A Powerful Tool to Help Us Understand User Experience
A customer-first organization is one that listens to their customers and acts on the insights they uncover. To do that, my team relies on many tools to listen to our own customers. These include research forums, surveys, customer advisory councils, and communities dedicated to gathering insights from our commercial customers, consumers, and partners.
One of the most powerful tools at our fingertips uses Big Data analytics to help us understand and improve the experience of our users. That tool is our Customer Insights Dashboard (CID).
CID uses natural language processing (NLP) to process over 20 million user comments annually from ecommerce and review websites, blogs, forums, and soon social channels.
The beauty of CID as a user listening tool is it places millions of data points into an interactive dashboard for our product managers. That is a quantum leap from when I ran the ThinkPad product group several years ago at Lenovo. Back then, it was not easy to discover what people thought about our products in a timely manner. The CID closes the gap by visualizing and quantifying what people are saying about our products in near real-time.
Understanding customer sentiment delivers good user experiences
With our dashboard, all customer feedback is parsed into categories (e.g., display, battery, performance), and sentiment classified as positive, negative, or neutral. The ability to collect and understand customer sentiment is crucial to delivering a good user experience (UX). The fact that several categories appear on the following top negative and positive list suggests that they are critical to making or breaking the UX.
When we know what matters to users, we can track their sentiment over time as we incorporate their feedback to make short and long-term improvements to our products. Below is an example of using CID findings to make an immediate short-term improvement to one of our devices. In this case, a fan noise / thermal issue resolved by a BIOS update.
Below are two examples of long-term improvements across two different product generations. One is utilizing user insights to improve the audio experience on a commercial category device and the other shows the improvement in performance on a consumer category device.
The point is, once you measure what matters to users, you can improve their experience with your product or service.
A new global situation increases our reliance on helpful tools
The arrival of COVID-19 transformed a large part of the workforce into remote workers almost overnight. I wanted to know if the needs of our users are continuing to be met during a time of increased reliance on our products and devices. A crucial time for the CID to keep me up to date!
I immediately turned to Sara Cowper, a User Experience (UX) Data Researcher and dashboard owner, to track emerging issues during our new global situation. Sara uses the dashboard daily to provide analysis and data to our executives, marketing, and design teams.
“I have a background in organizational psychology and naturally gravitated to data analysis because my field was statistics-heavy. I like that the data I analyze has a human focus. The dashboard is a really intuitive tool which helps me surface insights quicker,” explained Sara.
With CID, Sara can regularly share updates on the experience users are having with our products. Here is a favorite comment of mine regarding our ThinkPad P53 Mobile Workstation:
“Great mobile workstation for power and portability. It gives me mobility to work from home during this COVID19 outbreak while providing me with the processing power required to deal with big data and machine learning” — ThinkPad P53 customer
I like that comment because it encapsulates the current experience of many remote workers. Home is now where we work and learn, so our devices must be up to those tasks. Regular online work and meetings places more expectation on technology.
The CID reveals that in addition to performance and speed, portability and flexibility is key — even for desktops like our ThinkCentre M90n-1 Nano:
“Perfect home office PC. Nice design and like the portability — especially in this time of coronavirus lockdown in Norway” — ThinkCentre M90n-1 Nano customer
Sara adds, “Customers are experiencing pain points in troubleshooting how to get their audio and video settings right, and some customers appear to be using their microphones and webcams for the first time to communicate with colleagues and loved ones.”
Sara’s observation is borne out in this comment about the experience some people have had with microphones while adjusting to remote work:
“My internal microphone is not working with any type of Skype or Microsoft Teams application. I don’t get it because it works fine with Zoom and with Windows 10 microphone recording.” — IdeaPad customer
Microphone and webcam experiences are especially important to people now who are adjusting to the age of remote work. Like the earlier examples of the CID driving improvements to our devices before COVID-19, everything we learn from the dashboard will inform future designs and help us address usability needs for the way people work now.
Sara beautifully summarized the value of the insights from the CID. “Our mission statement with our UX research is to ‘empower compelling customer-centric designs through data analytic insights’ and the CID is a powerful tool to help us in that mission.”
A customer insights dashboard (CID) that adapts to feedback
The CID continues to be fine-tuned by Sara and our data scientists. “We are careful to ensure our global taxonomy — our language classification scheme — is kept up to date and refined. When we want to drill down into the data, the CID needs to deconstruct subtlety. As an example, when a customer uses the term ThinkPad fan, do they mean someone who loves the ThinkPad or are they talking about the physical fan in the ThinkPad laptop? Our dashboard can get that granular.”
As users change the way they share feedback online, the Customer Insights Dashboard will adapt. “We will add relevant social media platforms to broaden our data sources. Real-time alerts are something on our roadmap too. The more we add, the more the CID will become a predictive tool. One that can anticipate events as well as analyze current ones,” shared Sara.
We become advocates for our users when we understand them
The CID and its power to apply text analytics to customer feedback has enabled us to focus on what really matters to our customers. With it we can:
- Identify top issues and prioritize actions
- Understand the root cause of customers’ perceptions
- Understand the impact of improvements we make
- View from a customer’s perspective how we compare to the broader industry
- Discover customer concerns or issues and mitigate quickly
In short, we can become advocates for our customers by understanding them. As someone who regularly disseminates user insights from data, Sara has a compelling take. “I love being an advocate for users because that goes back to my psychology roots.”
Sara’s sentiment resonates with me. I’m pleased we have a powerful tool to help us understand and improve the experience of our users — real people with real wants and needs. Technology in the service of a higher purpose.
About the Author
Dilip Bhatia is Lenovo’s Vice President of Global Marketing, User & Customer Experience, PC & Smart Devices. As Lenovo’s Chief Customer Officer, Dilip drives the company to achieve its goal of being the leader in the PC, smart device, data center and mobility space. Start a conversation with him here, or on LinkedIn and Twitter.
