This call may be monitored for user experience purposes
How listening to support calls can make you a better UX designer.
We’ve all been there. You run into a problem with a product or service, and after failing to figure it out yourself, you give in to the dreaded call to customer support. After navigating the phone prompts, waiting on hold, and before speaking to an agent, you hear the familiar “This call may be monitored or recorded for quality assurance purposes”.
Does anyone listen to these things? Well, it depends on the organization. They’re typically monitored for agent compliance and call resolution. Many will aggregate them into top call drivers, which are sent to product teams who can address the root cause.
As a UX designer, you may have heard calls by visiting agents and sitting with them. This is great, but periodically listening to random calls isn’t all that helpful. Make it a habit driven by customer obsession.
With today’s speech analytics tools, you can quickly find nuggets of empathy and insight that are useful in every phase of your design process.
This is a superpower every UX designer should have.
Why listen to support calls?
Customers are telling you their problems, sharing their feedback, and giving their opinions. Close Slack, put down the phone, and listen intently.
- Build empathy. Empathy is the ability to step into the shoes of another person, aiming to understand their feelings and perspectives, and to use that understanding to guide our actions.¹
- Gain firsthand insights. Insights obtained by direct personal observation or experience are easy to internalize. Savor the Aha! moments.
- Keep it real. Unlike usability tests, they’re from real customers, trying to complete real tasks with your product, right now.
- Speak their language. Hearing customers explain why and how they are trying to complete a task gives insight into their vocabulary.
- Gather use cases. Specific situations play out during the conversation, which might jump-start your imagination of further use cases.
- Supplement research. They can help formulate a research plan by providing insights to validate, and hypotheses to test.
- Close the feedback loop. After your design launches, aren’t you curious about what customers think? It’s gratifying to observe them interacting with your hard work.
“Practice really hearing what people say. Do your best to get inside their minds.” — Marcus Aurelius
How To Get Started
Talk to your customer support team to learn what is available. A lot depends on how call recordings are stored and the tools available to analyze them.
The best way to tap into this gold mine of insights is with speech analytics tools like Nexidia and Amazon Connect. When applied to call recordings, they accurately transcribe the conversation, making it possible to find specific moments in the customer experience using keyword searches. Your company’s call database may contain millions of minutes of conversations per month. These tools make it possible to quickly find and listen to the nuggets of insight you’re looking for. This is a superpower every UX designer should have.
Empathy maps
Empathy mapping is a great activity to combine with support calls. They help you step into the customer’s shoes by gathering what they say, do, think, and feel. Collect any available demographic and usage data such as location and tenure, then bring your cross-functional team together to listen to the calls you found. Bring up the product screens as you listen to really get a perspective on what the customer is experiencing. Finally, have the team note their observations and debrief by filling in the empathy map.
Schedule recurring call listening sessions with your team. I call like to call it “Customer Empathy Hour”. They can be as little as once a month. It’s all about listening to customers on a regular basis. Find a specific topic to focus on each time.
Storytelling
Insert snippets of the recording into presentations to bring the problem to life. When telling the story of the customer problem, it’s really powerful for others to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth. Your audience will walk away with deep customer empathy and a clear understanding of the problem.
“Genius is the gold in the mine, talent is the miner who works and brings it out.” — Marguerite Gardiner
So remember, the next time you talk to customer support, the call may be monitored for user experience purposes. Getting started isn’t always easy, but as you begin digging, you’ll learn what customers call about and what insights might be found.
[1]: Krznaric, Roman. “Six Habits of Highly Empathic People.” Greater Good, 27 Nov. 2012, greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/six_habits_of_highly_ empathic_people1.
