Our goal? To transform “customer obsession” from a buzzword into an everyday reality. Sure, everyone nods when customer focus comes up in meetings, but when the rubber hits the road, old habits are tough to shake off. It’s all too easy to fall back into them, letting revenue-driven brainstorms and pet projects eclipse the customer’s voice.
In reality, nurturing a customer-obsessed culture is a long-term commitment, not a one-off project. It’s about making our teams walk a mile in the customers’ shoes, understand their world, their dreams, their challenges. After all, businesses make money when they deliver what customers truly want. Without this customer insight, we end up chasing our own biases, mimicking competitors, or getting seduced by “cool” ideas that don’t resonate with our users.
And here’s another thing: simply crunching numbers and demographics doesn’t cut it. Sure, data can help, but it can’t tell the whole story. It misses the real-world insights, the a-ha moments that come when you actually spend time with customers. And that’s where the innovation magic happens.
So, instead of just talking about it, we let our work do the talking. Our design and research team is all about showing the customer perspective as clearly as possible, using all sorts of tools in our kit:
Just Another UX Monday
Our newsletter served as a compact window into the design team’s work and kept the entire organisation abreast of our contributions. Though its information was appreciated, we acknowledged the need for a more engaging delivery method.
Diary study
This was a big win. It brought us an organisation-level award and gave us an in-depth look into the customer experience. Think of it as a reality show with our customers: raw, real, insightful.
We found a dozen UK citizens from our target audience who had not previously used Skrill. Within a month, they had to go through the key journeys that the app provides, and talk about how they achieved their tasks and how they felt during that time.
At the end, the research team cut hours of footage into 13 compact episodes packed with insights on improving each flow in the experience, shared in our internal network.
Two years later, we’re still seeing episodes referenced in calls, and the diary study is still dubbed the “best onboarding videos” by product managers.
CX Talks (Voice of the Customer)
The CX team’s hour-long, bi-weekly, company-wide presentations where we deep-dive into what’s cooking in the design team.
We share everything from usability studies and value proposition discovery videos to exploratory customer interviews and best practices from our work.
Honourable mentions
We’ve also had a blast with design thinking workshops and design sprints, both online and offline. We’ve set up a prototype hub where people can check out what we’re prototyping and what we’ve learned from usability tests. And yes, we’ve put together personas and customer journey maps to keep us all on the same page.
Taking this journey towards a more customer-centric design approach has been quite the ride. It’s taught us to keep questioning, keep refining, and above all, keep focusing on the customer.
And we’re just getting started!
I presented an extended version of this article at a DesignOps conference in Sofia in October 2022. The recording, in Bulgarian, is on YouTube.