A conversation with Sarah Blewett

In our second webinar for Customer Centricity Month 2023, 'Building customer centric teams', we discussed how you can establish a team to advocate for your customers and bring their voice into your organisation.

To begin the session, Rizwana Hussain, former Principal Service Designer at cxpartners, and Neil Schwarz, Experience Strategy Director at cxpartners, spoke about our tried and tested methods for setting up a customer-centric team as a consultancy, and from our experience of working in-house.

Following this, we then interviewed Sarah Blewett, Head of Research at Carwow, about her experience of building customer-centric teams. Carwow is an automotive marketplace that helps people buy and sell their cars and Sarah’s role is to help everyone across the business better understand their customers.

“We didn't have a user research function. I was the first user researcher, and user research was done within design and within product. But there was no one across the business thinking about how we make sure that our customer experiences are joined up and consistent and that we were starting with our customers when solving problems.”

“The impact was that we just didn't understand the broader context of our customers. We didn't understand how our products and services fit into their lives, how they were compared to competitors, what we could solve for people that no one else was solving. And we didn’t have a broad understanding of how our products were currently landing with people as well.

We had a lot of data from customer support. I find customer support to be a really useful research data pool. But we didn't understand the real outer ring of people's context when they're thinking about changing cars.”

“I think the first thing to do is to speak to your stakeholders and understand their awareness and desire for research and learn about any real concerns they have. You want to try and allow people to be really honest with you. To do this, you can ask them things like:

• Do you think this is going to be a waste of time and why? 
• What would credible research look like to you?
• What do you need to see to make it believable?
• How actionable does it need to be?
• When does it need to land with you?

This can help to prevent any problems from happening in the first place.”

“The main thing is that people think research is going to be expensive and it's going to slow you down. Because we can user test things ourselves, there can be a belief that user testing is useless, and that we don't need other people to tell us things like that.

Also organisations sometimes do too much user research so it’s easy for people to get the idea that we’d be testing everything and that's not necessary. That might be true in some cases and user research can be expensive, but it absolutely doesn't have to be.

I think a good user research function or a good way of being customer centric, is fitting in the research you can do around what the business needs. There are always going to be commercial requirements, but there's always a way to fit research in to make sure that you understand your customers.

The other thing is that often there's this idea that research comes at the end and I think good research has to come at the beginning. One thing that's really important to me in my role is constantly sharing things with execs about our customers so that when they're thinking about what products and services they want to start bringing in, they're thinking about it from a customer first perspective.

And to do this you need to make sure you are attending the important meetings and meetings for different products around the organisation. You also want to constantly surface points about your customers that they might not realise, raise things that customers are confused about, things that are important to them and things that are important in the context of their lives.”

“I think mostly by sharing interesting relevant tidbits in an interesting format. I like to share short 30 second videos on our company channels and ask the team to watch it. I spend a lot of time making sure I'm sharing things that are going to capture people's attention so that they know we have this way of speaking to our customers and can find out how they can make it relevant for their roles and problems they are facing. 

Sometimes that's stitching things together into a five minute summary video for a specific product we have, or sharing a short interesting newsletter with five things to learn about customers this week. It’s all about making things that are interesting for people that they can't help but watch or that feel really easy to watch as part of their day to day lives.”

“Absolutely. Trying to be approachable too is huge in user research. Sometimes people feel like user research can be very academic and use a lot of jargon. And so I try to eliminate as much jargon as possible when I'm sharing things with people across the business. It just alienates people otherwise.”

“The single easiest thing you can do is figure out a way to speak to customers.

Go to your CRM team and see if you can email 500 people to invite them to speak to you and set up 10 calls in your diary to ask your customers some questions.

Anything you can do to start talking to customers and start understanding them is huge. It'll make such a difference and then you can start sharing those insights out and start building that appetite within the business.

If you have more resources available, start hiring people to do this. Bring in an agency to help you do it, depending on where you are in that spectrum.

But if you can do nothing else, figure out a way to speak to your customers.”

“I look for people who I think are going to be really proactive, who are really comfortable talking to customers and will go out and find customers to speak to, ask them questions, really listen to their answers and be really curious about what's driving their decision-making.

I think the skills in Jared Spool’s article about indispensable skills for UX Mastery were really useful. It's also not super important to have a ton of experience in user research. It's more about having the right attitude and the right behaviours.

If you're a huge organisation and you're trying to get user research or user centred design started, you might need to bring in people who are able to speak the language of the organisation and have the research skills.

But I think for me personally, the most important things are getting people who are willing to come in and be curious about customers and what's driving their behaviours.”

“There were just more and more research requests. More people in different teams across the business were wanting to understand their customers. So I think we've just had a huge amount of requests for research and the natural answer to that is ‘I don't have any more hours in the day, we're going to need to hire more people’.

Also once people start understanding the benefits of building things based on what customers really want, it's hard to go back.”

“There are certain limitations of user testing to overcome. The benefit of user testing is that it is fantastic for things like finding bugs, finding things that are confusing, finding things that are unclear.

But when it comes to testing different prototypes against each other, people are unsure and don't know what they would do in a hypothetical situation. So sometimes, when you're asking hypothetical questions like ‘what would you do next?’, they just don't know.

And so there can be real limitations in research of things that are not real yet.”

“We have a whole host of measurements; the standard funnel measurements, things around customer experience, CSAT.

We measure the ROI of user research by thinking about projects we've done and what the direct ROI of those have been. And we also use more qualitative metrics such as ‘how many people are asking us for research repeatedly?’ Or ‘how often are we able to help steer business decisions in a way that's really customer friendly?’. We’re a very metric happy business.”

To find out how you can create more resilient organisations, check out the webinars that we held during Customer Centricity Month 2023. Available to watch on demand here:

• Staying competitive in challenging times
• Building customer-centric teams
• Using impact mapping to prioritise the right thing
• Prototyping to deliver more value, sooner
• Prioritising at transformation level

You can also now register your interest for Customer Centricity Month 2024: From Fundamentals to Future Trends.

If you've enjoyed the content from previous years, make sure you register to receive exclusive, early access to the events. We will keep you updated over the coming months on new announcements of speakers and talks so that you can be the first to sign up and secure your place!