How Service Designers can use Mobile Ethnography to research Customer Journeys

Introduction

The customer experience is at the crux of service design. While service design can benefit from mobile ethnography, an organization can get deep insights into the customer journey by leveraging these techniques. Well researched and crafted customer journeys are powerful tools for improving customer experience and building custmer centricity across your entire business. This article will focus specifically on how to research and design a customer journey using mobile ethnography.

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How to use Mobile Ethnography as a research tool for Service Design

Great service design starts with great service design research. If you are in the process of preparing a customer journey map as part of your service design brief, you first need to plan and conduct your customer journey research. Mobile Ethnography can be used for as a toll for doing research with customers or for service safaris where you get your colleagues to walk in the shoes of your customers to better experience what your customers need and do.

The following steps are important for customer journey research in service design.

Define your customer personas for before you start recruitment

First, determine what customer or customer segments you want to learn more about. This may be a point in your research where you may need input from internal stakeholders. It’s important to ensure everyone that is a recipient of the research findings agrees on who those findings are about.
While it can be tempting to research all the client segments at once, it’s better to be strategic and focus on one study at a time.
While each client demographic may have some variations, looking at the most common scenario per study will keep the project on track.

In summary, alignment on a persona and narrowing of the scope of a customer journey will be key to creating a foundational understanding of a persona.

Determine what insights to capture in your customer journey research

For effective customer journey mobile ethnography, it’s important to capture insights not only of the customer, but also the touchpoints they have with your organization. These touchpoints can include any interaction with the brand, promotions, sales team, support desk, or any other interaction a client may have with the organization.

Determine what customer process you want to learn more about. Again, it’s important to not deviate from the most common path you determined earlier for your customer journey. Branching and deviation will widen the scope of your research and introduce confusion.

Decide on what customer touchpoints with business operations you would like to learn more about. You need to coordinate with your internal organizational Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to determine the exact demographic of the customer. To capture this type of information, you will need to do parallel research.

What research methods can Service Designers use for customer journey research

There are several powerful data gathering techniques that can be used to catalyze the data gathering process for the customer experience using mobile ethnography.

Interviews: understand what the customer experience and their reflections on certain topics, general or specific are.

What was their overall experience like so far with the organization?
What was their last experience like with the support team? Starting with an interview can be a great way to get a high-level understanding of the customer experience.
Indeemo offers mobile screen recordings, enabling asynchronous interviews at the clients preferred time. This removes the constraints of time, allowing for more interview subjects to be tested.

Diary studies: best conducted over extended periods of time, these studies help get a deep understanding of the client’s experience. This can be a great tool to learn about various phases (onboarding, maturing, upgrading) a customer may experience with your organization. A diary study can be great to learn about the customer experience with a new service or product that is being used on a daily basis for an extended amount of time. This type of research can provide details that other research methods may miss.

Indeemo offers an intuitive interface allowing for multiple, asynchronous diary studies to be conducted at the same time. Catalyzing the data gathering process and allowing the researcher access to the data at any point of the study.

Tasks: If your organization wants to know about a client’s experience with a certain product feature or service, you can create a task for the client. This will prompt them to take action while providing feedback on their experience in real-time. This can be a great way to validate and get greater detailed learnings from interviews and diary studies.

Indeemo is a task-based methodology and is optimised for the creation of specific tasks you want a respondent to undertake in a sequential manner.

Emotional Journey: Understanding how a customer feels at each step of your journey is key to helping prioritize pain points and levels of effort from the organization. For instance, a client may have had a great call with the help desk, but they were even happier with the detailed follow-up email they got right after. Or the customer was unhappy with a poor integration, but they were incredibly unhappy when they found out it would take some time to fix the issue. While these examples are quite general, they demonstrate some of the emotional nuance that is important to capture.

Indeemo makes this easy by prompting a client for a rating during specific tasks and areas in the journey. A set emotional scale allows for clients to quickly rate their mood at the moment of the action. This prompt feedback provides a layer of accuracy that is sometimes lost when a client is asked to reflect and rate an action that happened a while back.

Mobile ethnography research methods can simplify the data collection process for the client journeys. They can save numerous hours of research work without sacrificing the research content. Above all, mobile ethnography can capture and share details in real-time with the researcher. This tool makes it possible to enhance findings without ever having to leave the office.

Customer Journey research data analysis

While the information gathered is powerful, it needs to be analyzed and refined in order to be used for the customer journey. Mobile Ethnography removes many of the time-consuming barriers to refining and analyzing information.

Go through the data to find patterns

What kind of pain points or themes are the majority of your clients experiencing?

The Indeemo interface allows for various views of images, videos, and transcriptions. All information gathered is easy to filter and pull out for analysis.

Where possible, follow up and probe experiences for clarity

Are some pieces of information a little too general or too specific? Have some time set aside for following up to better understand each point.

Indeemo’s tasking feature allows for quick follow-up with any client on the panel. You input the task and the client gets an immediate notification to record additional content.

Highlight and index important data

While refining your data, it’s good to get into a habit of tagging audio transcriptions and any relevant pieces of information. A good indexing system will make it easier to reference the materials later.

Indeemo offers an easy and intuitive way to get transcriptions of customer feedback and allows for tagging and storing. No need to create a new system each time you hold a study.

Create a design research repository of your findings such as videos, transcripts, quotes, photos

Prior to mobile ethnography, organizing the numerous different versions of data was a daunting task.

Indeemo automatically creates a repository for your deliverables

Even after you have the deliverable, the research findings gathered are a great asset for the organization. Keeping all the findings in an organized repository for future reference will be incredibly helpful for any questions you or your organization may have about your deliverable or other customer-related inquiries.

Map your Customer Journey using our research software

Now that you have all the information gathered and refined, it’s time to create the service blueprint. Here’s an in-depth article on how to create this deliverable and apply it to your organization.

Budget for a little extra time to go over the customer experience portion with your clients and have them validate and provide input on what could be refined. While your research will provide you with a great composite of different client experiences, this validation step is a safeguard before displaying your customer journey to the greater organization. However, use your judgement on any client feedback at this stage and make sure it aligns with the data collected.

Let us support your service design research

Mobile ethnography is a powerful methodology that service designers can use to research and design a customer journey. As we have illustrated above, the resultant benefits of deploying this approach are numerous and include a number of time-saving elements that do not impinge on the quality of research being undertaken.