Clare Muscutt talks with the Co-Founder of 4Sight CX, Liz Berks, about research methods and getting closer to customers on any budget.
Episode #402 Show Notes
Clare Muscutt:
Welcome to the second episode of the fourth series of the women in CX podcast, a series dedicated to real talk conversations between women in customer experience. Listen in as we share our career stories, relive the moments that shaped us and voice our opinions as loudly as we like about all manner of CX subjects, I'll be your host Clare Muscutt. And in today's episode, I'll be talking to one of our members, an awesome woman in CX insights and research. Let me introduce you to today's inspiring guest. She's lived all over the world. Having started out in research with GFK in London and going on to specialize in customer experience, designing products and services in Hong Kong for Cathay Pacific, all based on solid customer insights. She then held a number of agency-side senior roles in Australia before settling in Saudi Arabia and co-founding her own Consulting company, 4Sight CX, all whilst raising two beautiful boys. Please welcome to the show, CX sister, Liz Berks.
Clare Muscutt:
Hi Liz. Hi, how are you doing today?
Liz Berks:
I'm doing really well. Thank you so much for having me on the podcast today.
Clare Muscutt:
It's so awesome to have you with us and welcome to everybody listening at home as well. So today we're gonna have a chat about customer understanding and Liz, just so the audience can get to know you a little better. Can you tell us how you found your way to where you are today?
Liz Berks:
Okay, I spent most of my career on the customer insights side of customer experience. So I actually, I started my official career, a year out of university. I joined a market research company in London, and it was actually quite a fluke getting into that. It was one of those jobs where it was a graduate scheme. I wasn't entirely sure what market research was at the time, but I saw a job and it said it needed certain skills and I thought 'I can do those'. So yeah, I joined, started my market research career and started in employee experience and employee engagement programs. And then I had just had this desire that I wanted to travel the world.
Liz Berks:
So through help of my employer, I actually ended up getting a job in Hong Kong. And I moved out to Hong Kong and worked with a boutique agency there. And that's when I started to focus more on the customer side, doing a lot of customer research. My main client was Cathay Pacific, and I ended up working for them. And my role was all around premium cabins and designing, what would the experience be like for passengers in the premium cabin? So from the seats to the food, to the ambience, to the service, you know, what, what was it that we wanted to deliver? So that was an amazing experience. And then my itchy feet were on again and I decided, right, I'm gonna move to Australia. So I moved to Sydney and in Sydney, I was lucky enough to get into a whole new area of customer insights on the customer experience side called insight communities.
Liz Berks:
So I worked for two companies there that like specialize in insight communities, and it's all about embedding customer feedback within a business, and really bringing that voice of the customer into decision making. And I fell in love with that idea there. And I, I really fell into the whole idea of customer experience management and that it's, it's more than just the insights that I was taking. It's how do you build that into a strategy? How does that then how do you design products and that then, then meet needs but you know, itchy feet again, I decided this time Singapore <laugh> so moved from Sydney to Singapore and again, still stayed in that customer experience and customer insight community space before finding myself in Saudi Arabia two years ago. So having spent the last two years in Saudi and really the most amazing opportunity here to consolidate everything that I've been learning over the last 18 years in terms of how do you bring the voice of customer and we might come onto this in bit the difference between a voice of customer program and the voice of the customer into a business and start building your decision making around your customers and getting deep understanding of who your customers are.
Clare Muscutt:
Yeah. And now you run your own agency?
Liz Berks:
I do, neglected to mention that. <Laugh>, I just amazing had the opportunity here to co-found a customer experience consultancy. So being able to bring, you know, all of the experience that I've had globally and bring it to the market here and start advising on, you know, of best ways of speaking with customers, understanding your customers, building customer programs and building that into a bit of a customer experience management structure.
Clare Muscutt:
Nice. And it's such an interesting country to be doing customer experience in right now because there's big push around citizen experience over there. Isn't there?
Liz Berks:
Yeah. I mean, honestly, I, I, Saudi Arabia isn't anywhere that I had expected to end up working. But it, I love working here. It's really great. There's a real energy to things at the moment and a real drive, particularly around customer experience. And it's coming from a few different areas and one exactly what you just mentioned, this idea of improving the citizen experience. And that's not necessarily the idea of improving the services that citizens receive, although that is important. It's also around creating more experiences for citizens. So there's these, you know, huge development projects happening here that are bringing new kind of entertainment or events the likes of which haven't existed. There was just recently before Christmas, this incredible music event held in the middle of the desert where international artists came and, and the setup was amazing.
Liz Berks:
I mean, the stages that they built and, and the, the whole arrangement of it was, was really quite incredible. And, but the most amazing part was that that hasn't existed for such a long time. And so to be with a lot of the, the Saudi youth who are coming along and just, they were so excited and it's just, it's this energy that I'm really loving working alongside at the, so yeah, really ambitious and big but exciting and, and a great time to, to be able to help influence it and help bring the voice of the citizen to, to some of these projects
Clare Muscutt:
And being the women in CX podcast. I couldn't fail to mention the the changes that have happened for women in Saudi Arabia, because I guess until very relatively recently, women wouldn't have been involved. Would they, in those kinds of experiences or attending those venues?
Liz Berks:
Yeah. What you're seeing now is a, a, a big drive for both entertaining happening with everyone. And also just, you know, in the, in the workplace, I've been lucky enough to be interviewing quite a lot of people recently and was just blown away by the the passion and the ambition by a lot of female Saudis that I was interviewing fresh or two or three years out of university who have this real drive to get involved and you know, have an impact on, on the future of their company country.
Clare Muscutt:
Yeah. I, I can't, I can only imagine, but thinking about like the difference before women had the vote me in the UK to the change that happened in the next generation of women coming through, I suppose that's probably what you're seeing something similar to now, the first generation of women who have the equal rights to be able to do these things. That must be really exciting in the work environment as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So so yes, you just mentioned the difference between a voice of the customer program and the true meaning of customer voice. Do you wanna elaborate on that? A little?
Liz Berks:
Sure. Cause I mean, this is very much one of my passion areas and it, it does tie into this customer understanding part. So the difference between say the voice of the customer, by which we mean, just giving your customer a voice, trying to get who they are, what they want, what they need and what their experience is with the company into the management process. So the decision making process, the product design, the service design and that's very much on the , you need to understand who your customers are, you know, who the different groups of customers are, what are they trying to achieve when they're interacting with you? What's going on in their wider life, who are they interacting with? What are some of their unmet needs that need that as businesses you can start to innovator. And that is versus say a voice of customer program, which are I, I'm still a big fan of voice of customer program, but a voice of customer program is essentially a research program that looks to measure the experience that a customer has with you at any given point and make improvements based on that.
Liz Berks:
So it tends to be more quantitative in style and it tends to be very fixed, might just be asking a single question of, you know, how likely would you, based on your recent experience, how likely would you be to recommend this company, to your friends, family? And so it's great for identifying specific issues or problem areas, or, you know, for those metrics that help you build a case for things that you might need to improve, but it's never gonna get to that sort granularity of who your customers are and how you can better serve them.
Clare Muscutt:
Yeah. And there seems to be a bit of an obsession with voice of customer programs, as in things like net promoter scores, being the overriding investment in research and insights, especially in the UK as I see it, but also they, how globally, globally. Yeah. How how much that's really been crushing customer experience innovation. So I think I'd like to kind of head us towards this direction around research and insight and creating customer understanding more of their, like, understanding who the customer is and not just what they want, but why and understanding deeper needs and goals that enable us to come up with even greater offers and solutions. So you mentioned like, kind of, there's a quantitative bias towards these kind of satisfaction surveys telling us about what we already deliver, how people are satisfied or not pointing us in the direction of maybe troubleshooting or improvement. But what is the flip side of this? So thinking more around the qualitative insight perspective, how do we use that to drive customer experience?
Liz Berks:
Yeah, so I think this is when, you know, we, we talk about qualitative work to begin and that basically means just you are wanting to get a deeper understanding of who customers are, and, and qualitative tends to be, you know, you do it with a smaller number of, of customers, and it tends to be very unstructured questions where it's more of tell me about, you know, tell me about yourself, tell me about your experience here, tell me what it is you're trying to do. And it's, it's a brilliant way to, to be able to start exploring how people are really thinking and how they're feeling. And, and as you said before, the why is it all important? Why are they doing doing something or why are they trying to achieve what they want to achieve?
Liz Berks:
The only thing with that is always, you know, doing these questionings, you're asking it in retrospect. So it's about, you know, past behaviour or asking customers to maybe rationalize why they did something or why they chose something. And, and one of the things we always know is that what someone says they do and what someone actually does, that can be really different. So another research methodology is ethnography. So ethnography is all about in the moment in situ. So observing someone it's all observational. So observing someone what they're doing in the, that they would be doing it. So it might be with a customer in their home talking to them about you know, actually watching what they're doing in their daily life, having a look around how their kitchen, if you are an FMCG company, trying to understand how they have their kitchen set up and, and what's there.
Liz Berks:
And the benefit of talking to people in the moment is that you are getting that top of mind. So it's not post rationalized. And I, you know, this is something that I think one of the reasons maybe traditionally it's not been done as much is that it is very time consuming and expensive because, you know, you, you have to spend, if you're doing it in person, you are having to pay a researcher to spend a lot of time in someone's home or in someone's office with them, observing them, spending time with them. So it's not something that, you know, quick, easy or cheap but one of things I've, and this through my in the community space was getting to know about this incredible number of technologies that are now available that give companies the opportunity to interact with people. And do you know, I guess what we call it like mobile ethnography, it's one of my favorite, favorite research methodologies, where you get, you understand the customer and you get to understand their life, but you are doing it through the power of using the mobile. So asking them to do things like upload photos and videos, and maybe setting them tasks and being able to observe remotely, but in the moment of what they're actually doing,
Clare Muscutt:
It just reminded me of a project that I worked on a few years back when I was working for a very big supermarket retailer. And we did a big ethno study around our food strategy. And one of the activities we got to do as the CX team was take part in these ethno sessions in people's houses where they would be showing us what's in their cupboards, taking us into looking their into, to look into their fridges. But actually they were like live narrating how they made shopping lists. And we were gonna use that insight to help us think about what potential experience solutions we could have to help customers make lists digitally. And it was so fascinating, that's a few years back now, but yeah, like the, the digital tools available to like keep diaries and do video diaries and not actually have a physical researcher present and on site and at the same time. Yeah. I think it's really game changing because it must reduce not only the cost significantly, but also make it probably easier for the research participants to, to do stuff. Cause they don't feel like they're having to tell somebody and explain what they're doing and how they're thinking. They're just kind of narrating their life. I think it's, it was super interesting as well. It's kind of like social media, isn't it. Now we all have our stories.
Liz Berks:
It is
Clare Muscutt:
Actually just like, well on Instagram story for research <laugh>. Yeah.
Liz Berks:
And, and there's a third aspect as well to this, the, the mobile ethnography is that in a lot of the technologies they have this wonderful reporting backend where, you know, the content that gets posted up is, is, you know, these dashboard that really bring to life who the customer is. And I think one of the benefits is around, you know, getting your internal stakeholders within a company who can all get involved with this information live, you know, historically research tended to, you know, you had the, the research agencies who were doing the work and maybe the research team were working alongside them. And then it wasn't till a reporting stage that the rest of the business were really getting to find out. And it just, it doesn't have the same impact when everyone in the business can be viewing what's happening live and they can be watching, as people are posting these photos and videos.
Liz Berks:
And, and I think one of the things I love about doing those ethnography style ones is exactly what you just said with your experience, that you will have a bit of an aha moment because you are going in to observe one thing, but so often you will notice something that just makes you go, ah, I hadn't even considered that as an aspect, or we hadn't even thought about doing that, but, you know, actually watching a group of behave in a certain way that is, and it's always best when it's completely different from your own experiences and your own life, because you are, it's widening your own personal view in terms of how other people behave. And, and, and, you know, that's when I'm such a promoter of, of building customer understanding and voice of customer into the business is to avoid biases in a business. When we, you know, when decision get making gets held a team, a person level or a team level too often, you'll miss out on an, a section of your employee section of your customer group that might be needing something or wanting something because the way they behave or their motivations are so different from who your team are.
Clare Muscutt:
Yeah. And last week you came and joined the Women in CX community for a masterclass, which was awesome by the way. And you were talking about how to get closer to customers on any budget. So so we've kind of talked about the digital tools. I'm assuming they're quite expensive. And earlier you mentioned customer communities. So if you could just give us like a, a kind of quick little run through from like free to the most expensive, what should our listeners be kind of aware of that that exist out there?
Liz Berks:
Yeah, well, I, I mean, I think, and one of the way I wanted to structure the masterclass was around, look, what do you already have internally that you could be leveraging better? Because I think that's one of the things that just isn't done enough of is, is really taking what already exists and analyzing it and spend time with it. And the only thing that I think I, one of the things I wanted to stress with some of the internal data was cuz I'd mentioned about looking at maybe complaints data or social media. And my main point with those is we are not looking for the metric reports or the categorized reports that you might get particularly say about complaints, brilliant for knowing the reporting on metrics. But you're looking for is wherever in your company, you hold verbatim data from customers.
Liz Berks:
So wherever they've given you their feedback in their words, so that could be calling the call center for an issue. It could be writing a post on Facebook. It could be just and making an inquiry, whether that's through live chat or a call center, you know, going back to that original verbatim content and analyzing it on that level can give you a real insight into, you know, how are customers feeling about certain issues? What is it about a certain complaint or a certain issue that's really driving emotion positive or negative and also using that as, as stories to help influence your stakeholders or management internally. So yeah, it was great to maybe try and encourage people to, to really dig into what already exists. And then, yeah, then I moved onto, I wanted to, to showcase how there is this whole space of technology that is allowing us to do projects.
Liz Berks:
So it's still, there's a cost to it. But I would say it's a mid range cost and where technology is allowing you to make your budget go further. So some of the examples around the mobile ethnography, you still have analysis costs. You know, you're still having to, to find the participants and recruit the participants, but the, the process of actually getting those people to to upload the information and take part in the tasks and that sort of thing. You're not having to pay for someone to go and sit with them and, and spend time with them. So utilizing the technologies that exist to make your budget go further and then at the, the top end, I guess the highest end of the budget would be your full blown, branded insight communities. And, and they can be expensive.
Liz Berks:
And that's partly because, you know, the, the platform costs themselves are higher. But also because they're quite time intensive, you do need, you know, a dedicated person or depending on, on size of them, a team to be looking after the insight community, but the value that you can get from them, I truly believe offsets the higher cost. Because I mean, I worked with insight communities for about seven or eight years. And you know, some of the clients I worked with and, and how they embedded these communities into their business to the extent where, you know, I was in a I worked very closely with one team and was invited to, to some of the senior management meetings and would hear you know, senior managers ask whether, well, has this been through the community yet. And, and, you know, this feeling that decision making was truly built around an understanding of how do this meet our customers needs is this aligned with where we want to go as a business and where our customers need us to go. And insight communities cover the full spectrum. So it means you can do quantitative work, you can do qualitative work, you can do ethnographic work. It just allows you to build a, a, you know, a really comprehensive picture of who your customers are. So
Clare Muscutt:
A big shift that we're seeing out there, especially like with SaaS and tech companies, is that they're actually creating customer communities as part of their overall proposition. So to help with customers helping each other solve problems quite often, you know, asking them questions so they can, what's the difference between having a customer community and an insight community? Is that something that the purpose is solely for insight?
Liz Berks:
Yeah. I mean, this is where I think the market, it, I think it's already changing. I have to say I'm, I'm not fully up to date on how some of the technologies emerging because when I was working on them, it was very much a separated thing. So an insight community was about research and it was about giving feedback on research. And it, you still wanted to integrate that with your internal data, say your sales data or, or anything else you already know about the customer, but generally you invited customers to come in on the basis of giving feedback. I think there is starting to be more of a, a hybrid emerging, and that makes complete sense because what we were finding when we were working as an insight community is that especially ones that exist for quite a while start to become a, you will have sections of it that will become your ambassadors company or brand ambassadors.
Liz Berks:
That's not the case for all members. I know one of the arguments we always had was, well, surely everyone who joins an inside community is more likely to be positive towards the brand. That just wasn't the case. It did tend to be people who were more engaged generally, but the, the positive and negative and the critiquing of the brand always existed which was why they were so useful. So I think, you know, for me where the future is going with these is how to be leveraging insight communities to be more than just a tool that gives you feedback. But is also your , whether it's your ambassadors or, or whether it's a community, like you say, that starts to, to help each other and, and troubleshoot depending on what kind of business you are.
Clare Muscutt:
Yeah. and just reflecting on what you said about like the free end. A lot of the projects I did, I had zero research budget for, especially in the early days of trying to get customer experience established as a practice within an organization. So just some like quick tips from me would be including, and these are actual, real examples of, of stuff that I'd done. So I'm going back to the contact centre. And as you said, like reviewing complaint history one thing I found was like, all the complaints had all been coded wrong. What the business was looking at at a category level was actually incorrect. So you're right. You know, going back to that raw data and reviewing, I actually recoded 500 pieces of feedback <laugh> and it painted a very different picture than than what the management were seeing.
Clare Muscutt:
Yeah, but also then this piece of work was actually about cafes in supermarkets and then actually going and observing what people did. So being able to sit there for a whole day and literally watch where the problems occurred. So having seen from the data then going and actually looking and seeing how it manifested. So watching things like queues and where they built up and understanding why you could actually observe a lot of that stuff. And then the next step being offering to buy the person, you just observed doing something, a cup of tea. And just to tell you about it, <laugh> and unsurprisingly cafe customers are quite willing to, to, to share. And and that, that was not in the innovation space. It was much more in the kind of troubleshooting and problem solving space. But if we'd just been looking at the customer survey, like the voice of the customer survey program, or even the data that was coming out of the contact centre, we were not looking at the same picture as the, the reality.
Clare Muscutt:
And we wouldn't have thought there was a problem. And even more interesting was that we had a mystery shopper program, and this was like the golden measure for like the whole business. Everyone was like kind of addicted to it. And it turned out they weren't even measuring the things that were really genuinely important to customers. So in that café example, they weren't even measuring like food quality and temperature of food, and speed of the service and things like that. So it looked like if you just looked at the, the metrics picture, everything was fine, but <laugh> when you dig a little bit deeper using these free kind of approaches you can, you can find out there's a very different picture. And then for me, even in primary research for innovation on a shoestring you know, being able to do one to one interviews, I think for me has been like a really great free approach to understanding people's motivations and asking why, but in the interviews I, I did, especially when we didn't, when it was quite nebulous, even starting the community, it was just getting people to talk about what are the challenges they're experiencing?
Clare Muscutt:
What are the goals that they're trying to achieve? What are the barriers that they're experience in terms of getting in their way? So there's definitely a lot that can be done in the free end too. So Liz, like, just to finish off, then what would you say, like your top kind piece of advice around customer understanding would be for our listeners? What should we be focusing on?
Liz Berks:
So really, I think the first for anyone is to, when you look at your, your look at your, a business, what do you truly know about your customers already? And really critically assess around, do we really understand who our customers are and who the different customer groups are, and not on a what's their satisfaction score on a really deeper level of what is they're trying to achieve with us and why are they doing that? And when you find those gaps is about starting to build out a plan for how you fill those gaps. And, and hopefully it can be everything from finding that data internally, like you say looking at what's available internally to then dedicating some, some budget towards research. I really do think that given the tools available now your budget can go further and you can learn so much that would be so valuable is to, to persuade your, your stakeholders internally, that there is value in spending that little bit of budget. So starting to get to grips with who your customers are and what it is that they really need.
Clare Muscutt:
My, my tip about helping you to get that budget is on some projects I worked on, we had a big marketing department that was spending 20 million pounds a year, just on advertising and they had personas, but they were very much used for targeting marketing communications. So being able to do primary research, to understand customers with greater depth and evolving a set of personas that could be used across the organization, that weren't just kind of like a single dimension. How do we use them for, for targeting? Marketing was one quick way to get some research budget approved. Cause it was actually maximizing the opportunity around something marketing already did. Rather than it having to be something completely independent and having something, an output at the end of it that, you know, it's insight and research insight for specific projects, but having something agree that personas is another great way to, to get your stakeholders to say yes, spending some money as well. <Laugh> absolutely. All right, Liz. Well, it's been amazing to chat to you today. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Liz Berks:
Thank you. It's been a pleasure talking
Clare Muscutt:
And thanks to everyone listening along at home. We'll see you all next time. Bye for now. Thanks. Thanks for listening to the women in CX podcast with me, Clare Muscutt. If you enjoyed the show, please drop us a like, subscribe, and leave a review on whichever platform you're listening or watching on. And if you want to know more about joining the world's first online community for women in customer experience, please check out womenincx.community and follow the women in CX page on LinkedIn. Join us again next week, where I'll be talking to another wonderful community member this time from Denmark about how to create lasting change through your CX initiatives. See you next time.
