Partnering with Customer Success to Recruit Customers for User Testing
A VP of Product describes how his teams partner with their customer success colleagues to recruit customers so they can do user testing on a continuous basis. Note that Erik's team members get on calls themselves and interact directly with customers.
“Now we have a friend for life, so to speak, where we don’t even have to go through the Customer Success team after that. And we can actually reach out to the users directly the next time we have a potential question.”
Transcript
Jim Morris:
Hi there fellow product leaders. Here's a snippet from Eric Skurka describing how his teams partner with their customer success colleagues to recruit customers for user testing on a continuous basis. Note that Erik's team members get on calls themselves and interact directly with customers. Enjoy.
Erik Skurka:
You know, being a B2B company, we do have a little bit of our experience that is B2B2C, but the primary user that we're interested in, in doing research on is that business customer. So the amount of in-person research that we have historically done, even before COVID has been pretty low. It's been the onsite quarterly or annual visit to an enterprise-level customer and then we usually carve out time. So we've been recruiting for remote testing since the beginning. And we partner very closely with our CS (Customer Success) team and they have an objective to reach out and have contact with all of their named accounts once a quarter and do a quarterly business review, a QBR. And so the easiest way that we've found to do that is to bring a product or a UXer along for that quarterly business review. And there's always time for questions or demos, "Hey, here's a concept we're thinking about," or, "Can you prioritize your level of interest based on these three different things, knowing what we know about your account and your business needs?"
So we've partnered very, very closely with the CS team to get in front of those users. And then once we've gotten in front of those users, most of the time they're actually really enthusiastic about being part of the building of the product process. And so now we have a friend for life, so to speak, where we don't even have to go through the CS team after that. And we can actually reach out to the users directly the next time we have a potential question.
Jim Morris:
Thanks for watching. You can find more product discovery resources at productdiscoverygroup.com.
Jim Morris, Product Discovery Group
Jim coaches Product teams to collaborate with each other and seek customer input early and often during the design and ideation phase.
