Blogs

Medallia is a 2020 Silver Sponsor of CXPA. This review was conducted at CXPA's request. The opinions expressed herein are from the author, who was not compensated.

Webinar link: https://www.medallia.com/mastercast/

Webinar title: Conducting Virtual Video Research

The data doesn’t lie: Your surveys aren’t quite as effective as they used to be.

Sending researchers from city to city to interview clients is getting expensive.

Your customers are exhausted from filling out survey after survey without ever knowing if someone is taking their feedback seriously.

So, you’ve been thinking about doing video interviews instead.

The thing is, you’re having trouble getting buy-in from your teammates.

They’re worried customers may not be willing to do video interviews. Even if they are, isn’t video research overkill when you already have so many data streams?

Not quite.

In this Medallia Mastercast, Theresa Marwah, Technology Lead of Research Operations at Atlassian, offers multiple tips and examples for using video research to supercharge your business’ understanding of your customers and revamp your data collection process.

Check out the summary below for a glimpse of the many insights Theresa shared. 

Why I loved this webinar:

I really appreciated how Atlassian’s webinar provided so many bite-sized, actionable insights that CX teams can start implementing today.

Firstly, I liked that video interviews can democratize customer data and encourage collaboration amongst team members.

Customer videos can be viewed asynchronously, which means that teams can analyze and reference the material in much greater depth than if they had to wait for a condensed report. I also found it so innovative that Atlassian has an internal board where any teamed member can see how research is being conducted.

This webinar also opened my eyes to just easy video research could make it to humanize customer data, as well.

Having real-time customer interviews can help clients open up more than so than in a typical feedback survey. Additionally, one-on-one conversations allow you to ask follow up questions and observe behaviors that can supplement what your customers share.

This is a fantastic means of getting employees to put a face to their employees and craft solutions with specific customers – instead of data points – in mind.

Lastly, I thought it was so clever and customer-focused of Atlassian to explain the terms and conditions of the video interview before it officially began. Additionally, they simplified their consent form from a jargon-laden document to one that was written in plain English.

There are a few reasons why I think other organizations should adopt this practice. For one, it helps to address customers’ questions early on so they don't have to worry about sorting through a legal document to understand their rights.

Secondly, it shows transparency on the part of the business. This could help to develop customer trust since it shows that businesses aren’t trying to hide anything and are making prioritizing customers’ comfort and trust above all else.

Though this a relatively small change to make to the research process, small changes like this are essential to showing customers that you care about them and understand their apprehensions.

Basically, it demonstrates that you’re conducting research with their feelings in mind, just data collection – and what customer wouldn’t appreciate that?

Key quote:

“ . . . [research] is really about everyone hearing from the customer together and bringing their perspectives and hearing what the customer’s saying and talking about it afterwards. There’s nothing better than a debriefing session.”

Who this webinar is best for:

I’d recommend Atlassian’s webinar to any CX professional who’s looking to enhance or revamp their organization’s voice of the customer programs.

More specifically, this webinar is a must-watch for CX practitioners who:

Can no longer run in-person research programs. Though external factors may have halted your in-person programs, that doesn’t mean your VoC program has to suffer.

In fact, video research can allow for more dynamic and rich programs than in-person programs could. This webinar can teach you how to make that pivot much more smoothly and create an even stronger program.

     Are looking to have ongoing conversations with their customers. It’s easy for organizations – including CX teams – to fall into the trap of collecting ever-more data. However, customer surveys, interview, and data gathered from customers’ buying habits and behaviors give businesses an incomplete and cluttered picture of their customers’ needs.

     Video research, however, allows teams to have real-time conversations with their partners. Using video also helps businesses to let have multiple team members speak to customers at once instead of just one or two facilitators.

     This can help more employees to not only have a clearer understanding of the customers’ desires, but also put a face to their customers and the problems they’re solving.

     Want to add more context to their research findings. It’s easy to miss insights in an ephemeral meeting, especially when you have so many other tasks and data streams to sort through.

     Engaging with customers over video enables you to ask questions that could clarify customers’ thoughts and feelings. Video research can also help you to observe more nuanced elements like tone, word choice, and body language.

Having a one-on-one conversation may also help customers to open up and share more than they typically would on a feedback form.  

     Want to get more team members involved. Customer interviews can be recorded and shared so people can watch them asynchronously. This means people can get insights without having to rearrange their schedules.

     This also makes it easier for employees to reference the original resource instead of a condensed version from their personal notes or a brief written by a colleague.

     This, in turn, allows more people to analyze and utilize the data so they can contribute more to the customer experience. More liberal data access can also help more individuals in your organization to understand customers’ experiences and identify opportunities to improve customer-oriented initiatives.

     It may take time to get buy in to adopt video research into your data collection tool set. Admittedly, the transition may be a little rocky, too. 

     However, using video research could very well be the tool your business needs to combat survey fatigue and data overload and to provide the key to winning over more customers.