How to better understand your customers as humans and support a more diverse UX with Janelle Estes, Chief Insights Officer at UserTesting

This episode features an interview with Janelle Estes, Chief Insights Officer at UserTesting, an on-demand human insight platform that quickly gives companies a first-person understanding of how their target audience behaves throughout any experience and why. Janelle has over 15 years of experience in customer research for both B2B and B2C companies to help them transform their customer and user experiences. She has also held UX research consulting roles at Nielsen Norman Group and Forrester Research. In this episode, Janelle talks about understanding your customers as human beings, engaging them in the feedback and development process, and embedding the customer voice in your business.Quotes*”Customer experience is really about people, and serving your customers as people and human beings.”*”Without the context of understanding your customers as humans and hearing from them [about] why they might have given you a low NPS rating or why they're leaving a particular page, you can't make an educated decision of what to do and how to fix it.”*”The interesting thing about people and customers is that while they don't wanna be tracked, they wanna be heard… You've heard the phenomenon, like everyone hates surveys, nobody fills them out, only a small percentage fill them out because they're tired of them… What this study and research uncovered was that people aren't fatigued by taking surveys. They're actually fatigued by taking surveys and then the company not actually doing anything with the information.”*”Don't try to change everything at once. Don't try to boil the ocean. Find one or two places in that product development flow that you really want people to talk to customers and then find a way to embed it there.”*”How do we get to a place where we're not just over indexing on all the things people are doing and where they're clicking and what they're saying on all these different platforms? What if we just reintroduced the customer as a person that is next to us every day or provides intelligence to us on an ongoing basis? To me, that's the future. And that's what gets me super excited about what we have in front of us.  And I think there's so much room and opportunity for us to  reintroduce the human into the business conversation.”*”The really interesting thing about personas to me is that we tend to think that everybody who falls into that persona is the same, but there's so much variety within personas. And so imagine if you could go talk to five people that fit into the profile of your key persona. You're gonna meet five very different people.”Time Stamps*[0:04] How to better understand your customers as humans and support a more diverse UX*[0:28] Introducing Janelle Estes, Chief Insights Officer at UserTesting*[5:55] How UserTesting helps organizations connect with customers*[8:34] What is a customer experience narrative?*[10:51] Finding inspiration from your own best customer experience*[11:30] The revealing metrics behind customer behavior*[16:35] How UserTesting engages customers in their own experience*[25:49] Where to begin when wanting to better understand your customers*[32:32] Why it’s critical to talk to customers who fit your ideal guest persona*[34:21] Debrief*[35:21] HGS PubBioJanelle is an expert research practitioner fascinated by human behavior and intrigued by data insight. She brings over 15 years’ experience conducting large-scale customer research initiatives for both B2C and B2B companies across a variety of industries to help them transform their customer, user, and brand experiences. Janelle is responsible for stewarding the future of Human Insight and translating that into opportunities to evolve the UserTesting platform. Prior to UserTesting, Janelle held UX research consulting roles at Nielsen Norman Group and Forrester Research.Thank you to our friendsThis podcast is brought to you by HGS. A global leader in optimizing the customer experience lifecycle, digital transformation, and business process management, HGS is helping its clients become more competitive every day. Learn more at hgs.cx.LinksConnect with Janelle on LinkedInFollow Janelle on TwitterConnect with Lyssa on LinkedInCheck out HGS