms out there i could do a whole workshop just on journey mapping alone but it is one of the primary tools for cx professionals and the idea of the map is has to be informed by research from both the customer and internal stakeholders as well as employees on the front line so this and including all it etc so you have to understand get there by and get their input and then you sort of map that out if you will and it's usually you know if you think of a hotel you might start with searching for hotels you know what is that like on your platform your brand versus all the other ones like you know i'm just making an expedia travel monkey or whatever it is so then you have uh getting to the hotel you know what do they do when you arrive is it parking all that stuff and then you have you know check in then you have uh your room or maybe someone carries your bags for your room your room itself's got a lot of functions and features like the bb etc and then you have various places within the hotel uh could be uh amenities or room service all these different things are different um different panels if you will categories that you want other touch points you want to measure and understand what is needed at each touch point so you can design for it so journey mapping is fun come chat with me anytime about that now onto the quant side this is really what happens after the research after the experience and most of this stuff is looking in the rear view mirror okay you try to get these kinds of data before before it becomes a problem so you want to make sure you understand what's going on right now nps in the net promoter score is known as the leading cx measurement for good or bad um so basically it's you know anyone who gives it a uh a nine or a ten as is a promoter if the question is how likely are you to recommend this company um to to a friend or family or whatever it doesn't work very well in b2b number one and these are my my things on it and unless you ask why they gave that rating it really doesn't give you much insight to work with they might tell you yeah it's not that good but you don't know why so always follow up these kinds of scales with a why question and if you're doing them at scale you have to be prepared to deal with fast analytics and ai tools to to understand and bring that insight to people who can make a difference at the companies another one is uh everyone's familiar with customer satisfaction stores these generally go from one to ten by the end and yes score goes zero to ten uh so they only count the top two in nps but on customer sat it's a little bit different you can go down to specifically yours your your satisfaction with various uh blocks of the experience if you will the selection service product um you know location etc so you really that's what you're into with satisfaction measurement person recommending someone ces customer effort four is another one and uh this is really good for understanding how easy it was to shop and it could be anything how easy was it to get the help you wanted today you might see this one coming out a little bit more i think it's got a little bit more um to it because you take the easy and sort of minus the difficult and you get that net easy score uh it's it's fairly new on the block but i think it's going to come out more because you know experience is all about making it easier for people to just get what they need and really it changes it changes your mindset from uh from a selling kind of a mindset to a help them by mindset and if you if you think about that i'm just helping people by versus you know are they do they like me are they going to come back that's i'm not likely to go back to a place i've visited you know out of town i'm not likely to recommend my grocery store frankly you know so the whole mps thing i think has fallacies i like this sport it has a lot of potential and we'll see what happens in the future on that now all these different data points are coming into uh platforms so these platforms basically take data streams from different sources it could be transactional data um you know which you get on your receipt or you might have a if you do a web purchase you might get a little you know pop-up for a survey and these are very short transactions how do we do you know any problems we need to know about it's just that kind of thing um but in fact also along with the sentiment data as i mentioned earlier it's going to track you who you are your demographics your buying history your contact history uh basically everything you might see in salesforce for every person out there um plus whatever their whatever their behaviors are online all that's being tracked and sold believe it or not um if you don't you know check out the social dilemma to see how they're selling all of us on social media it's free customer data platforms are a little bit different because they integrate uh with marketing tech stacks so marketing technology stacks from our tech stacks could be your your email programs or type of marketing you're doing so the idea of converting people and funnels and all this stuff you know that's kind of what a customer data platform does and i'm not a big fan of funnel sales personally i guess i'm just old school and i believe in you know real relationships i'm not leading people down and upselling them constantly i believe getting customers and serving them you know as i'd want to be served long term is better um so as in the past they've had this sort of the funnel right it's been an afterthought and it's moving more towards this sort of flywheel if you will customers at the center of every decision and it becomes sort of a cultural thing and that's where customer experience management comes into play versus the crm or tdps so customer experience management takes into account the sentiment along the way and it's the sum of all data related to customer experience so it could be mystery shot scores it could be survey scores it could even be qualitative you take all of that together and and you get a better picture of who is my customer now remember it's the shots of the rock and roll and the researcher up front but all that it comes down to uh you have to get information to the end users in customer experience research and it has to be done quickly just to give you an example um when we were doing those five and six thousand mystery shops back in the day back in before internet there could be a parent for that i think bi or something but anyhow before internet i was doing uh we were doing about five six thousand shops they were all by mail or fax and finding stoppers we ran ads in newspapers and all of this stuff it was it was typical for a 30-day turnaround on shops and fats pushing up with 5 000 shops these jobs were not easy either a lot of them were apartment communities so you gave away the identity or they were um like optical storage we did you know thousand optical storage so you had to give away your identity go set up an appointment get your glasses bring in all this stuff then we want to send the glasses to us but it took a long time to get feedback to the stores and then all of these surveys come in we had bucket loads of mail coming in every day with these mystery shipping shopper report as they came in we had to open them up sort them out into the client files give them the project manager do quality control on each one make sure they're accurate and and and not contradicting themselves within a report then you have to do data entry then you have to do reporting and everything was customized so you can imagine the lag time between there's a fire at the store the mystery shopper says and getting that to that store manager to do something about it well all that's changed now with the speed of the internet and it seems to be accelerating every day um and so what they've had to do for their own and they being the customer experience managers you know there's managers directors officers etc in customer experience world the customer experience manager need to understand what is happening in the field what is happening with their operations is it causing customers to move away from them or move toward them is it is it causing them to um over time is it increasing their they're feeling good feelings towards the company or they have an issue if they have issues were they resolved in a timely manner all of these kinds of in data that come back to the manager have to be analyzed quickly and that's a lot of it's automatic and then it has to be distributed down to the right people who can use that information to make timely decisions and make those things happen over time a dashboard sort of becomes their their go-to reality if you will so you see a lot of that's that's why people now sort of think customer experience is this that it's about surveys it's about nps sports you know and i hear sad palettes when he spoke all the time they're saying you know i i go and talk to my uh you know leadership team and all they want to know is how i did on my mps score and and a lot of times that's because bonuses are tied to those things um and or their own performance metrics for their own reviews that's a good thing but it can be a bad thing and i'll tell you where it's a bad thing an example you ever go to a car dealership for service and you can buy a car they hand you the survey and say give me a pen then they send you five emails give me a pen and then they say you know you get a call hey did you give me a ten you know i mean how real is that after a point you know um there was another and it's not just not just car dealers um i had an apartment community uh complex we were doing like 70 of their locations or something but um one of the communities handwritten surveys distributed by the staff to doors handwritten surveys we gather them all they come mailing in so we've got like i don't know 100 something questionnaires filled out with the exact same handwriting and different colors of ink so the struggle to try to do well and do scores and it just allows a lot of wiggle room in the past so you want to make sure those data coming in are accurate and that's part of the job of the analysts to make sure that the outliers that they can do something with that which is what we do in survey data all the time so speed of the kpi data and putting that in one view is what these managers need they've got a lot on their plate so give them what they need and these things are customized often and you can customize however you want but that's kind of where your report now lives is in a dashboard the other big report we used to do in the past they've disappeared i totally even my qualitative reports have really changed a lot um more and more video reports more of them are tutorials uh there's a lot more graphics that are used now and i think a lot of that has to do with our own short attention span it's going to continue to be a challenge to get things done say what you mean and have action on it very quickly it's just i think it's part of part of the internet and i think part of it's societal and that's happening even more now uh because of code because everyone's online so that's um you know kind of early here uh so i want to see if we have any questions i can certainly go on forever about this topic because it's near and dear to my heart but uh do we have any questions so far billy we don't but i have a couple that might prime the pump one of them is is what you just had talked about and the nature of how reporting is changing people with shorter attention spans but also just you know not wanting to just see reams of data but wanting to hear the story and that you've turned to using um digital as a and video as a means can you talk to us a little bit about an example of one of those reports and and and how it changed how how it might have looked in the in the past and how it's evolved here at more modern time yeah yeah i can i can use some examples i can't name the clients of course yeah that's great but um there's a very large uh company that uh was exploring virtual reality headsets and these were a couple years back when uh when they first became uh public are commercially available so these are the kinds that are hooked up to your um to a big computer there's a there you're tethered by cables right not the not the kind you put your phone in box so um these are pretty immersive experiences this client wanted to enter the field of vr um and they they were looking at all the components around what vr is about and and how people act with it so we set up these studies um there were a bunch of iadis probably around 40 or so and they were with people who had just purchased um a a device it could be oracle or could have been htc vive i think that was only two at the time and so we were looking really closely at what they needed and how they how their living rooms were set up or their viewing gaming rooms or whatever their whatever their setup was we wanted to know uh everything about their their physical environment in their home as well as you know what their feelings were about being in the actual experience and what they were going through in that experience both you know how do these prepare for it you know what is their emotional level going into it and after so a lot of that was visually represented back to the client uh through both you know photographs and videos of clips of people doing things in their home as well as talking now we actually set it up and this is kind of a fun study design but we set it up with people where we see their screen so they just you know we can see everything on their screen so whatever they're seeing in their virtual is just like two screens you can see and then we could also see them through a laptop so just like this kind of conversation and then they also had their phone that we could see in their room so we could see them sitting at their desks from the phone as well as what's on their screen as well as what they're talking to us about and and the interview lasted it was about almost two hours long but we really wanted to see the whole setup and you know what was it like getting it and opening it up and from all that um there's a lot of video in there now i happen to do all everything in the cloud on like a google slides kind of thing so it was easy to have those links to video clips especially if they were protected um you know if i use you know i use a service for for setting up the interviews they have a platform right and so all the library of all that stuff's within a projected platform well if they're sharing this report throughout the company i need to make sure they can all see the videos so those video clips we would take them clip them out put them in there and put links to different places but i had to actually create a sub place for that that they could access so anyone could access any time without having to have permissions the uh the other thing was you know we get to a page and just just bring it to life on each page um it's it's harder now i mean we're all used to the the brady bunch set up a zoom but how do you get someone's voice to the decision makers to me i record it i just bring it i say okay you've seen all these data that it's your it's your uh uh right brain pretty good now let's look at uh or i hit your left brain pretty good yeah yeah left brain i guess i don't know and then then we're going to show you the what they actually say the real voice of the customer and i think that's a huge area for now as a matter of fact if you don't mind i do have another um i do have another uh uh powerpoint i can hear here let me just open that up and it's all about qualitative research and digital claw and i gave this one the other day but it's pertinent to where we're talking now uh because it's about how do you share that stuff so let me share this one and let's see here this is yeah okay so i just put this together a week or two ago this is for my my uh my my consultancy and in doing qual so essentially with digital qualitative which is if you're not in it now you really should be because you know during this whole pandemic i mean everyone has to communicate in digital form and everyone is used to it now i mean i i can't believe there's kids grandmas etc all know how to use zoom on their phone or whatever so it's not a challenge like it used to be um and here i've got a little thing you know why qualitative is needed i'm probably talking a bunch of qualities here but i'm going to tell you my story of the purple car you do a survey right now of favorite colors across the country u.s you're going to find out about you know 17 or so percent like the color purple that's just where it is now dissect that down to be a female male you'll find there's probably 24 or so females that choose purple as one of their favorite colors but you didn't put in context right so if you think about it if if that's true why don't we have you know 17 percent of the cars on the road or purple why do we have purple houses why aren't more people wearing purple all the time it's weird it's a weird thing so you know if you get into qualitative you ask what do you think about it so when you drive the purple car would you feel comfortable driving forward some people would some people won't and that's why you don't see more cars out they're purple on the road even though you like the color it's just context so digital qualitative in general is going to deliver those insights that again i mentioned a lot of it has to do with design or the front end the fuzzy front end of innovation um so innovation initiatives can take place even after a company's been around a long time i've done a lot of work with with companies like walmart and kroger and some of these kind of companies and and those you know innovations just have to do with maybe a department uh refresh or maybe a whole total restore uh sort of thing um it depends on what that innovation is it could even just be an app who knows but from that you get into the journey map and how does that fit into the journey is it linear is it you know circular whatever goes on there messaging are we getting the message right do people understand what we're trying to say even if it's just a symbol brand perceptions again how they think about the brand is it is it you know warm and fuzzy is it someone have a connection with or is it just let's always model it that doesn't communicate uh and then the touchpoint feedback along the journey uh those different touch points you have to have some sort of feedback just to monitor it and make sure it's working uh as we all know there's a bunch of different tools out there for digital qualitative and um i don't promote any one platform i like all of them but some do certain things and some do others and there's some of them that are just like the swiss army knife they're doing everything and that's everything from you know recruitment to you know even analytic help you know there's some of that there's some some ai tools are they're helping on that now but when you get into the tools i mean it really goes it's not that hard when you think about digital you know we've been doing telephone interviews forever that's basically digital um video meetings have been going on for a long time as well as long as we've had the web and even you know even before that i remember some clients had their own internal you know cisco systems you know point to point um before the web even i think they were probably using aspects of the web but they had satellite uplinks big companies uh mobile apps when that came out that changed the game on everything right it really did change everyone's lives uh our brain is now in this you know it's i don't even remember a phone number but mobile apps give you the ability to be with your your interviewee wherever they are anytime you know you can go i've done so many studies where i'm looking into everything from all the different rooms in the house just projects that you're doing on home improvement to you know what's in your purse what kind of makeup do you have in your counter you know you get pictures of this stuff and when they go shopping hey take a picture of something on their felt that catches your eye something you know you like something you don't like so you understand all that now and really there's a big challenge with mobile um apps as well just because you can capture all these videos and photos doesn't mean you should because you're going to get inundated with data especially at large samples and that's where integrated platforms come into play so integrated platforms take in all these things mobile online however they want to communicate and that's good for like you know longer studies for instance i did one with a tire manufacturer a couple years back and we had 120 people because they had all these different segments they wanted to know about different kind of vehicles have different tires they manufacture all of them you know there's so many skus and tires it's ridiculous so we did one farming we did another one for uh you know passenger vehicles and so we had 120 people in the in the uh the passenger vehicle group and then we had about 40 people on the agricultural side and we had to have these people go through all them needed to have tires they needed to be in the market for tires and they had to have certain vehicles that either came with the original equipment as the brand or not and so the big question we're trying to solve on that was you know why are people not buying the same brand tire when they go to repurchase tires what was the big issue and how can we get them to do it well over time this thing the study design was fun because i started off with just a survey to help qualify people right it's a big survey and then narrow that down to people who are in the market and want to buy and then we have to bring them into mobile ethnography so i started off with all these free videos of how to do it and who we are and what we're doing but i'm telling a brand i just tell them that you have to go buy tires and document what they do we gave them about a month on that so there's a lot of fat pacing and other things going on with that and making sure everyone's complying and submitting what they need to the ones who finished up on that we actually had really good participation rate um then we brought them into bulletin board discussion groups to really explore further along what they did especially any anomalies that came up and then gary picked some people out of that into idis well imagine a report on this thing you got i don't know 30 or so different segments out there then further segmentation is based on uh what i guess it would be um you know just how the data laid out uh like they call it there's a certain term for everything it's kind of a regression analysis and quality if you will but then then you take it and you say okay how many photos am i going to use how many videos can i use and it's just it's over overwhelming because these executives ultimately they only have a 30-minute meeting what you learned over the past three months oh here this is what you should do right and that's my job as a consultant to tell them you know the output they didn't care so much about the whole process but we as researchers we got to be down in the weeds so the basic kinds of studies that we do or the methods uh not necessarily study type for me would be product design right but the the methods available to us now are mobile ethnography diary keeping both online and mobile in-depth interviews could be anywhere uh whatever zoom or any kind of platform you want whether it's protected and recruited or whether it's not all kinds of transcripts and stuff around that um then you have your real-time focus groups it's a brady bunch nowadays i remember doing that you know 15 years ago and uh and speed and dial up and all that stuff was such a hassle you know nowadays you just want to make sure everyone's got stable internet connection for that people can do real-time focus group bulletin board focus groups are a little more easy in my opinion you know people are used to having threaded discussions now and you can basically go in any time it's asynchronous so you can go in anytime and do what you need to do it was funny i made my company threads before i even thought about threaded discussions i got nothing to do you know it had more to do with a a fabric museum in bali than it did with threaded discussions or the thread that ties us together and all that but anyhow i digress so the steps to do any study this this is stuff you guys should know falling off the truck all starts with the objectives what are we going to do here there's business objectives there's decisions need to be made and there's research objectives how we're going to get there what are we doing study design is is is directly related to objectives and budget and time how are we going to get the information we need in a timely manner at the least cost rather recruiting process from there it's 99 also include the questions and and the recruiting screeners and all that good stuff timelines uh then they're interviewing engagement like in the field and talk to these people somewhere or stay at home and talk to them and analysis you know taking all of this qualitative stuff and the digital again is very media driven multimedia so knowing how to look at this stuff and make sense out of all these different different points of view and differing experiences like we're all different people at different times right analysis is is tough and and i just say you know stick to you know let it let it sit in your in your in your brain for a little while uh i call it sponge egg light actually i picked that up from earl nightingale a year ago sponge egg light means uh when you're in a study you soak it all up and just emerge itself and all points of view and different methods as you can try to use a whole bunch of different methods not just one and then you you you incubate it like an egg all right so you just let it sit for a little while and all of a sudden you're in the shower or driving or something you're going to come up with some ideas these are insights and sometimes it takes some creativity a leap just like as i said earlier seeing the things that others don't see and just bringing it to light and then you go aha i have some hypotheses that came out of the study so you want to share that kind of high level stuff and make a difference and that's what comes to reporting reporting is on a lot of different levels and cx as i showed you earlier you have you know constant data or ongoing which is in uh dashboard components and then you have front-end research which is typically in qualitative components but again all of that only matters if people can do something with the information in a timely basis and that could help them you know prove the moment you know it's kind of like the accountant phrase now this is um this was in a report here and i had one of these tee'd up here to play i don't have it right now but um we did an interview uh not long ago with some hurricane survivors and these people had their homes totally wiped out uh this guy here for instance he was that's his house now it's just nothing there it totally washed away um and you know he was having to go through problems with his you know rescue dogs all this same these people were in bad shape let's put it that way and we were working for an energy company this was down in texas and uh there was all kind of issues with floods and all that stuff we just wanted to know you know what their needs were throughout that process preparing for the hurricane all the way through to you know a couple weeks after and how they felt during those different time moments because you know when you're in the thick of things time is really different than like if you're you know just hanging out right you know time flies when you have fun but it's very intense when you're in a when you're in a crisis um so understanding these kinds of things is what we had to do so i actually brought these are you know clips from what i had in the powerpoint and i would just share the click on the video and it plays right so that that was helpful and over here is like a journey mapping um area on that part uh so anyhow that's uh that's it for my quality stuff there so a couple questions um mark that came to mind like you at the beginning you were talking about journey mapping in the process of doing that but you also talked about you spoke to like the silos within the organization and because journey mapping inherently is covering end to end like there's subject matter experts throughout the entire organization that need to get pulled into that so and and that exercise of pulling everybody in and engaging them and keeping them moving in the right direction and and contributing and stuff that collaborative process can be difficult to manage oh yeah a lot of politics can you give yeah can you give any advice to us in regards to how you've managed that or what what have you picked up over time that has allowed you to facilitate those types of conversations sure so for me um it's been a uh workshops are the way to go but we actually have it as a priced item right because how many hours of preparation things like that so first off we would we would spend a lot of time doing uh idis with with keith stakeholders ceo on down uh okay so idis with the top managers and these might be you know from 30 minutes to an hour interviews with them uh in the past we used to go and park them right to their office and have been in a lot of offices that way now we just do it um online through this kind of channel so in-depth interviews first of all transcribe what they say and send them the transcript back say is this that's accurate you want to pay anything more right so they they know they're being heard number one for all levels operations marketing sales service you know whatever it might be then you you actually go and talk to customers as well so you sort of have a baseline of what they're looking for and what they're at you want to see if there's alignment between what the customer is saying and what they're saying so again we get that voice the customer the real voice of the customer if it's if it's an alignment great we report that if it's not we report that whatever that is we say here's what they said here's what you said uh you're missing the boat on these two or three areas right now they can either disagree if like that someone's gonna be embarrassed no matter what you know uh we didn't deliver the product on time the packaging failed on us whatever it is uh the communication was unclear there's always gonna be failure and the key is to learn from your failures and move forward how do you how can you fix something if you ignore it you know it's just going to get worse so we try to set that mindset with management during the interviews and during the whole process so i've got one kicking off here in april one um and this is with a clothing manufacturer for work clothes and this company's never done journey map and they have their customer experiences like porn they've been around for like 80 years right and i'm like okay well we need to bring in everyone for these meetings i'm just going to look at my timeline say let's make sure everyone can be at this meeting and this date and then this meeting and we're going to have a workshop so all those interviews have to take place and the reporting and everything else and the journey map creation before that date puts pressure on me get all that done now at that meeting what i do is i just i try to say look guys let's put up let's take off your operation pack for a moment take off your marketing hat let's just absorb the information and so then we'll present stuff but we'll have them also get engaged with some uh you know sticky note kind of stuff they might go up there and start pegging things on different places the map say it's not my folder tooth fold over there because you know i didn't get what i needed whatever it is there's a lot of finger pointing and stuff but again that's a whole day long process have some good food make sure they're relaxed settle in and really sort of start working through it identify where are the big problem areas we need to focus on then you fight it out for priorities and resources right i need budget to do that okay well i need budget too you want me to do all that you know that's it's a negotiation a gift take and they have to go up the top management ultimately to sort of sort out uh where the spend is going to be and you know what the matters is effect will be that's a that's a mouthful right there and it's okay that's helpful and and mark you know this past year has shown us that we have to be very um creative in the ways that we facilitate those kind of conversations right so a lot of this stuff is having to happen online and and obviously that that becomes a bit of a challenge but there are things like mural out there that has a lot of these templates collaborative platforms so have you have you been utilizing resources like that to facilitate these kind of conversations you know uh personally i i haven't yet um and this is a shame on me area you know i just told everyone they should get out there and um and and really take be involved in digital call right um i made a decision about four years ago three or four years ago and that is partly because of my angst and having to do reports and deal with politics right i've been the messenger of bad news so long i've got like a leather back you know just you know you get a lot of arrows in your back you get killed they shoot the messenger but i've been doing a long time i the other thing is i've already created and sold some businesses right other research companies i did very well when i did that but that only lasted so long so i've looked at and says you know legacy wise what do i want to be known for what do i leave and i've had a lot of people tell me that i'm a connector you know i just like to connect people i like to bring together people for jams i like to go to conferences and organize them and stuff so i decided at that time i was going to focus my energy and attention uh my timing is is impeccable i was going to focus all my time on on conferences right bringing people together obviously when we got hit by this i had four shows planned booked and ticketed refund every winter money go forward and the challenge became um you know frankly looking at all the ways people are going online with conferences and looking at how communities are developing and what's going to happen so i became a student of technology i had to go back to my roots and sort of understand the offerings for things like conference management online and other other tech facts so my heart has been more in organizing these events and bringing speakers on to the audience it's more about them than me i just kind of background on it but i may host it or find a guest post but i'm really looking forward to uh in-person events again and i am planning them now for uh this fall in person boston on on september 21st then we're going to be in chicago on there's a lot of commitment chicago on october 12th atlanta on november 9th and austin texas on december 14th my goal is to do one of these a month in different markets across the country we're looking at irvine miami nashville seattle new york minneapolis philadelphia and then repeat boston chicago atlanta and austin so that's where i'm at yeah that and that's fantastic that's a full lineup i'm glad to hear that you are going to be out there hitting the road again i'm so glad that the rest of us will be out there hitting the road again i hope in the fall um and i appreciate uh your to you uh sharing your wisdom with us my pleasure and and hope that um you know if anyone has any questions for mark um you can still go ahead and we're wrapping up on the hour but you can go ahead and send that to us and we'll get those to him um and we can also get you a copy of this presentation and i hope you'll check out um uh you know cx forum and uh and if uh if he comes to your market this fall i hope you'll attend so yeah love it and and anyone who has any questions you know feel free to hit me up i also have a weekly show but what i did was actually i took this whole thing i said i'm not just going to put my conference online this is a little bit dull pre-recorded stuff you know chat in the networking chats i said i want to do a weekly show you know i started thinking about night shows you know you watch late night i said i'm going to do one every wednesday and i'm going to make 40 i'm going to make they say 30 percent of it's going to be a fireside chat so 20 minutes only an hour and then 40 minutes is networking so we do two breakouts like 30 to 50 people each time different guests each week it's a fun way to engage your audience and learn by every guest i interviewed i'm just hitting people up say hey would you like me you look interesting if somebody wants to that's listening to now wanted to participate in one of those how would they do that just find me on linkedin is the easiest way mark michelson on linkedin i look just like i do and uh once you find me there or send me an email mark cxforms.net our website is cxforms.org you can find more info there but these are free we just you know just everyone comes it's from 1 30 to 2 30 eastern it's it's a meeting format so everyone's on video everyone is on audio and uh you tell them enjoy you know you can ask any question you want there but would you usually have a theme for each you know whatever that topic is um so by all means i'm joined thank you thank you