The CX Blog

Ethnography is cool; don’t be afraid of ethnography just because it sounds scary. At its base, it lines up well with what a lot of seasoned professionals know: you learn the best lessons fastest by going straight to the source. Typically this source has been customers, and largely been marketing and product dev focused.

But from my perspective as a customer experience professional with a focus on the support end of the organization, I think a lot can be gained by applying ethnography to both sides of the coin: the internal support operation and the external customer. After all, it’s this specific and quantifiable interaction that can make the difference between a love or hate relationship with a company. And if the scales tip towards hate, no amount marketing can dispel the real, live experience that sentiment is based on.

Ethnography is a research approach that focuses on deep understanding of end user experience by way of direct observation, interviews, and narratives. It enables an organization to become highly customer focused from top to bottom. In a shift that becomes more obvious as it goes along, the end user drives innovation and adaptation.

Does that mean that the company nimbly follows every whim the customer has? Certainly not, and that’s where the methodology, with its focus on rich data over time, comes into play: observation and exploration lead to ideation; ideation leads to creation; creation leads to working models and finally assessment (the rinse and repeat phase). Let’s take a look at each of these as applied to the customer experience of a hypothetical computer peripherals manufacturing company.

Hypothetical Case:

Imagine two end users in our scenario: the consumer and the support agent. The consumer encounters a specific problem networking their printer through their router; they contact the printer company seeking help with resolving the problem.

Exploration In this initial phase the ethnographer dives into the user experience on both sides, the Voice of the Customer, as well as the Voice of the Agent. Interviews and direct observation result in a narrative that captures the overall experience, with data to highlight specifics. In this specific case, the agent taking the call groans and while call is on mute says he hears this issue approximately 14 times a day but has little recourse to helping the customer; the knowledge base is outdated for the issue and there’s no channel for surfacing these incoming problems effectively. The customer sighs and pushes back when she is told the problem is likely with the router and is given the number to reach the router manufacturer.

Ideation The ethnographer’s task in this phase involves surfacing the misalignment between actual usage and ideal experience, which in turn leads to conceptualization of needed changes. In this case, what is the path to solution; what tools does the agent have or need; how often does this type of contact come in; what is the ideal outcome from the customer’s perspective, the agent’s perspective, the company’s perspective?

Creation In this phase, the ethnographer begins to formulate a model that incorporates the findings surfaced during ideation. The changes and adaptations brought forth in this phase will lead to a road map of steps to leverage the direct experience of both the consumer and the support organization; these changes leverage the surfaced misalignments. In this case, improvements include Knowledge Sharing plan, standardized x-functional review processes, online support strategy, better/easier product documentation.

Model The customer experience ethnographer will then create a model of expected or potential outcomes based on proposed changes. The model will help the organization to understand and track the progress/success of the new programs; the model is validated over time by following the metrics attached to customer and agent processes. In this case, the model would include c-sat and customer interviews, KS adoption and usage patterns, x-functional issue timelines, online support metrics and feedback, customer observation/interviews of product documentation.

Assessment In this ongoing phase “rinse-and-repeat”, the consulting ethnographer continues to observe the end user experience over time, with an emphasis on watching for areas that need “tweaking” or minor adjustments. Also important to note in this phase is the potential for unexpected results, for example, it’s noted that a few agents spend unexpected amounts of time refining the KS content–to the vast improvement of support for customers but an increase in the amount of after-call activity time. Is this a good thing? Should it be incorporated into a realigned KPI?

Up next: how ethnography fits into the Driva Solutions approach to contact center optimization.