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Customer engagement is the starting point for any customer/advocate interaction. With this new product for Needle - Instant Answers - we needed to study a simple question that had profound impact for our product: when do people want to help chat while shopping? Answer this and we could find new ways for our customers to get pre-purchase help from our partner's product experts. With that question in mind, we started a round of customer research...
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This project started with bringing in around 12 people and watching them shop on our partner's sites. We observed why they would initiate a chat, and more importantly, why they would NOT.
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Our team presented our end-user test findings to the company around the problems discovered with our current method of customer engagement. We hosted a giant "group think" discussion - a brainstorm - on how we could solve this problem.
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We defined our hypotheses to test as a result of our customer research.
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We mapped out the relationship between customer needs and product service in search of "problem/solution fit"
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This map prioritizes the importance of each of the customer's needs and served as a guide during development.
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Thinking through the work flow of Instant Answers in the Advocate console.
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Initial wireframes for Instant Answers....a far cry from where it ended up.
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One of a few tested ideas was to use existing technology with quicker ways to engagement by embedding a text field directly in the invite.
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Externalization of our work on the "Designer's Wall" for more group discussions around our current thinking.
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