My guest today is Phil Ahad, Chief Digital Officer at Toluna. Founded in 2000, Toluna produces online surveys and manages a consumer community of over 24 million active members in 68 countries. Prior to joining Toluna, Phil lead marketing and product strategy teams across many different industries, and has held senior-level positions at CoStar, AOL, and ComScore.

Find Phil Online:

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/philahad

Website: www.toluna-group.com 

Find Jamin Online:

Email: jamin@happymr.com

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jaminbrazil

Twitter: www.twitter.com/jaminbrazil 

Find Us Online: 

Twitter: www.twitter.com/happymrxp 

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/happymarketresearch 

Facebook: www.facebook.com/happymrxp 

Website: www.happymr.com 

This Episode’s Sponsor: 

This episode is brought to you by HubUx. HubUx reduces project management costs by 90%. Think of HubUx as your personal AI project manager, taking care of all your recruitment and interview coordination needs in the background. The platform connects you with the right providers and sample based on your research and project needs. For more information, please visit HubUx.com.

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[00:00]

On Episode 230, I’m interviewing Phil Ahad, Chief Digital Officer at Toluna, but first a word from our sponsor.

[00:08]

This episode is brought to you by HubUx.  HubUx is a productivity tool for qualitative research.  It creates a seamless workflow across your tools and team.  Originally, came up with the idea as I was listening to research professionals in both the quant and qual space complain about and articulate the pain, I guess more succinctly, around managing qualitative research.  The one big problem with qualitative is it’s synchronous in nature, and it requires 100% of the attention of the respondent. This creates a big barrier, and, I believe, a tremendous opportunity inside of the marketplace.  So what we do is we take the tools that you use; we integrate them into a work flow so that, ultimately, you enter in your project details, that is, who it is that you want to talk to, when you want to talk to them, whether it’s a focus group, in-person, or virtual or IDI’s or ethnos; and we connect you to those right people in the times that you want to have those conversations or connections – Push-Button Qualitative Insights, HubUx.  If you have any questions, reach out to me directly. I would appreciate it. Jamin@HubUx.com   

[01:32]

Hi, I’m Jamin Brazil and you’re listening to the Happy Market Research Podcast. My guest today is Phil Ahad, Chief Digital Officer at Toluna.  Founded in 2000, Toluna produces online surveys and manages a consumer community of over 24 million active members in 68 countries. Prior to joining Toluna, Phil has led marketing and product strategy teams across many different industries and has held senior level positions at Costar, AOL and Comscore. Phil, thanks for joining me on the Happy Market Research Podcast today. 

[02:02]

Thanks for having me. 

[02:03]

I really want to start out and talk about the growth that we are seeing inside of the user experience and customer experience space. If you see like the ESOMR data, market research largely has been flat and yet you have these massive growth revenue numbers in the companies that are focusing on user experience and customer experience. I don’t know if you follow hashtags on LinkedIn; I pay a lot of attention to that. And so, just as a point of reference, market research is around 350,000 to 400,000 people that follow that hashtag whereas a user-experience research is around 4.5 million. So it’s crazy like the delta between the amount of people that are following these different trends and the attention they’re getting despite the fact that in a lot of ways they’re doing similar types of methodologies. Application might be different. Where they sit in the org structure is different. But, anyway, are you guys seeing this shift inside of your core customer base? Are you seeing there’s a…  You’ve got the market research lane dialed in. You guys have been around for two decades, solidly two decades. Are you seeing a growth in some of these other areas? 

[03:18]

It’s interesting, I think, if I look back in terms of the work we’ve done over the last two years, specifically the last year ‘cause market research is changing so quickly, it’s always been more focused in user experience or customer-experience testing in part of the NPD process. That’s a big chunk of…  Users want to consume, how they want to consume, how your customers are providing you feedback of this concept or of this product that’s in market. I see the uplift or let’s call it the buzz on user-experience and customer-experience testing as a term. We’re seeing Qualtrics being sold for x amount of billions, and they’re heavily focused on marketing their position as the CX platform.  And you see Medallia over the last month, their IPO was very successful. Again, pushing the customer experience, the word and buzzword in their marketing messaging. But for us, when the platform play and from the testing that we do, I mean it’s always been quite focused on it. Nothing’s really has changed. We have the platform; we have the technology; we have the methodology to provide this type of testing. It’s part of our research process; it’s part of our toolkit. 

[04:21]

I’m going to just try to story it a little bit. In, gosh, ‘98, ‘99, I was doing work with Intuit, in their in-house usability, right? And all I was doing was recruiting respondents to show up for onsite interviews. They were task-driven, etc., etc.  A lot of that has moved online or I should say not moved online, but it’s been augmented with online methodologies where people are given specific tasks to do and give feedback. User Story is a platform that does a good job of capturing that sort of feedback. And there’s a million different other platforms, right?  But one of the things that I’m really curious about is like the way that you’re framing your solution, is it slightly different to these (I’m going call them new researchers even though they’re established disciplines, like in UX) specifically as it relates with product development for example? That was a lot of words. Did that question make sense? Sorry.

[05:23]

I get what you’re saying. I mean for us we’re seeing a ton of innovation and a ton of new ways and new methodologies to conduct research and to get to where you need to get to make a business decision. For us, it’s not just a technology play, right? It’s not just we’re going to give you a survey tool, right? Or we’re going to give you an insights platform that’s going to allow you to automate the procurement of these insights so that you can make a decision faster. It’s a combination of both, right? The technology has to also adjust with the methodology, right? If we’re going to take an amazing tech stack—a tech stack that’s focused on automation, speed and visual reporting and insights—but we’re going to use dated methodology within that tech stack, you’re not going to improve your process. You’re not going to get there faster. You’re not going to make decisions faster. You’re not going to improve that NBD process faster. So for us it’s a combination of both things. And what we’re seeing from the new product development process from start to finish, we’re seeing more stages being infused to do some user testing, to do some customer-experience feedback. When we’re going from screening a bunch of ideas to actually going in and testing specific concepts to then seeing the feedback from the clients, we’re seeing more touch points, more pulse touch points from “let’s test the user experience and let’s test the feedback from the customer experience and let’s see if we’re on the right track”  because nowadays you can do so much more research with just about the same amount of budget. But in the past, you pretty much do like one research project and that will consume your budget for an entire quarter. Today you can do a hundred research projects within that one specific budget line. Does that make sense? 

[06:46]

Perfectly. So it’s a lot like you have the traditional market research buyer, which is still leveraging large or whatever market research firms for a big part of the actual day-to-day deliverables. But, at the same time, you’ve got the researcher or the product person that is sitting there on the floor trying to make a decision on this versus that, for example. And are you seeing those people leveraging market research tools like Toluna’s more and more? In other words, is that part of the customer shift that’s taking or augment that’s taking place?  Or is it still just in… Is the lane of winning just in the market research?

[07:28]

No, we’re definitely seeing a combination of both. And what we’re also seeing is the collapse within those businesses of those groups, right? It’s more so the product development team, the engineering team, the R&D team; they’re going to their research insights groups and they’re saying, “OK, we want to test these ideas.” It’s not as much as that they’re taking on this work themselves ‘cause it gets quite complicated. And now that we’re realizing these research teams have a way of stretching those budgets to do more than your typical like 200-question tracker once a quarter. They’re able to consume more work and they’re able to take on more work because it’s far more easier today to do a concept screening and then it was in the past and again it’s also a lot more budget-friendly to do that. So where we’re seeing today really the growth of our work… 

We’re doing a lot more pre-work than we had done in the past as opposed to just testing that specific concept and then maybe testing in a market. We’re screening actually 200 concepts a lot more down to a combination of like 10 to 15 that they potentially want to act on and then do the concept testing on. And then, we’re also seeing a lot more qual work throughout this process. So, you mentioned Intuit having more focus-group-type settings. We’re doing a lot more qualitative online qual work where we’ve gone through the screening process and maybe there was a one concept of these 50 or so that they’re screening internally they thought were killer, but it completely failed through the screening process. It is an easy way within our platform to pull the subset of those people who said they weren’t interested in it, pull into an online qual discussion and real time and then have a discussion on specifically what missed.  Maybe it was a communication thing. Maybe actually the idea really did suck, right? Or you know, maybe it’s different way of positioning it. So, we’re seeing of the entire process, more infusion of pulse, qualitative research and then a lot more infusion of qual discussions as we go through that process. 

[09:16]

That’s interesting. It sounds like one of the big shifts is this movement (I feel like it’s overused) but agile research. Right? So the integration of research alongside the day-to-day operations of the business informing things. I want to unpack that one-use case you just highlighted because I feel it’s fairly unique from my vantage point. It sounds like what I heard you say was you have a quant survey or equivalent and you’re getting feedback at scale and there’s a carve out of respondents that you’re interested in doing a deeper dive, qualitative-type assessment. Is there automation built into that workflow or are you pulling the list out and then just— not just—but and then doing the solicitation and scheduling with those individuals? 

[10:08]

Yeah, I believe, anyway, I’m biased because I work for the company. 

[10:12]

You know, that’s okay. 

[10:15]

Yeah, for me, I think one of our fastest growing products is something called Quick Communities, right? It’s integrated directly into our QuickSurveys platform. Quick Communities essentially, as basic as I’ll explain to you, it gives you the ability to have like a Skype conversation one-on-one or with a multiple group of people in real time. Right? So I can launch through the QuickSurveys platform and I can say, “You know what? Anyone who answered question one like this, question two like this or vice versa independently, at the end of the survey I want to recruit them into this qual discussion in real time.”  Now, I can set up that call discussion to happen immediately when the survey ends, or I can schedule it for tomorrow morning, whatever. The communication would be automatic to that specific respondent. As they’re going through the survey, they’ve qualified for it. At the end, I’ll say, “Congratulations, we’d like to actually ask you some more questions. Are you interested in joining this really quick chat?” And then it will direct them right into the chat and you can have that discussion right away. So this is completely DIY. You have the ability to set this up with the DIY user, or if you don’t have the time or you don’t have the moderation skills to do it, we can take on that work for you.  It’s how we empower our users. I think that one of our biggest differentiators is you can save money and it’s going to be faster because you’re doing it right and you’re doing it in real time or you spend a little more because you don’t have the resources at the time to do it yourself and the Toluna, the Harris Interactive teams can take it on and do it for you. 

[11:32]

So, that’s such an interesting…  I wish I could say I would have thought of that as the CEO of FocusVision ‘cause that would have been like a natural opportunity for connectivity. 

[11:44]

It wouldn’t be an easy the thing for any company to do, right? The company that can do this has to have an online community, so an engaging online panel and then technology built into it. Right? So for us it’s a natural thing ‘cause all of our quick surveys go directly to the Toluna panel network, to Toluna.com. That’s 68 different markets, right? So the person is taking the survey on the panel site, right? And then, they’re already registered. They’ve already opted in: we already have demographic information right there. We’re already double opted into this thing. So then they’re not leaving that environment when they need to go into this qual discussion. It’s part of the panel, right? So it’s a great idea. But if you don’t have that panel, that online community panel site, and then you don’t have the technology and the survey engine and the moderation tools to do it, it’d be a really difficult thing because then you’re going to recruit people into an online qual. Like if I was going to send a survey to Lucid and I’m getting panel, now, when I have an online discussion, I’m going to have to send a landing page to register that online community and go through that process. And that’s where you’re going to lose a ton of people. 

[12:45]

All right. Well, I mean, you’ve kind of alluded to this point that I wanted to get to, which is centric to the roll-ups that have been happening.  P2Sample recently, we did a big announcement, right? Dynata obviously: we’ve talked about that one before on the show. Probably the biggest piece of M&A news in the last, I don’t know, forever, maybe since Greenfield Online went public in whatever year that was 2001 or 2002 or 2003, I guess. But anyway, with all of these roll-ups that are happening, is this a threat or an opportunity from your vantage point for a company like Toluna? 

[13:20]

Obviously, I’m going to say it’s an opportunity, but all of these changes in the market have to be followed, and we have to identify what is that going to mean to us in the competitive landscape of things. I think it’s an opportunity because for us it’s stability, right?  We’re investing heavily in our technology platform. We’re investing heavily in our panel. At the moment, our attention isn’t being moved away because we’re going to plan for an IPO or we need to get acquired or we need an investment or we need funding. So that’s where I see it’s a strength for us ‘cause it’s just how stable we’ve been over the past two years with a lot of unrest within the market and a lot of other companies eating each other up. Now, to be upfront and honest too, we’re always looking to acquire companies that fit our mission and fit the things that we’re trying to do from a panel situation, from a technology situation, like niche player in the market. Because we do so much ourselves, we tend to rather build than buy, but with so many new advancements and technologies, and so many niche players in the space, we’re always looking to see if there’s a natural fit for us in terms of what we’re trying to do from a research and an insight standpoint. 

[14:28]

I mean that’s interesting because there’s a host of companies that have been entering the space since Qualtrics did their big announcement. Right.  So, for example, I don’t know if you’ve been following this thread on my LinkedIn, but we’ve recently enrolled in startup school, which is part of Y Combinator.  It’s the largest accelerator for tech-based startups globally. There’s 23,000 companies that are in our cohort. I mean it’s an insane number. Now, there’s only a small fraction that are inside of the insight space. But the broader point is that there’s a massive amount of growth that is happening inside of this startup or the entrepreneurial ecosystem. And I’m seeing a lot of new entrants even in the last six months inside that technology entrants’ center specifically that are trying to leverage in.  And it’s interesting ‘cause they don’t come with the baggage that I have as a market research professional: kind of this grandfatherly point of view. But they’re connecting to a (I call it the new researcher), which is everybody inside of the organization. I had the head of product on the show last week, Rian for Postmark, which is basically an email service for apps. It’s widely utilized. And he was saying, “Yeah, like it’s a do or do-not. There is no try organizationally for research.” Everybody has to be doing at some level of consumer interaction in order for us just to maintain truth of the consumer point of view. So, when you’re thinking about M&A, ‘cause you’re right, you guys have historically “built” versus “buy,” do you think that could be part of the narrative for Toluna? 

[16:21]

I mean for sure. And the Qualtrics acquisition last year to me was…  I mean it’s great news for the industry ‘cause, of course, it’s going to open up a bunch of really smart, young and up-and-coming engineers to invest in this space. Historically in the past, no research company has been acquired for any type of value like that, especially X over revenue, right?  That valuation and that acquisition is typical technology and to have that in the market research space is, obviously, that’s why you have 23,000 people starting up. It’s going to be great for us ‘cause there’s going to be these niche players who come and think about things in a completely different way than the historical researcher.  And when I joined Toluna almost over seven years ago, and although I had a stint at Comscore, I told myself when I was at Comscore… It was a long time ago, right? I was like, “I’ll never work in market research again. It’s just like why?” Obviously, I came to Toluna because of the uniqueness of the opportunity, but coming in fresh and not coming in with 10 years of market research baggage and coming in with 10 years of like, “This is how I’ve always done it, so I’m going to always do it this way,”  I was quite disruptive here. And I hired people who didn’t come from market research to lead products and lead innovation or lead ideas ‘cause, again, they’re disrupting the standard. When we purchased Harris Interactive, it was the same thing. And I was like, “Why are we doing it this way?” “Because we’ve always done it that way.” “Do you really need to have like 17 nested quotas to do a survey on popsicles? “I don’t know. I don’t think so, right?” This is kind of like we’re out. We need to… 

[17:52]

Only 17! 

[17:53]

We need to really, really push for change in the industry and not because we want to. It’s because our clients demand it. We talk about speed, and we talk about costs. Well, traditional research is expensive. New research doesn’t have to be.  I’d rather have a hundred different ways of looking at one thing than just one way of looking at it because I had to add a stick to a budget or I had to stick to a specific time. Right. And I believe this is where we’re at today and we’re going to get consumed with data, right? And data, multiple different data points and multiple different ways of doing something to collect the data points so that you can result in a business action is going to be the future, right?

 Well, it is a future today, right? And, actually, how we consume the data—and I think this is where the next innovation has to come—is that we’ve got DMP data; you’ve got stated data; you’ve got third party data; you got cookie-tracking data; you got behavioral tracking data. There’s so many different sources, right? And the aggregator of these data sources, who makes it clean and easy, so that you can look to the data right away and you can get what you need to make from business decision and then act on it—that’s where we have to invest in right now.  I mean the companies that I’ve started to talk to just fresh into the space, the ideas, this is what they’re focused on right now. So the aggregators of the data are going to be the real future. Building another survey tool and building a different way to ask a question—How much more different ways can we do that? So that’s what from an M&A standpoint, that’s kind of where my focus is at the moment. 

[19:20]

So, really quick, you guys have actually in a lot of ways…  So, I went through the join process of your panel in preparation for our meeting today, your Influencer Panel, and the initial framework for that is completely different than I’ve ever seen, joining a panel.  Maybe I’ve joined 20 panels, I don’t know. But not like all of them. But having said that, I mean it is a very unique, interactive experience where somehow, and I don’t exactly know and I’ve tried to reverse…  In my head with my team, even sat down, “Gosh, you know, this is really interesting. How can you reverse engineer that?” But it’s a very unique experience. So anyway, sorry, I didn’t mean to cut you off. My broader point is that we are still seeing innovation in the checkbox space. 

[20:11]

I’m not trying to state that…  I just think we need to do things differently, right?  We just can’t rely on, “Ask this and tell me this.” And then back to that, right.  It’s going to have to be a combination of different data sources and for us too, that panel experience is going to be critical for us moving forward. Right?  As they’re joining and as a collective, we need to give them the most relevant surveys or the most relevant projects possible: one – they’re interested in ‘cause then they’re going to leave. Right? We can’t hold people’s attention anymore for 30 minutes. It’s like impossible.  Some groups of people, you could pay them $100 and they’re not going to take a survey for 30 minutes. Right? So we’ve got to figure out a different way that we can engage with panelists, within consumer panelists to collect information that we need to drive business decisions. Right? And there’s going to be a multitude of different ways of doing this, not just from mobile and not just from online surveys, right? It’s from data collection; it’s from combination of sources of what we’ve seen from…  The stuff from DMP is going to help us make these decisions too. So that’s where my mind is at right now; where the team’s mind is that is what are the other different ways that we can collect data, collect consumer data, keep the experience positive and keep these people in the system. 

[21:21]

Yeah, it’s a drum that I’ve been beating a lot over my career, which is the more data sources that you can integrate into your consumer story, then one – the more compelling the story is and two – the more accurate it’s going to be because you’re not just biased with your lens or the self-reported lens of the average consumer. It’s really interesting. But as I keep thinking, kind of finishing the thought relative to your M&A thesis, are you thinking that part of a thesis is more bent on technology versus customer size, customer book size? 

[21:59]

You mean panel size or…? 

[22:01]

Yeah, no, sorry.  Are you guys thinking more or do you have more interest in interesting technologies that are kind of outside of the box touching other non-traditional buyers? Or is it like the typical (and I don’t mean this in a bad way), but the typical kind of like looking at Dynata buying SSI, right? So, in that case, more of a financial consideration was a major part of the thesis because of cost reduction. 

[22:28]

I wouldn’t disregard any opportunity. If I look at the things that we can do internally versus the things that would be harder or more costly, obviously, there’s a lot of interest in some really innovative and niche technology that either we never thought about.  So that interests me, right? And we’re passionate about these things. So, we were the first company to buy a digital tracking technology. We bought it from Nielsen four years ago now. So, we’ve always prided ourselves about being ahead of the game, especially from a market-research technology standpoint. But right now, we’ve got excellent technology, in-house built technology to manage and run panels. We’re improving our panel experience across mobile, across the site, across digital tracking. We’ve got an excellent B2B consumer insights platform to procure this data and organize this data. 

So from end to end, I think from a foundational standpoint, we’re really strong. So, would I be interested in buying another Toluna-type or like an SSI-type? No, probably not. But again, I don’t make those decisions, but I got to report to X and to the board and to Frederic…“Oh, no, sample x company’s proven for us.” So, he’s going to make that decision. But these are just my recommendations.  For me, I’d rather continue to invest in what we’re doing. We’ve got 200 product and engineering staff across the world, who are focused on this. It’s not enough in my opinion. We’ve got a good amount of people, and they’re really smart, and they’re really hungry, and they’re energized about what they can do within market research. So yeah, I’d like to really focus on those niche technologies that are out there that could transform the way you digest and then react to data. But again, if the right panel company or if the right survey company comes into play that makes sense from us and make sense for our team then, yeah, why not? 

[24:15]

You guys have been doing a lot in the way of—and I don’t mean to like sound all infomercially fanboyish here but, just practically speaking—a lot in the way of innovating the respondent experience. I assume framing out the Influencer versus a traditional respondent or people that take surveys, that’s psychologically a really interesting shift for me.  I’m sure you don’t have the statistics off the top of your head, but I imagine you guys have been paying attention to things like retention and engagement and that sort of thing. Are you seeing this reframing of the respondent as an Influencer having a material lift in terms of their long-term stickiness? 

[24:59]

We went through a reorganization.  I’m not sure if you were aware of that, but one of the reorganizations… 

[25:04]

I’m not.  

[25:05]

is we took over…  Our panel team historically has been tied with the operations team, right? And what we did was we took the panel team and now we’ve combined it with the product team and the marketing team, right? ‘Cause in our eyes now, (so this is all heads up) it’s all now falls under a digital group, which I lead, right? So, panel, product, and marketing are all aligned because, in my opinion, without the panel, our products really don’t… They’re nothing special, right? 

[25:35]

That’s right. It’s an empty house.

[25:36]

Yeah. The combination of these two things make us incredibly unique and powerful in the spaces.  We can do really cool and creative things like integrate a Quick Community, a qual-online-function chat within our QuickSurveys platform, right? Because if you’re just a survey tool, then you’re one of 25 other survey tools. They’re all great survey tools, right? The uniqueness is that immediate access to a panel and then online panel that’s in 68 markets.  Now, we’re collecting 1 million completes every single day. So, we ask about retention rates and lifetime values. Since we integrated these teams, and I took over the panel team, I have been absolutely obsessed with this ‘cause there’s no bigger waste in my mind than sending people into a router, into your survey engine and having them go through 10 minutes until they get to a complete. And in this day and age, when we know so much about people, it makes no sense that I’d send them into a blind survey that I know after 10 questions, it’s going to have a screen out.  This is something that we’re still challenged with today; this is an industry challenge. 

So the things that we’re focused on right now is that we’ve got so much profile data on people, whether it be stated, claimed, whether it be tracked, whether it be through a DMP, that we need to do a better job when we’re putting a project out to our panelists:  that we understand what that project is so that I’m not just saying, “OK, I’m throwing 10,000 starts at a project to get to 1000 completes.” We know that there’s going to be a screen out, and we know that this person will get screened. There’s no point to send them out to the firing squad. Right? So, for me, the biggest improvement in a panel experience is getting them to complete because let’s be honest, they’ve joined this panel to get rewarded, right? And if they’re not getting rewarded, then we’ve wasted their time, and they’re not going to come back. So although we’ve done historically a really good job with this, we can do far better. And our focus right now is to have the best panel experience from start to finish. And it helps that our router is built and owned by us too. So, we can play these mechanisms; we can play these games with within the system. So, first-time joiner gets high IR studies, gets shorter studies. They get into the process of being in a panel slowly as opposed to a person who’s been in our panel for over a year and is getting hammered with 10 survey invites a day. Well, they’re used to that, right? So different segmentations of our panelists get different types of experiences, and those experiences are tailored to what we know about them. And then they’re getting rewarded and they’re providing their feedback and they’re providing quality feedback then. 

[28:00] 

Yeah, it’s like AI-enabled or machine-learning-enabled routing, right? You have access to my Google docs. I have a half-written white paper on your true LOI (Length Of Interview). Excuse me. And my thesis is that, on average, somebody that goes to the router is going to be disqualified seven times. In other words, the eighth time on average, they’re going to get into a qualifying survey, and they’ve probably answered the same six questions in each one of those screenings. Right. And so, you could be looking at upwards of six to nine minutes that the person’s already been just going through a qualification process, which has a psychological impact on your willingness to be receptive to new ideas and overall fatigue, etc., etc. 

[28:53]

It’s going to have a direct impact on quality too, because then they just make stuff up to hope to get qualified. 

[28:59]

Right. Just got to get through this. I’ve already given you eight minutes that I’m never going to get back. 

[29:04]

Exactly.  So, to me like the panel experience and lifetime value of panels isn’t just going to be one thing, right? It’s going to be a multitude of things:  how engaging in the surveys are. And you’re right. If we’re going to ask the same six questions over and over again to collect demographic information and profiling information, that’s a terrible experience for anyone of our panelists.  This is why we actually append this information. If we have that information and you’re asking for it, we don’t ask the panelists for it. It skips. So I think we’re doing a lot of the right things, but I think still just like every other company right now in the space, there’s so much that we can improve on. And this is really what we’re investing in right now. We’ve rebuilt our entire router mechanism this year, right? We’ve rebuilt; we’re collecting profiling attributes and how we’re leveraging profile attributes in projects, not just from our DIY platform but even from our project and field management teams.  Like how they’re integrating or how they’re using the profiles to get projects done, we’ve revamped that entire process too. So this year, I’d say, we’ve really changed our entire mindset of how we’re not just managing the panel, but how we’re leveraging and using the panel. 

[30:07]

I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about this whole…  We’ve seen massive disruption. Zoom had their S-1. I’m sure you had a peek at it. Insane growth in a completely saturated marketplace that had a very, very dominant Citrix site, I think, owned by Oracle.  Just dominant players and entrenched, and yet Zoom comes out with massive growth with 160 some odd percent. It’s just insane: the revenue numbers etc. You’ve got Superhuman, which is a sexy startup. We don’t know what the revenue numbers are, but everything about them says they’re going to be a big deal. They are basically just a better email client that sits on top of Gmail.  Anyway, obviously, Slack that everybody is using and familiar with. When you think about like Toluna, which is a storied, 20-year-old veteran in the industry, what are the three big challenges that you, as a chief digital officer, have to address? How do you maintain that tension between the established versus making sure that you don’t lose sight of the next big thing? 

[31:25]

I don’t think we’re that established at all, even though for a 20-year company or a 50-year company, right. The companies that stay ahead of these games or that are on top of innovation are constantly figuring out ways to innovate the norm or just what our clients need. So, you know, Qualtrics is 20-year company, right? And now everyone thinks of them as THE technology player in the space.  For us and it’s been proven by our growth and our revenue, our digital portfolio business is up 70%, each one versus each one last year. Right.  

[31:58]

Wow! Congratulations. 

[31:59]

Thank you. Our adoption of our technology, actually, is the easiest thing for us to sell right now. And it’s not because the technology is amazing, right. And it’s not because the panel’s great.  And it’s not because our service team is awesome and worldwide and are on 24 hours. It’s a combination of all three of these things. Right. And for us right now, it’s continued investment in these three buckets because weren’t really focused on…  Automation and agile insights is the thing right now. It’s been the thing right now. And while we can easily do that, it’s not going to be the single one thing that drives your growth or drives your adoption of clients because at some point they want automation, but, in some cases, the work doesn’t fit an automated solution. There has to be some attributes to that. And having that ability to allow your clients to choose rather than forcing your clients in a single solution that you offer is going to be what’s driving growth. So I’m really more focused on how we can be agile to our client needs, but at the same time ensuring costs and ensuring speed. 

If we’ve got to infuse our research team into the process to get something done for Colgate or Unilever or Coke or Pepsi or whatever, how we can pull them in quickly enough by using our own technology internally and then next time training them to how to use it themselves and then they can save more money and then giving them the ability to decide, “OK, I can take this on myself and save money or I’m going to pass it onto the Toluna and Harris services teams to do it for me ‘cause I don’t have the time or the resources.” That to me is how we’re going to continue to encore growth. I think as you go back to your point on staying at the forefront of innovation, you mentioned three things. I can’t really think of three things off the top of my head. 

[33:35]

Well, it’s not a test. That’s fine. 

[33:37]

For me, the way we build and the way we plan for our roadmaps within our engineering and product teams, most of the time it’s reacting to client needs and changes in the industry.  When we want a Quick Communities or online qual where we want to integrate digital tracking into our system, it isn’t because one person in our team is like, “Oh I got a great idea.”  No, it’s a combination of testing and working directly with clients. Like everyone in our product team is exposed to clients on a consistent basis. They’re not just sitting in a corner in a box and just building whatever it comes to their minds, right? We put them in front of clients on purpose ‘cause we really need to understand the client need. And if you ask a client how they want to do concept testing in the future, they’re going to always give you the same answer, but that’s not how we’re going to do it because that’s not…  They just want to faster, right? So we need to come out at a different angle to solve for that specific need. So, within our planning process, a lot of stuff is maintenance; a lot of stuff is enhancements. But then we always parse out 15% to 20% of our time on forward-thinking innovation, on testing new things, concepts and testing new ideas. And we have a team that’s constantly focused on understanding the landscape, not just of the market research landscape, but of other industries to see if there’s anything that we can take from there and then adopt into our technology stack and then to see if that’s going to be sticky and move forward.

So that’s how we’re trying to attempt to stay at the forefront of innovation. Now the problem is we’re a company and because of the way Frederic operates too, he LOVES to do new things, right? He loves testing new ideas, and he’s constantly pushing us to test new ideas. But at some point, you get to a situation where while you’re going to have like 35 products to manage, and that gets really difficult.  And you might even get to a riskier situation where you’re just average at 30 different things, right? Or even 10 different things. So try to stay focused on what we’re really, really good at, which is this NPD research flow from testing start to finish and then trying to parse out some time for really focusing on innovative new technologies to infuse that process is kind of where we’re at right now. 

[35:30]

You think like part of the…  As I reflect on my time in FocusVision, I’ve often wondered if I would have been better off having the individual brands maintain autonomy—kind of like the Google to YouTube, right—versus the single umbrella. I’m not second guessing my decisions. I just wonder, “Oh, would that have been an interesting…?”  Do you think that that sort of framework, is that something that you guys think has a place in the future or is it more of the just the bigger bolt-on brand? 
[36:03]

Yeah, I don’t know. I think it really depends on the environment and the solutions. And right now, we’re literally managing three brands at the moment, right?  We got a Toluna brand, a Harris brand and we’ve got the KuRun brand in China. And the more brands you kind of throw into it, the more expensive it gets to manage, especially from marketing standpoint too. So, if it fits, Harris Toluna from a solution standpoint, then it makes sense to roll it onto one of those brands at the moment. If it’s completely unique, then it justifies it being a standalone brand if it’s got a really niche following too, I think those are decisions that we make, but I don’t think there’s one right way or the other. For us, for right now, I’d love to just continue to manage the three that we have rather than adding another layer into it. But again, if the situation calls for it, then that’s what we’ll do. 

[36:50]

Yeah, it’s all about those auditable.  Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. So automation, big deal. I’m thinking about the one-use case that you highlighted already, which is this integrated qualitative follow-up into a survey.  We’re seeing automation continue to drive positive outcomes for both the end-user of the research, but then also the financial considerations or the multiples for the market research companies. What are, I’ll say three, but it doesn’t have to be three. A few, how’s that? What are a few…  three? OK, give me three tips. Give the listeners three tips that they should consider when thinking about bringing automation into their workflows. 

[37:34]

Yeah, for us right now, it’s what your goal is for the program ‘cause to me automation comes in so many different aspects of it. Like you take full end-to-end automation, like one of our power modules, which is a completely closed box for concept testing, right? It’s an automated template. It’s automated reporting, it’s automated sampling. It’s literally end-to-end automation. You’re telling the technology, “I want to do this concept test against three to nine assets and to millennials or to a group of people.” And then the technology takes it:  Literally, it’s a five-minute set up and your research is out there. To me, that works for a lot of our clients who do a lot of standardized testing, who do the same type of concept-testing survey over and over again. Right? But if you need to add a wrinkle to it and if you need some sort of customization to it, then it won’t work because, again, it’s a closed box. So what we’re seeing is clients want a blend of that. They want maybe like half of it or a percentage of the questions to be standard all the single time, but they then want to give their researchers or the consumer-insights team some flexibility to add out-of-the-box questions or if it’s specific to that concept or that product or that use case, they want to add some questions to it. So, once you start to customize the automated platform, it gets less and less automated. For us right now, the focus is, “OK, what’s the in-between?  Is it completely customized, which we know takes time? Right? And if it’s completely automated, we know it’s incredibly limited. So what’s that halfway point and that’s what we’re testing right now too. So really understanding the client need ‘cause some clients can fit in one or two of those different spectrums, but most clients now are fitting in the middle, right? They want x amount of completely automated and then they want the ability to do custom stuff to it. And this is what we’re providing within our platform today: You can take the standardized, completely automated function, pull it out of its box, and then just take bits and pieces of it and then do a blended approach to it. 

[39:22]

It’s kind of like Goldilocks, right? So, I think you’re right.  You almost have to have the three beds or the DIY, the fully do-it-for-me highly customized. But then also that layer in between.  You need to have the squishiness to accommodate for the hybrid approaches, which, I agree with you, actually I think is becoming more and more part of the need in the market. 

[39:44]

The challenge is that actually we’re facing today—well, not as a challenge—but the challenge we’re getting from C-levels at some of these brands is, “I don’t actually don’t want my consumer-insights teams to have a completely open system to do whatever they want,”  ‘cause like, you know, the CI team for detergents versus CI team for like handheld soap or whatever or different markets, CI in Italy versus CI in the UK, it might be testing the same products, but because they can do whatever they want, the methodology would be different. And it might test amazing in the UK, but really poorly in Italy because of how the test was conducted. So they’re pushing for standardization, which is great for us because that’s kind of what we do anyway. Right. But then when it actually gets into field to those specific teams, then those specific teams are, “Well, no, ‘cause it’s a different market. There’s some local things that we’ve got to ask or it also won’t make sense.”  Like what they’re testing in the UK may not necessarily make any sense to what they’re testing in Italy. And that’s kind of our challenge. Like how far can you give them an open box versus a closed box to what meets their business needs and each one of these different markets.

[40:46]

Congratulations on your success year over year. 70% is no joke. So, yeah, that is huge. I’m very excited about hearing more about the products that you guys are launching, and I’m hoping that you release a white paper on the stickiness factor for respondents given your pre-post positioning of the Influencer thing. I think that’d be really interesting. 

[41:11]

Maybe you can let me know when you’re ready, and we can collaborate on it. 

[41:14]

Oh, good. Yeah, don’t totally, I would love that. That’d be awesome actually. For sure. I’m going to coordinate that with Janice. So my guest today has been Phil Ahad, Chief Digital Officer at Toluna. Thank you, Phil, very much for joining me on the Happy Market Research Podcast today. 

[41:29]

Thanks, Jamin.  Take care. 

[41:30]

Everybody else, f you enjoyed this episode, please time screenshot, share it. I would greatly appreciate it. It helps other insight professionals like you find this content. As always, your five-star review is greatly appreciated it. Have a wonderful rest of your day. 

[41:48]

This episode is brought to you by HubUx.  HubUx is a productivity tool for qualitative research.  It creates a seamless workflow across your tools and team.  Originally, came up with the idea as I was listening to research professionals in both the quant and qual space complain about and articulate the pain, I guess more succinctly, around managing qualitative research.  The one big problem with qualitative is it’s synchronous in nature, and it requires 100% of the attention of the respondent. This creates a big barrier, and, I believe, a tremendous opportunity inside of the marketplace.  So what we do is we take the tools that you use; we integrate them into a work flow so that, ultimately, you enter in your project details, that is, who it is that you want to talk to, when you want to talk to them, whether it’s a focus group, in-person, or virtual or IDI’s or ethnos; and we connect you to those right people in the times that you want to have those conversations or connections – Push-Button Qualitative Insights, HubUx.  If you have any questions, reach out to me directly. I would appreciate it. Jamin@HubUx.com   

Have a great rest of your day.

My guest today is Jon Picoult, Founder and Principal of Watermark Consulting. Founded in 2008, Watermark Consulting offers consulting services to top brands around improving customer experience. Prior to founding Watermark Consulting, Jon served in leadership roles at both MassMutual Financial Group and American International Group. He holds a degree in Cognitive Science from Princeton University and an MBA from Duke University. 

Find Jon Online:

LinkedIn

Twitter

Website: watermarkconsult.net

CX ROI Study: watermarkconsult.net/cx-roi

Find Us Online: 

Social Media: @happymrxp

LinkedIn

Website: happymr.com

This Episode’s Sponsor: 

This episode is brought to you by HubUx. HubUx reduces project management costs by 90%. Think of HubUx as your personal AI project manager, taking care of all your recruitment and interview coordination needs in the background. The platform connects you with the right providers and sample based on your research and project needs. For more information, please visit HubUx.com.

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[00:00]

On Episode 229, I’m interviewing Jon Picoult, founder and principal of Watermark Consulting. I’ve got to say this is a marquee episode for Happy Market Research podcast. I have referenced Watermark Consulting’s report on their analytics over the last 10 years of the S&P 500 overperformers and underperformers. The one central theme: Overperformers all leverage customer experience, whereas under-performers are laggards. They are not leveraging it. We are seeing mainstay companies, CBRE and others, who have historically not really had research as a primary function in the organization, but they’re all investing in our field. This is an exciting episode. I know you will find a lot of value in it, but first a word from our sponsor.

[00:54]

This episode is brought to you by HubUx.  HubUx is a productivity tool for qualitative research.  It creates a seamless workflow across your tools and team.  Originally, came up with the idea as I was listening to research professionals in both the quant and qual space complain about and articulate the pain, I guess more succinctly, around managing qualitative research.  The one big problem with qualitative is it’s synchronous in nature, and it requires 100% of the attention of the respondent. This creates a big barrier, and, I believe, a tremendous opportunity inside of the marketplace.  So what we do is we take the tools that you use; we integrate them into a work flow so that, ultimately, you enter in your project details, that is, who it is that you want to talk to, when you want to talk to them, whether it’s a focus group, in-person, or virtual or IDI’s or ethnos; and we connect you to those right people in the times that you want to have those conversations or connections – Push-Button Qualitative Insights, HubUx.  If you have any questions, reach out to me directly. I would appreciate it. Jamin@HubUx.com

[02:18]

Hi, I’m Jamin Brazil, and you’re listening to the Happy Market Research Podcast. My guest today is Jon Picoult, founder and principal of Watermark Consulting. Founded in 2008, Watermark Consulting offers consulting services to top brands around improving customer experience. Prior to founding Watermark Consulting, Jon has served in leadership roles at both Mass Mutual Financial Group and American International Group. He holds a degree in cognitive science from Princeton University and an MBA from Duke University. Jon, thanks for joining me today on the Happy Market Research Podcast. 

[02:52]

Hi, Jamin, glad to be here.

[02:54]

I have referenced your work on the show probably at least in five to ten episodes. I have also talked about your work at two talks I gave and then also in the industry and then also I teach an MBA course and I reference your work in that MBA course. I’m going to Michigan State; I’m on the board for their Masters in Market Research Program. I’ll be there next week. I’ll be talking about Watermark Consulting and specifically your report. I’m going to be diving in deep on this report on this particular podcast. That’s why pursued you so hard to be on it; so, thanks very much for joining me. But before I do, I’ve got to get to know you a little bit. Our audience likes to get to know you a little bit.  So we’re going to start with our patent question, if you will. Tell us a little bit about your parents, where you grew up, and how that’s informed your career. 

[03:41]

So, I grew up on Long Island in New York.   And my mom was a nursery school teacher; my dad was a Wall Street securities analyst covering stocks for insurance companies. And as far as how their upbringing informed my career, I guess I’d say that seeing my dad come home every night dressed up, suitcase in hand, kind of was my first exposure to the business world. I think that I sort of thought, “Well, Gee, that’s what I want to do.”  I even insisted to my parents back when I was in elementary school, I insisted on taking one of my dad’s old Samsonite briefcases and carrying my school supplies and my books and whatnot in a Samsonite briefcase. In hindsight, God knows what my teachers and my fellow students were thinking when they saw me…

[04:38]

Probably thought this guy just bought some stocks.

[04:39]

…tote that in elementary school. I mean really, but yeah, that was that was my upbringing. 

[04:45]

How old were you when, I assume you made some side money somehow working for your parents’ allowance, something along those lines? 

[04:53]

So actually, I did a lot of lifeguarding. That was my primary job in summers and whatnot and in winters too in indoor pools.  Did a little internship for my dad here and there. But where I really got the business bug, if you’re interested in knowing, was in college.  I wanted to DJ for the college radio station at Princeton where I went. The radio station was actually a commercial station, so a little bit different than other college stations in that it didn’t receive any money from the university. It was all self-supported through advertising sales. So, I’m the low person on the totem pole. And I said, “Hey, I want to get a show.” And there are tons of people vying for shows. They said, “Oh, yeah, you can have a show. You just need to bring in the money. If you bring in advertising sales, you’re going to be in a much better position to get a show.”  And so, actually, that was my first entree into business really was door-to-door radio advertising sales. And it’s actually where I first kind of got this taste of customer experience and understanding how the experience that you provide to people, even before they’re a customer, even during a sales interaction, how all of the elements of that experience can really do wonders in terms of helping to cultivate a relationship with people. And so, that was my first foray into true business. And I’m happy to tell you that I brought in a lot of ad sales and got a prime radio slot, a Sunday night oldies show is what it was called, 11:00 PM to 1:00 AM, prime spot on college radio.  And yeah, that was it. 

[06:22]

You know, if you decide you need another side hustle, we could use some help on advertising revenue on the show. I’m just kidding. 

[06:30]

That’ll be my fallback opportunity. 

[06:33]

So, did you buy any stocks growing up? 

[06:35]

I remember that my parents bought me some stock here and there.  When I first became of an age where I can invest myself, I was actually a mutual fund kind of guy. So, I shied away from buying individual stocks and was more schooled in sort of the idea of just diversification and so, yeah, I bought into mutual funds but started at a very early age and, yeah, so.. 

[07:03]

I’m fishing here, and what I’m really looking for is like you had some very good jobs. You’re in both places for quite awhile, right? Just under a decade. And yet you decided in 2008 to leave and start a consultancy, which is certainly in the early years, everybody knows that’s a saw blade of emotion, right? From the ups and downs, based on winning projects and delivering its projects. When did you decide that you were going to step out and start a consultancy?

[07:38]

So, I had always had an interest in putting out my own shingle. I think that that was just something that was inside of me all along even though I was spending my whole career in the corporate ranks, in large companies, no less. But I was always intrigued by the idea of putting out my own shingle in terms of having the ability to work on what really interested me the most and focus and build a business in a way that I thought it should be built and to have really complete control over that, which is not something, despite your best efforts, that you have when you’re working in a large organization. And so, in 2008, the opportunities sort of arose in that the company I was working at…  I had been hired by the CEO of the company. He left that company. A new CEO came in, wanted to choose their own team, which, of course, everybody has the right to do. And so, I saw the writing on the wall. And at that point, remember what was going on in the U.S. at that time: that was when the financial crisis was really bubbling up and at its height. And so, while I thought about looking for other executive opportunities at that time, I said to myself, “Well, Gee, you know, until I find the right opportunity, let me put that shingle out; let me get started. And it might just be a way to sort of bide my time until the next executive opportunity comes that appeals to me. Or maybe it’ll be actually a long-term endeavor.”  And it turned out to be the latter. And I’m very glad that that’s the way that it went. 

[09:16]

Who was your first customer? 

[09:18]

My first customer. The company, it was Marsh & McLennan. 

[09:24]

Not too bad. 

[09:25]

No, not too bad. And, actually, it was business that came through a connection that I had developed earlier in my career — the value of networking, of course. But yeah, that was my first customer, and it was a great customer to have, obviously, a name people would recognize.

[09:42]

Yeah, no kidding. And it’s nice being able to get to revenue is really important. But then I guess to the other point of it:  the validation that that creates or the social trust that that creates when you have that name behind you is a big lift to the business and you personally. 

[09:59]
Yeah. And actually, I tell this to people who I talked to who are interested in starting their own businesses and being an entrepreneur. And I tell them that when I first launched my company, what I realized was the number one priority had to be building credibility, particularly if you’re a boutique consultancy that’s trying to work in the same market as much bigger entities and, obviously, landing a marquee client helps in terms of building that credibility. But, quite honestly, for probably nine months when I first launched the company, my focus was purely on writing and speaking because I decided that was the best way to build credibility in terms of people — right or wrong, when people see you up on a podium, when they see your name in print and that you’re authoring articles and whatnot — right or wrong, it adds credibility. Hopefully, if you have something meaningful and valuable to say to them on that podium or in that article they’ll walk away feeling like, “Okay, this is a credible player.”  And that actually was my focus for nearly a year before even landing a single client was just building that brand, if you will, and that credibility so that people would take Watermark seriously. 

[11:14]

Yeah. I, obviously, completely subscribe to that point of view. It’s really a one-sided value exchange, right? So it’s you contributing to a market that, eventually, you are going to be able to have some level of harvest, but you just have to have faith as you’re going through that process that, at some point, it does turn up favorable to you. What kept you going? Cause that’s a long time to be contributing. It’s hard to do that discipline and not get the sort of instant gratification because social media at this point was still very early. So you didn’t have like all the thumbs up and likes, although I guess Tumbler and whatnot were trending at that point. So you, maybe you did get that sort of gratification on a short-term basis. But anyway, how did you keep the intestinal fortitude, as my grandfather used to say?

[12:07]

Yeah, this might be unique to me, but you talk about the delayed gratification. There was actually some instant gratification for me because I enjoyed writing and speaking very much. I continue to enjoy that to this day. And so, merely getting published. I remember the first time I had an article published in the New York Times. That was tremendous gratification. And the first time I landed a big speech in front of a large group…  So, even though there was an alternative objective, a longer-term objective in terms of credibility building there, personally for me, it was actually very gratifying to accomplish those things. And so, that definitely kept me engaged through the course of the journey. 

[12:51]

That’s awesome. So, tell me about a specifically difficult or a material challenge that you have overcome either personally or professionally. 

[13:05]

What we were just talking about, that would pretty much be it ‘cause starting a new company is a steep climb to begin with.  Starting a new company in the midst of the greatest economic downturn since the depression increases the difficulty of the dive. And so, I look back and say without question, that was the biggest challenge that I probably had professionally in terms of just overcoming that, given the headwinds, given the environment that I was operating in. 

[13:43]

So was the worst possible time to try to start a business. Anyway, I just finished talking with a few guests centric to user experience.  Our space is so interesting because nomenclature is really, really important: the words that we use to describe things. So we have these casts, right? We’ve got like market research that fits some place inside of the corporate kind of ecosystem. You’ve got user-experience research that fits there and, and you also have customer experience.  And, if you look at Google trends, you’ll see there’s an inverse relationship over the last ten years between market research and customer experience, which is very eyebrow-raising for me. We were talking about this a little bit at the beginning of the show. There’s this new group of researchers that are coming in and they might not… Market research feels a little bit, just being honest, it feels like maybe a little bit…  Not a lot of people know what it is, and it feels a little bit old school, whereas customer experiences is something that’s gotten a lot of attention in the media over the last couple of years. And you definitely see that from a Google analytics perspective. So, tell us from your perspective, what is customer experience? 

[15:06]

So, if I had to give you just sort of a phrase to define that, I’d say customer experience is really how customers FEEL about their interactions with your company or how they feel about their interactions with you. And it’s worth just unpacking that definition a bit because when we talk about the word “interactions,” how they feel about their interactions with your company, it’s very broad. Those interactions really encompass every live, digital and print encounter that they have with you through the entire customer life cycle, even before they’re a customer. The experience begins before somebody is even a customer. I’d argue the experience actually persists longer than many people would expect. You hope you never have a customer that defects from your company but, if they do, I would submit to you that that’s a touch point that deserves to be managed as carefully and intentionally as any other in your customer life cycles. So the “interactions” word is really very broad, and I think many people don’t understand that, particularly those, for example, who think customer service is synonymous with customer experience. Customer service is really just but one component, just the way user experience is but just one component of customer experience. So the word “interactions” is important to understand. And then, the second word really to unpack is this word “feel,” how they “feel” about their interaction. A lot of the behavior that you cultivate in people that is repurchase behavior or recommending behavior, referral behavior, it’s really driven largely by their emotional response to the experience as opposed to their rational response. As the behavioral psychologist Daniel Kahneman once said, it’s the emotional tail that wags the rational dog. That is true in customer experience.  And so, it’s not, for example, about how fast you answer the phone. It’s not about how quickly you turn around that quote. Those are all elements of it. But it’s that visceral reaction that people have, the emotional reaction that is, ultimately, what is going to drive their engagement with you. So that word “feel” is very important. And then the last word I’d highlight in the definition is the word “customer.” How customers feel about their interactions with your company. It’s important to understand that that word “customer” also needs to be defined very broadly. Sometimes, the customer might be an individual consumer; sometimes, it might be a business if you’re in a B to B business; sometimes, the customer might be a distributor where you’re trying to get shelf space or trying to somehow circulate your product; sometimes, the customer is a colleague that’s just down the hall from you or one of your employees. And I think that the techniques that companies use to engineer a great customer experience can actually be applied to all of these different constituencies not only in terms of engaging individual consumers, but even engaging employees at a company or job candidates ‘cause their customers in a sense. You’re serving them; they’re interested in applying for a job and… 

[18:12]

Glassdoor, Glassdoor, right.  Glassdoor is a…  

[18:15]

Right, right, yeah, sure. So that’s really how I would describe customer experience. The term “user experience” is, I think, that’s a very important part of the customer experience. But again, it is just one part.  And the market research piece, I think that is also part of the customer experience in the sense that, if you’re trying to deliver a great experience to your customers, what’s really important is to deliver a relevant experience. When I look at the companies that are legends in this regard, there are a number of key principles that I’ve identified that they do exceptionally well. And one is that they create a very relevant experience for people: something that’s pertinent, something that resonates with them both rationally and emotionally. If you want to understand what’s relevant to your customers, you need to cultivate insight, and market research and customer research is a key way of doing that. 

[19:06]

I need to rename the show.   

[19:11]

Do I get credit for that?

[19:12]

Yeah, you will definitely get credit for it. It’s something that I’ve really struggled with, to be honest, because I, growing up in the 90s inside of primary research, we really didn’t have a customer experience as a set-aside discipline that I was exposed to. I’m sure it existed. And now, in every way, it’s eclipsed market research from a visibility perspective. 

[19:37]

It has become sort of buzzwordy, which is a bad thing I’d argue. One thing that that troubles me is that the word, the term “customer experience” gets thrown around a lot in the workplace, but I don’t think everybody really knows what that means. And, as I said, the people that use that term interchangeably with customer service, I’d argue that there’s a big disconnect there in terms of their level of understanding. Also, if I just might, ‘cause you were mentioning about the market research and how it’s evolved today and whatnot and how it relates to customer experience, something that, I think, doesn’t get enough coverage and that people don’t talk enough about in the market research world is how market research is part of the customer experience. It’s actually part of the experience of the customers that you are reaching out to to conduct that market research. And the classic example I like to use to illustrate that are customer surveys that dissatisfy your customers.  We’ve all gotten those surveys that they could be like 20-pages long; they could ask you to remember things, an interaction two weeks ago that you have no clue about. And I think that — no offense to market researchers, to anybody in the research realm — but I think that’s something that people in that discipline would be wise to understand is that the work that they are doing is part of the experience itself, and so not only should it be used to cultivate insight, it should also be used to strengthen the impression that that customer has of the company that’s conducting that research. 

[21:19]

The point that you’re making right now is, in my opinion, should be one of the tenets (we should read a blog post on this) like tenets of research of what is the rubric-base understanding of “Should I do this project?” or I should at least check these boxes to ensure that…  Mobile compatibility is a great example. I launched a survey recently. It wasn’t my survey. I didn’t program it, but I was doing some work for it, and it was getting really bad completion rate and I’m like, “What in the world is going on? Incidents shouldn’t be this low.” It turns out it wasn’t mobile compatible, and in a world where you’ve got over 60% of respondents happening now on mobile devices… Anything I take is on a mobile device; I don’t sit in front of my desktop anymore and take a survey; I’m doing work at that point. We, as researchers, when we say that we’ve heard this said a lot:  “It used to be the case that brands were who said they were and now they are who their customer says they are…” This became very apparent to me at Decipher about 15, oh, gosh, less than that, like 10 years ago. We were doing this longitudinal study for eBay. We’d been doing it for a couple of years, and I looked at the email report, and we had just sent over a billion emails against this project over the period of time that we had had it. They were basically customer-satisfaction type NPS-ish thing, different than that but that was the gist of it. And I’m like, “Holy crap, that’s a lot of… That’s a lot of…”  You think like direct marketing, for example. You know what I mean? That’s like marketing department should have visibility on all those touches, and yet there’s zero visibility there. So yeah, research is an extension of brand. 

[22:59]

Yeah, absolutely. 

[23:01]

Your service is geared towards optimizing customer experience for your customers. Who are your customers? And I mean down to like who are you interacting with at the corporate level from a level perspective? 

[23:12]

Sure. So, the first thing I would say is — and this gets back to the definition of customer experience — the work that my firm does, I’d actually describe it as straddling two dimensions and that is the customer experience as well as the employee experience. Because the way I encourage people to think about it is a great customer experience is like a well choreographed performance. And there is an onstage component, which is all the live print and digital touch points that the customers see. But then there’s also the backstage component and that’s everything that’s going on behind the scenes, which, while invisible to the customer, nonetheless can exert a very meaningful influence on the quality of the experience that’s delivered. And backstage influences might be things like your hiring process, the types of people that you’re hiring, how you vet them, how you onboard them and train them, how you measure and reward them, the cultural norms in the organization, leadership behaviors. These are all things that create an environment that either can be conducive to creating a great experience or can undermine it. So, my firm, actually…  The work that we do with our clients often straddles those two areas, both the onstage and the backstage. And in terms of who we interact with at companies, it does vary quite a bit. There are companies that have at this point chosen to appoint like a chief customer officer. So it’s not uncommon for somebody like that to be our primary point of engagement. But there are also firms that we’ve worked with where it’s the CEO that just might be very passionate about this and is the one who’s driving the activity. We’ve also seen customer experience live in marketing; so, a CMO might be our primary point of contact. We’ve seen it live in operations where a COO might be the primary point of contact.

 And actually I think that that diversity of contacts and how this thing called customer experience resides in so many different places actually speaks to why it can be difficult to really nail this thing in an organization because there’s both an art and a science to customer experience. And if you think that it is just a marketing endeavor, you are doomed to fail. And if you think it is just an operational endeavor, you are doomed to fail. And I have found that the people we work with that are most successful are the ones who can actually dip their toes in both of those dimensions. People who might be a trained marketer, but they’ve got a good sense of the operational aspects of how to not just articulate a value proposition but to bring it to life operationally, to really weave that customer experience theme through every interaction that you have with a company. And then, conversely, we’ve worked with people in operations roles, who might not be classically trained marketers, but they understand that aligning the experience with the brand and how it is defined is critical. So I think it is kind of fascinating if you see just the variety of individuals that we work with and that are often reaching out to us for help. It really does reflect the criticality of having sort of a left-brain-and-right-brain approach to engineering customer experiences. 

[26:29]

What is the customer trigger for them to reach out? 

[26:33]

If we look at the most common reasons why people reach out to us, I’d say it probably falls into three or four categories. One is the company that says we’re just launching a customer experience initiative, and we need help understanding how to structure that.  Should we hire a chief customer officer? Should we create a centralized team? If we do, what should they be responsible for? What should their priorities be? And so, that’s one common type of engagement is helping them build almost that organizational scaffolding, if you will, on how to structure a customer experience improvement initiative. 

A second common type of engagement is when a company will come to us and say, “We know in our hearts that we can do better for our customers, but we’re just not quite sure where and how to start.” And so, we have a methodology that we use in that situation, which is essentially a very deep and comprehensive dive into the firm’s current customer experience, basically, answering the question: “What does it really feel like to be your customer?”  Because you might think you know what it feels like, but within the walls of the organization, often that view is very different than what it actually feels like to the customer. So helping them map that out for people, show them the highs and the lows in the experience, and to give them a very detailed road map for how to get from point A to point B, which, mind you, isn’t just about enhancing existing interaction points. It can also be about adding entirely new interaction points that don’t exist today but help to elevate the quality of the experience. So that’s a second common type of engagement. 

The third I’d say is when people are at an even earlier stage and they say, “Hey, you know, we’re hearing about this customer experience thing, but we need to sort of get our executive team on the same page with the what is it all about and how do great companies really manage it.” Or maybe they’re already there with their executive ranks, and they need help with the front line:  getting them to understand what is the customer experience and how can they personally on the front line each day…? What can you do in order to influence the quality of that experience in your role? And so, for that we’ve got a lot of educational programs that help spread the Gospel, if you will, around not just what customer experience is but the techniques great companies use to effectively manage it. 

[28:50]

So, let’s dive into the report. The findings, as I understand them, you’ve got the S&P 500, which has had year-over-year improvements for the last decade, material up and down, but total aggregate certainly up.  The analytics that you’ve done is to identify that CX leaders are about 45 points above the S&P and probably the eyebrow-raising part is the CX laggards are underperforming by 75 points, which I think is a really important.  That’s a material Delta between the two. So, talk to us a little bit about the methodology of the report and then maybe unpack for us this key finding. 

[29:36]

Sure. So, one thing that might be helpful is actually to talk just a little bit about the origin of the report and why we even chose to start doing it. And it goes back to when I first established Watermark a decade ago because something that I saw then as we were in that credibility-building stage, and this is something I even saw in the corporate world when I was in corporate roles.  But a lot of executives and companies pay good lip service to the idea of customer experience and good customer service. But the dirty little secret that everybody has that they don’t talk about in the town hall meetings with employees and whatnot, is that there is this inherent skepticism of “Does it really pay off?” And I think in part that skepticism is due to the fact that people see companies out there in the marketplace that seem to do a really bad job for their customers yet seem to be profitable at least for some period of time.

And so, when I launched Watermark, I was really thinking a lot about how do you open the dialogue with people to get them to entertain the idea that this might actually be something worth investing in. And I started to think, “Well, what is the language that every business executive understands?” And what it came down to was shareholder value. Whether you’re a public or private entity, that is a proxy for the value of my company. And so, I thought, “Okay, if shareholder value is the language everybody understands, can we demonstrate the value of a great customer experience in that universal vernacular?” And that really was the birth of the Watermark customer experience ROI Study. And so, what we did is we didn’t pick the customer experience leaders or laggards ourselves. We weren’t stacking the deck. We actually used research from other well-known firms that each year had established programs where they were interviewing over 10,000 consumers and ranking 200, 300 companies in quality of customer experience.  
We took publicly available information and, basically, created two portfolios, two model portfolios. The leader portfolio was made of the top 10 publicly traded companies in customer experience; the laggards were made up on the bottom 10. And then, what we did is each year when those rankings came out, we went back a year and calculated the stock market performance of those companies. Now, the reason we went back a year is because we wanted to insulate ourselves from the criticism that the mere publication of the report, the mere selection of those companies as the leaders or laggards, might actually drive their stock price. And we believed that whatever was happening in those companies was already baked into their performance the prior year before the research surveys identified them as leaders or laggards. So we did that, and, basically, year after year you assume that you create these model portfolios, you repopulate them each year, and you look at the aggregate performance.

And so what we found (we’re now up to 11 years of data that we have) over that 11-year period, as you noted, the customer experience leaders outperform the S&P by about 45 points; the S&P outperforms the laggards by about a 75. And if you look at the Delta in performance between the leaders and the laggards, it’s a three to one ratio. So quite significant. And something I would just say:  You noted that your attention was drawn to the, the difference between the S&P 500 and the laggards. And I think that’s actually a very important thing to highlight because many people, when they’re thinking about customer experience investment, they’re thinking, “Well, what’s the upside?” But nobody talks that much really about what’s the cost of not doing anything. And the cost of not doing anything is illustrated quite vividly and in great pain by those lagging companies that are underperforming the S&P and far underperforming the leading companies. The study, which has become, —  and I’m so happy to hear that you reference it frequently — and, as you probably know, it’s become one of the most widely cited studies in this area within customer experience. And I have found it is a great way to start a conversation with people who have an inherent skepticism about whether this stuff really pays off because it’s just hard to argue with 11 years now that this pecking order, this pattern of performance, has persisted. And I want to be very clear that it’s not a perfect correlation. We’re talking about portfolios of leaders and laggards that are outperforming, underperforming. The fact of the matter is there are a lot of ways you could screw up your business even if you have a great customer experience. And the example that I like to use for people is actually Borders Books.  Borders Books back in, I think it was, 2011 was actually the number-one rated company in customer experience. And within a year they were bankrupt. And the reason for that is because there were a whole host of things that they did in their business that just completely torpedoed their ability to perform. They locked in long-term leases so that when the real estate market collapsed, they couldn’t take advantage of lower real estate prices. They had four CEO’s in like five years. They had outsourced their e-commerce to Amazon, which is like putting the fox in charge of the hen house. I want to be clear that it’s not a perfect correlation, but what the study shows is that, on average, the companies that over the long-term are leading in customer experience are indeed outperforming the market and their peers. 

[35:18]

I’m really interested in this next part. How many companies are fitting into that underperforming? I know you said bottom 10% but, if you pull back a little bit, is it just a few companies? When I think about like the, the Delta – the 45 up, and the 75 down, which is a heavy weight, it feels like the majority of companies in the S&P are actually doing relatively well inside of this space, right? And then you’ve got this bottom 10% or really far away kind of a thing. And this is anecdotal; I haven’t actually crunched the numbers. I don’t know which companies are necessarily fitting in those categories. But really what I’m thinking about is the total addressable market for CX or consumer experience is, do you see that as a like is it going to grow a lot over the next few years? And I’m going to end on this last story. I was listening to a podcast, Donuts to Dollars [sic -Dollars to Donuts], which Steve Portigal’s the host of that, well-known user experience researcher. And he had the head of customer experience on his show. I forget the guest’s name, but the company was CBRE, and they didn’t actually have a centralized CX function or research function in the organization.  And over the whatever it’s been, (I think at that point it was less than a year when she did the interview) they had already had five staff there and were really moving aggressively from installation perspective. So my point is that you’ve got this really large organization that has not historically thought of CX as being playing a play, and, yet now they’re starting that investment piece. Conversely, you’ve got Facebook that, in and of themselves, has over 600 UX researchers, right. Forget about the other disciplines. Which is kind of like the other end of the spectrum. Do you think that the overall market is in CX is going to be growing or do you feel like it’s fairly stable? What’s your point of view over the next couple of years? 

[37:16]

Well, Gosh, I’m kind of biased probably to answer that question.

[37:19]

Both of us are and I feel like this is a little bit, and, to that point, I really try not to be a conversation with ourselves, which I liken to Fox News or something. But…

[37:29]

Let me answer your question this way. Here’s what I would say. I think that particularly today, (I think this has always been true but especially these days), I think that many forms of competitive differentiation are fleeting. New products and new technologies can pretty easily get from one company to another.  Cost leadership is difficult to achieve, let alone sustain, but a great customer experience and the internal ecosystem that supports it can actually be difficult to replicate and can accord tremendous strategic and economic advantage to a firm. And so for that reason, if I had to place my bets anywhere, it would be on focus in customer experience increasing over time and companies and industries that maybe didn’t think in those terms in the past, starting to think about it because I feel that in the inevitable march towards commoditization, it is the customer experience that will be your savior. I mean that is what is going to inoculate you from a lot of competitive forces that can turn your company into one of the many corporate carcasses that litter the road of those firms that thought that they were delivering something differentiated but, in truth, were not. 

[38:45]

Is it Clay Christiansen? That book that talks about the only real sustained point of differentiation is customer relationship. I think that’s right. Anyways, it’s either Crossing the Chasm [sic] or…  I mean there is no IP.  There’s nothing that you can protect.  Zoom is a great example of that in the market. We all saw their S-1 that was filed, and yet that company entered probably…  I mean so dominated with GoToMeeting and Oracle’s, the whole Citrix-type framework, and for another company to be able to come in and the offers basically the same exact thing, but in an optimized way — We’re using it now, as a case in point — it’s just remarkable. How if you pay attention to that, creates this whole land-grab opportunity even in completely entrenched and established markets. 

[39:37]

Yeah, I think that’s an excellent example. The example I also like to use for people is Blockbuster Video.  Blockbuster Video, they thought they were doing great. They could actually probably, and this is another common mistake that companies make, Blockbuster was probably looking at its customer retention statistics and was like, “Hey, we’re doing terrific.”  But what they didn’t realize, retention is not a proxy for loyalty. There are a whole host of reasons why your company might retain customers, but yet they’re not really loyal to you and, when something better comes along, they will quickly jump ship. Some people might call it sort of digital disruption and whatnot with some of the more recent examples of this with an Amazon and what it did to bookstores or what Zappos did to Payless ShoeSource.  I mean to me it’s not digital disruption. It’s about somebody coming along and figuring out a better way to skin the cat, a way to deliver a better customer experience. And if that happens to be enabled in part by digital technology, well, then great. But, if I go back to your original question about “Is the market going to expand?” I think if there’s any part of the business marketplace where people are thinking, “Hey, we don’t need to really focus on this,” it’s probably in those industries that are somewhat monopolistic where the thought is, “Hey, people don’t have a substitute.  So why should we be investing in creating a better experience from them?” But that’s when I point people to the examples of Borders or of a Blockbuster because somebody is always going to figure out a way to deliver that better customer experience to innovate. If you’re not doing it yourself, somebody else will do it for you, and that’ll be the end of your business. 

And a few years ago we started to do customer experience ROI studies for specific industries. And one of the industries that we selected was actually the airline industry. And we targeted it because many people say airline seats are a commodity. It’s like you’re going to fly with whoever gets you from point A to point B and you’re going to go for the lowest price. Well, we actually found that when you look at the customer experience leaders in the airline industry versus the laggards, it’s a very similar setup to what the study we’ve been talking about illustrates and that there actually is a performance premium for airlines that outperform in customer experience. That was something that surprised many people because they thought if there’s any industry where it’s highly competitive, highly commoditized, isn’t that it? But the fact is there are airlines like Alaska and JetBlue and Southwest that have figured out a way to break out of that mold. 

[42:08]

The Blockbuster example is really interesting cause it’s like the exact…  It’s the exact bulls-eye of a bad customer experience, right, because their business model was predicated on late fees. So it’s like when your business model is predicated on basically you screwing the customer, then you can pretty much guarantee you need to reach out to Watermark Consulting and sort that problem out. And, on the other side of it, I’ll talk a little bit about McDonald’s ‘cause I think McDonald’s has done a remarkable job of partnering with the buyers, the consumers, and identifying what the best value opportunity is in front of them. And I like the…  I think it’s four for two or something whatever the special is, but they run these various specials and they’ll actually tell people, “Hey, this is going to get you the most.” They don’t say it like this, but thank God I’m not in charge of the marketing department. But they don’t say it’s like, “Here’s the maximum calories for the least amount of dollar,” like that kind of thing. But they really have done an outstanding job of changing just the way that they interact with customers so that they are promoting to the customer, “This is how you can get the most out of your dollar right now.” 

[43:17]

Yeah. And also as long as you bring up McDonald’s, the other thing I think is worth noting about them is the consistency of the experience. I mean, you could argue whether you’re a McDonald’s fan or not, but the bottom line is you go into any McDonald’s, you can be pretty assured of what the experience is going to be like. And that is another component of a great customer experience. Creating any kind of experience sporadically is one thing, even if it’s a good one, but creating a really good customer experience consistently at every location, day in and day out, that’s an entirely different animal. And one thing you have to give credit to a company like McDonald’s for is, you know, whether you like it or not, the experience is certainly very consistent from outlet to outlet.

[43:59]

Yeah, it, you know, Gosh, okay, so this is funny and I’ll just personalize it a little bit. I actually go to McDonald’s about three times a week in the mornings. On my commute and they have good oatmeal. And I mean you can get oatmeal anywhere and it is, I think it’s probably equally healthy if I get it at Starbucks as well. So there, it’s a little bit cheaper. And so, I shifted because of the value thing to getting a different meal with some eggs. And I kind of got like once a week that was like my go-to breakfast. And it was always the same every single week for months. It was always the same until one time it wasn’t. And the eggs were runny, and I was like, “Never ordering that again.” And I, literally, won’t because of the fear of that, you know? So it’s, it’s interesting that you’re bringing that up because it really is such a hard freaking thing to do of delivering day in and day out that exact same customer experience. I remember at Decipher I had a customer and we would do great on like 15-20 projects and then one project wouldn’t go well. And I remember this client, he was at PayPal at the time, gave his feedback.  And he told me, “You know what, Jamin? I’d rather you just like decrease your overall quality just so I know what I’m going to get every single time.” 

[45:11]

Yeah, yeah. ‘Cause it could be jarring for a customer when you know, it’s like you’re spinning the roulette wheel, ”What am I going to get this time?” And that’s, that can be very jarring for people. 

[45:21]

Yeah, for sure. Anyway. Good. So, I want to end on this question. What is your personal motto? 

[45:26]

So, I’d have to say it is, “Seek to impress.”  Seek to impress all with whom you do business, whether it is individual consumers, business clients, whether they’re colleagues, coworkers.  I’ve always thought that if you’re aspiring to satisfy your customers, you’re aspiring to mediocrity and the key to delivering a great differentiated customer experience no matter what type of customer you’re talking about is to seek not just to satisfy them but to impress them, to leave that indelible impression that Watermark, if you will, that has them coming back for more and telling other people a about you. 

[46:04]

Perfect. My guest today has been Jon Picoult. Jon, thanks very much for joining me on the Happy Market Research Podcast.  He is founder and principal of Watermark Consulting. I’m sure that people can find you on your website. But maybe you could just give us a quick like how people could get in contact with you.

[46:22]

Sure. So, you can Google Watermark Consulting or you can go to a www.watermarkconsult.net.

[46:30]

Perfect. And, of course, that information along with his information on LinkedIn will be available on the show notes. Thank you so much for your time today. 

[46:39]

Thank you, I enjoyed it. 

[46:44]

This episode is brought to you by HubUx.  HubUx is a productivity tool for qualitative research.  It creates a seamless workflow across your tools and team.  Originally, came up with the idea as I was listening to research professionals in both the quant and qual space complain about and articulate the pain, I guess more succinctly, around managing qualitative research.  The one big problem with qualitative is it’s synchronous in nature, and it requires 100% of the attention of the respondent. This creates a big barrier, and, I believe, a tremendous opportunity inside of the marketplace.  So what we do is we take the tools that you use; we integrate them into a work flow so that, ultimately, you enter in your project details, that is, who it is that you want to talk to, when you want to talk to them, whether it’s a focus group, in-person, or virtual or IDI’s or ethnos; and we connect you to those right people in the times that you want to have those conversations or connections – Push-Button Qualitative Insights, HubUx.  If you have any questions, reach out to me directly. I would appreciate it. Jamin@HubUx.com   Have a great rest of your day.

My guest today is Steve Portigal, Founder of Portigal Consulting. Established in 2001, Portigal Consulting helps organizations bring insights about their users into their design and development processes. Additionally, he has also authored two books: “Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: User Research War Stories,” and “Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights.” And, Steve hosts Dollars to Donuts which has 24 episodes with remarkable guests including head of User Experience Research at Pinterest, Airbnb, Mailchimp, Goldman Sachs, and IBM.

Find Steve Online:

LinkedIn

Website: portigal.com

Find Us Online: 

Social Media: @happymrxp

LinkedIn

Website: happymr.com

This Episode’s Sponsor: 

This episode is brought to you by HubUx. HubUx reduces project management costs by 90%. Think of HubUx as your personal AI project manager, taking care of all your recruitment and interview coordination needs in the background. The platform connects you with the right providers and sample based on your research and project needs. For more information, please visit HubUx.com.

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[00:00]

On Episode 228, I’m interviewing Steve Portigal, founder of Portigal Consulting, but first a word from our sponsor. 

[00:11]

This episode is brought to you by HubUx.  HubUx is a productivity tool for qualitative research.  It creates a seamless workflow across your tools and team.  Originally, came up with the idea as I was listening to research professionals in both the quant and qual space complain about and articulate the pain, I guess more succinctly, around managing qualitative research.  The one big problem with qualitative is it’s synchronous in nature, and it requires 100% of the attention of the respondent. This creates a big barrier, and, I believe, a tremendous opportunity inside of the marketplace.  So what we do is we take the tools that you use; we integrate them into a work flow so that, ultimately, you enter in your project details, that is, who it is that you want to talk to, when you want to talk to them, whether it’s a focus group, in-person, or virtual or IDI’s or ethnos; and we connect you to those right people in the times that you want to have those conversations or connections – Push-Button Qualitative Insights, HubUx.  If you have any questions, reach out to me directly. I would appreciate it. Jamin@HubUx.com   

[01:36]

Hi, I’m Jamin, and you’re listening to the Happy Market Research Podcast. My guest today is Steve Portigal, founder of Portigal Consulting.  Established in 2001, Portigal Consulting helps organizations bring insights about their users into their design and development processes. Additionally, he has authored two books: Doorbells, Danger and Dead Batteries, User Research War Stories. I actually am ordering that one as soon as we are off this call. It’s on my list of things to do today, by the way, and then I’ve already ordered the Interviewing Users – How to Uncover Compelling Insights. Holy Moly, that is going to be super interesting.  And Steve hosts what is now my number one listened to podcast for the last two weeks. In fact, I’ve got a six-hour or eight-hour road trip coming up this Wednesday. All the episodes are downloading. I believe I’m going to be caught up at the end of that road trip. He’s got 24 episodes with remarkable guests, including head of user-experience research at Pinterest, Airbnb, MailChimp, Goldman Sachs, IBM, and the list goes on. Steve, it is an honor to have you on the Happy Market Research Podcast today. Thank you. 

[02:47]

I’m happy to be here. 

[02:48]

I’d like to start out with a quick kind of assessment of, from your point of view…  You grew up in a different area than the Bay Area. Tell us a little bit about your parents, your upbringing, and how that informed who you are today and what you’re doing. 

[03:03]

Yeah, I was raised by a single parent. My mom raised me and my sister in southern Ontario. It’s a suburb of Toronto. And, when we grew up…  This is sort of development in any big city. We grew up—it’s probably about 45 minutes from Toronto—but it was a small town. There were like orchards and things that you don’t see as much in…  Well, I guess there’s development everywhere, but I remember when we got our first McDonald’s like that kind of thing. It was pretty isolated. I grew up in the 70s. It felt pretty isolated and pretty small town, and now it’s just part of Toronto. It falls under the same kind of administrative area. So it’s definitely a different community than the one that I grew up in. But it was, I guess, a smallish town kind of upbringing. My mom worked for the Canadian federal government. She worked as kind of an administrator or a clerk for a benefits office. And, so growing up in a single parent household, like your mom was working  (I don’t know if we had the phrase “latch key kids” then), but we were the kids with like a string around our neck with a house key that we were the ones that were able to let ourselves into our house, which wasn’t, again, maybe not a common thing for many of my peers. So, you grew up in that environment. It’s a little bit of independence and autonomy and responsibility at maybe an earlier age. My mom’s workplace was… She’s serving the public a lot. It’s a lot of either manning the phones or being on the front desk, and you’re dealing with people in need that are contacting about benefits. And so, she would come home with stories every day, first of all about just the kind of work environment, which was pretty bureaucratic and maybe not about empowering people or creating rules that were safe and effective for the staff and the people they were trying to serve; but also just the stories of people that she would meet and  upsetting or funny or… She just had a lot of stories that had a lot of detail and a lot of complexity to them about just what it was like in that kind of environment. So yeah, when I was a kid there were no—this is such an old man thing to say—even just so before cable channels, before most people had VCRs in their homes, let alone before the Internet and in a very kind of monoculture, small town. Like we were one of only a few Jewish families. So we didn’t … You just didn’t get exposed to things through the course of your life, who you were in school with, what you had kind of access to. We had books, of course, a great library, but not the amount of culture and diversity that you’re exposed to and you know in the culture we live in now. So I think in some way her stories were just that sort of the biggest stream of what real life could be like outside the home of a child. It really opened things up and kind of a funny and challenging way I guess they were lots of different kinds of stories.

[06:22]

Are you an only child? 

[06:25]

No, I have a younger sister. She’s six years younger than me. 

[06:27]

And what does she do? 

[06:28]

She is a genetic counselor.

[06:30]

Okay. That’s heavy. 

[06:32]

It sounds very interesting. Yes, you are also dealing with people in…  I don’t know that it’s exclusively in times of health crisis. I think it’s sometimes also coaching them through or supporting them through where there’s questions or where there’s uncertainty. She also works with the public in a pretty intimate kind of way. 

[06:57]

It sounds like stories are a big part of your upbringing and, obviously, your career now as a user-experience researcher, right? How did you wind up in user experience?

[07:08]

How did I wind up in user experience? It feels like a series of opportunistic accidents or happenstance. Again, you have to anchor this in time. When I came out of graduate school, there was no (I guess the web technically existed) but there was no web industry. There was no web design. I didn’t know about software design. I barely had been exposed to industrial design, sort of the maybe the more historical source of creating innovative products was kind of coming out of that field. So I really had very little exposure or awareness that this work existed. I mean the work didn’t really exist.  So, this technology was starting to change how brands were talking to the world, how companies were making products. That created a lot of change that maybe I drafted along with. 

So, I ended up studying in graduate school human-computer interaction, sort of the academic, maybe precursor to user experience. But I was not trained to be a designer. It was an academic program. You learn to critique or analyze or create frameworks or explore things. It was not a practitioner degree. And again, I didn’t know that there were people who were designers working in this field. It was all sort of creating best practices for making software. And these kinds of large telecommunication companies was what we were exposed to. These kinds of academic papers that were coming out of the industry was what was feeding me. So that seemed like what I might want to go into. But again, I wasn’t trained to do that work. There wasn’t really training to do that work. I was very fortunate. I think this is part of the happenstance through a series of “Oh, you should talk to so and so.” I met somebody at a conference, and they gave me some names, and then you were maybe emailing or maybe phoning or leaving voicemails.  Months later I ended up with a job at—and this is what brought me out to the Bay Area where I am now—a job at this industrial design consultancy. So nominally I was (I wasn’t a designer) but I was working on human-interface design, and there was also this emergent practice in user research that was happening there. And I kind of apprenticed into that. It’s cool way to apprentice when it’s not like anyone really knows what they’re doing as opposed to it being handed down to you and here’s how we do it. We didn’t know how to do it. We didn’t know how to write a proposal, how to quote for it and how to describe it at an advocate for it, how to scope it. These things were all kind of…  

[09:56]

What year is this?

[09:57]

This would have been like 95 or 96. 

[10:01]

Okay. Super early. 

[10:03]

Yeah, and so over the next few years, we got good at, I think, the business part of it as well as the practice part of it. And we started teaching classes at the local schools about it. It became a thing where if you apprentice, eventually you become the journeyman and then you become the master and you can help other people apprentice. And so, we hired people with less professional experience and brought them in as well. So it started to become a thing that we knew how to do. So that was early times for sure, entry to this field.

[10:40] 

So, let’s talk a little bit; just set some context for the listeners. The majority of the of my audience is our market research professionals and predictive analytics companies or people in that field. Give us a little bit of a framework for user-experience research. It feels to me, as an outsider, that there’s a lot of overlapping methodologies, but the applications and even the vernacular in some cases is different, right?  So, where your user-experience research sits inside of the organization is not inside of market research. It’s a different part of the org structure usually. And then on top of it, just tuning into your podcast, listening to about people, your guests and yourself, the nomenclature is just different than market research. Talk to us a little bit about the evolution of user-experience research and, and then maybe get us up to date today in context of like a modern company.  So, I like using Lyft as an example. They have 5 market researchers and over 50 user-experience researchers. So, in a lot of ways you’ve seen user experience move this more kind of like niche don’t really know squishy and now it’s just it feels like it’s become a very dominant. There’s a lot of headcount that’s associated with it in the corporations. 

[12:04]

I would guess there are contrasting firms.  I heard a story about this yesterday where analytics and could we just call it traditional market research? (the more established, historical kind of practice) has more headcount, it has more impact and the user research is smaller.  I think you’ll see organizations where the balance is different or the headcount is different. Yeah, I’m hesitant that (You can hear the hesitancy in my voice.) I’m hesitant to try to define or make any kind of definitive declarations about any of this because it is sort of shifting and there are many perspectives on this and I don’t want to say something where, well, that’s completely wrong. So it’s just possible that I may be.

[12:53]

Everything I say I’m pretty sure is wrong half the time.  So, anyway, for what it’s worth, when you think about like Intuit is a good example of a company that leverages user-experience research heavily. They were my very first client at Decipher, and I’ve been working with them since 1996.  So super early days. They have in-house usability labs. Predominantly, originally, it was staffed by the market research team and then user experience—Just kind of taking them as a case study—sort of filtered into the broader organization. And so, one of the things that (maybe the question here is more “yes” or “no,” which is a terrible question to ask) but one of the things that I think I’m seeing is this democratization of access to the consumer so that you don’t have to be a PhD. 

It’s great if you are, but you’re seeing research being done in various levels across your organization.  And user experience, again, not categorically or like here’s the box that it fits in ‘cause that doesn’t exist, but user experience is basically just is part of like product, right? So, as companies are seeing more and more of their full customer experience be considered product, you’re seeing an adoption of things. Like Apple’s a good example. You look at their receipt and you understand it, right? I mean it’s beautiful like somebody’s actually taken a receipt and turned it into language, which if you look at almost any other receipt, it’s nonsensical. I’m not suggesting they have a head of product for receipts but, broadly speaking, the way that they’re doing this. And so anyway, it’s the long-winded way of me asking this question of really trying to see or understand:  Do you see user experience as a job function and then also maybe, more broadly, as just an adopted discipline across organizations increasing? 

[15:05]

The question is sort of about the language we use to describe this work. I would just be a little picky on the terms and I would separate user experience from user-experience research.

[15:17]

Okay, perfect.

[15:18]

We’re sort of talking about market research and how do we think about that relative to user-experience research. But then I think this is where it gets slippery because then we sometimes, and I hear this all the time, substitute user experience for user-experience research. 

[15:34]

I would love clarity on this point, by the way, because I am uneducated as it relates with this. 

[15:39]

Definitions of functions and so on are things that like design Twitter loves to argue about. So again, I’ll just blunder ahead here. To me, user experience is like a short for…  User experience is the thing that you are as an organization are creating. So, what does it like to buy a product from Apple? How do you find it? Where do you look to get it? How do you transact? What’s your out of the box experience? What’s the receipt look like? Right? And so that whole experience is designed. So UX, so user experience is sometimes called UX design. When you start talking about it in those terms, like the example of Apple, I think about service design, another sort of buzz word. But these things are more alike than they’re similar. But I think these words provide hooks to how to kind of even think about it. So what’s the whole service from the… ‘cause part of dealing with Apple if you go into the store is dealing with a person who has a way of troubleshooting with you, and a way of placing you in a queue, and a way of upselling you or not.  There’s so many aspects to what that person is doing, and they’re part of the whole experience that you as a customer or user have. So to me, user-experience research is a certain kind of research activity that’s meant to inform the decisions that are made around the user experience that gets created. And I think you kind of talked about product, right? I mean just look at the labels that we have for these things sort of shows where they come from. 

So market research is about understanding this kind of thing to make these decisions. User-experience research is historically about understanding these things to make these decisions. And I think there’s lots of gray area and lots of overlap and some of it may have to do with where’s their head counts, who do those people report to, what is that person’s portfolio, what’s their comfort zone, what are they advocating for? And then. I think you also hit on a really important thing:  this phrase that I keep hearing about, “democratization of research.” And you tied it to making increasing access or availability. And this is a hot topic in like the people that are on my podcast, the clients that I work with because the demand for—let’s just call it research and not even say what kind of research—the demand for research, fortunately, has grown, and now there are more questions than (This is like a be careful what you wish for, right?) there are more questions that need to be asked than there are resources, whatever we label these resources, to answer them. So, Lyft has however many people you said; they still (I’m hazarding a guess here) they can’t meet the demand that there is internally. So, I’ll throw another term out there. There’s a sort of a movement or a practice that’s emerged in the last couple of years called “research ops.” It’s the operations of a research. There’s a very active slack community. There’s more and more conference content around this. There’s a lot out there. And it is about within an organization at least, how do we create the circumstances whereby research can take place without every single person that wants to do research having to figure out “What is research?”, “How do I learn how to ask questions?”, “What data do we already have?”, “What do we have access to?”, “What data storage, privacy management requirements do I have to comply with?” So putting practices in place such that people who are quote “researchers,” that’s their title and people who are product people and people who are anybody or some subset of anybody can get access to this information in a way that is of high quality and that helps them drive towards these kinds of decisions. So, I think that the infrastructure and that access is happening. The other thing that seems to be happening, and I don’t have as much of a buzz word for this, but I think it falls under the democratization bit, is as more people in the organization understand the potential of understanding who people are and what they’re going through and where we might play differently to address their needs. 

That’s being turned into opportunities to improve so many parts of what an organization does. So marketing teams are working with (I’ll just air quote) “user-experience researchers” because they realize, “Oh, we can do something with this.” The last consulting engagement I’ve just wrapped up was with a human resources team that’s looking at what the recruiting process is. So we’re looking at the user experience of being a hiring manager, being a recruiter, being a candidate, and what are the processes that are put in place to support that, to get to the outcomes the organization has as a goal, what are the tools that are, that are designed, you know, technology and other to make that happen. So that’s not about the product of the company. It’s not about the market of the company, but it is about this company functioning better to achieve its goals. So that to me seems very exciting that that they’re starting to be broader acceptance than maybe some of these, these walls are coming down and that the potential for all the work that we’re doing to have impact across other parts of the organization is growing seems very exciting to me. 

[21:07]

Yeah, I mean anytime you ingest the consumer into a business decision, then as long as it’s not like you’re not mixing qual and quant or whatever, you know, dangerous traps you might fall into, you know, you can’t take a micro insight and extrapolate it to a market, for example. But you know, as long as that doesn’t happen, presumably, and you’re asking questions in the right way, you as an organization are going to be consumer-led and therefore, have a better outcome. The other term that I’ve heard a lot, especially since the Qualtrics acquisition by SAP is customer experience. I pay a lot of attention to Google trends and customer experience is actually like crazy how it’s ramping right now. Do you see that interchangeable with user experience? 

[21:56]

Right? There are, I think plenty of Medium articles out there that say, “What’s the difference between CX?” Cause if we want to be really cool, we have to abbreviate it. “What are the differences between CX and UX?” My eyes glaze over a little bit when I hear that. I don’t know. And maybe that’s just the privilege of being a consultant. You sort of get dropped into a lot of different parts of the organization, but you’re not responsible for the overall map or maybe just intellectual laziness on my part. I don’t know. I would never be the person to…  You can hear how I struggle with definitions of what this is and what that is. 

[22:32]

Yeah, and again, I’m not trying to paint you in a corner here. I’m just trying to kind of level set in the context of these trends that we’re seeing and try to understand. We used to have NPS, for example, as being the god of the state of your business, right? And if you got a 60% NPS and you’re just doing fantastic.  And now you’ve got a new, I forget the name of the scale, but a new product market fit scale that is starting to usurp the NPS. So, it’s a three-point scale and instead of it being framed in a positive, it’s now a negative. How upset would you be if your product was not available to you next week? And if you’re on a three-point scale, if you’re very upset, then that’s a win. So now we have this double negative. I’m like, “How can we make this more complex?” I don’t know. Triple negative maybe will be the way we end in five years from now, right?  But that’s fine. So, it might just be the case that we just see the same thing but called a different name because we have a generation that’s coming up that doesn’t necessarily have that point of reference, right? I don’t know. For me, and I’ve read a lot of content. In fact, I’m speaking at Michigan State and for like two hours on this particular topic. Thank God there’s more, but this is like part of the thesis is that you’re seeing this rise of these other disciplines, but really they’re all trying to do the same thing. It’s just more the lens of that or the culture of that organization and how they’re adopting it, whether it’s CX or UX. I do think that market research fits outside of that to a limited degree. But there is clearly that on that Venn Diagram, which again is something I would love to see if you’ve seen that Medium article, kind of the overlap of type of work done. That would be super interesting.

[24:20]

Right. I think it needs to be built. I mean probably someone’s taken a wag at it. But I’m excited for this conversation ‘cause even as we’re going back and forth on terms and how we kind of create alignment around terms, I think that the language becomes a boundary object.  It keeps us apart from talking about similar goals, maybe identical goals, maybe adjacent goals, the super set of our toolkits, our complementary ways of thinking about things. And you know I think introducing a new tool, introducing a new terminology, it can be done in a way that invites other people in other, other functions in, or it can be done in a way that we use to hold onto our potentially dwindling territory. Again, I don’t care about a lot of these terms, but I pay attention to the culture that kind of grows up around them, like how we talk about them and how we use them to educate and inform our clients, our internal clients, our consulting clients as well as our peers in this practice. Obviously, my hope is that we can take everything that we have access to. And not everybody is interested in everything or good at everything and the diversity of kinds of brains that are brought into the work to solve problems or create insight in different ways is where I see a lot of potential or I see a lot of excitement and what personally I’m looking for. I’m super smart, I think, but I am looking down a tunnel, that’s just how everybody is. So the more I can get access to other how other people unpack problems or create questions or pull insights out of things in a way that levels up what I am doing and adds value to it, then all the better.

[26:22]

So, as a fellow podcast host, there’s this space between…  So, we do a podcast, right, and it’s however long it is, but then there’s this bit that happens at the beginning of the podcast that isn’t ever published. And then there’s this kind of bit that happens at the end of the podcast that again is never published. Probably some of the more interesting things, conversations that I’ve had have been on those ends, right? They aren’t really necessarily part of the organic conversation that happens in the structured, the published, that sort of thing, right? So, you’re nodding your head. So, I’m assuming that you’ve had similar experiences. 

[26:59]

This is the phenomenon in user research, for sure. And it comes from medicine; it’s  the “doorknob phenomenon.” So, in medicine, people will go to see a clinician of some kind and go through the whole meeting, appointment and never really say what’s going on. And then, as they’re standing up and walking towards the door and putting their hand on the doorknob to turn it and leave, they’ll sort of turn over their shoulder and say, “Oh, I did want to ask you this one thing.” And it’s like the…  So, this happens in user research, right, that the tactical pieces don’t turn off your recording device ‘cause there’s something about, “Well, this is great; this is very helpful. Thanks for the time. “We learned a lot from you.” Sometimes, not always, but sometimes that… And if you’re giving someone an incentive, you might like hand it to them right away or put it right in their hand and hand them their forms, whatever sort of paperwork, kind of wrapping up, sometimes that can trigger this. “Oh, you know, I have the story about when I was a kid.”  I don’t say always like, always the good stuff is there, but just you want to allow space for that to happen and not in a sneaky way. Sometimes, I just won’t touch my recorder. It’s there on the table and they can see it and the red light is on and I’ll just keep going ‘cause they’re going to keep talking.

[28:30]

So, in those kind of edge, kind of the stuff that’s outside of the show, what are you picking up on in terms of major trends inside of user experience? I’m really interested in that ‘cause you have such a …  You have the highest caliber guests on your show, right? I mean they’re just amazing. What are the trends that you’re hearing from them and you’re seeing in your own consulting practice that are emerging and where we should be paying attention to for the next few years if you can project out that far? 

[29:03]

There’s some distribution. If I was a smart stats person, like people watching this, they would say, “Oh, yeah, that’s the whatever distribution.” But you know the people that go on a podcast who are…  There’s such a sampling bias, I guess. I find people who are in-house in a leadership role around user-experience research. Well, there’s lots of organizations that don’t have leadership. They haven’t sort of invested enough that, “Hey, we need a leadership role dedicated to this alone.” So you’re seeing these kinds of organizations. What you don’t see from my podcast is the phrase is “the user-experience team of one.” There’s even a book with that title by Leah Buley. It’s about…, and I think it’s a passionately embraced book ‘cause there are all these people out there who (We talked about head count at the beginning) who are in organizations where they are in a mid-level role. They may be tasked with something else. They may be a designer who’s trying to create wireframes for the evolution of an app.  That’s kind of their main task. And they’re the ones saying, “We have to talk to customers. I need this information. We have to understand the problem and we need to evaluate our design decisions to see if this is going to resonate or work for people.” And then they’re taking that work on in their ample free time. So, these people I think are amazing, and they are struggling, I think, for resources and for some sense of, “Am I doing this right? Am I having the impact? What’s the magic thing that I should be doing differently?” Whereas it’s not really about them, it’s about their context. So, in terms of trends, I think we see more from a certain category of organization where there’s investments, but I also just see job ads on like slack channels or whatever groups you circulate in. 

Back in the day it was companies that we know:  the Googles, the Facebooks. It was the Yahoo; it was a big leader in a lot of usability and so on. I mean, you talked about Intuit. These are like companies that have invested, are big, that are high profile, that have invested heavily and we all know of them. If you work in tech or if you use tech, you know these companies. But some of my colleagues, some of the people who have been on the podcast, for example, leave those organizations and then I see what their next job is.  Or the job that I see posted are for companies I have never heard of who are small. There’s more things in like fintech, financial technology companies, that are not big banks but are little companies here and there that are trying to disrupt something established; logistics companies; just people making things that we don’t even know as a thing that gets made and they are starting to hire and then even hire leadership roles and really invest in this as part of how they are going to build things that are going to create the kind of change that they want as opposed to this being something that gets added in years later when they go public or try to go big or want to be acquired. It’s happening earlier. I think about this for myself, just my own practice, “Who should I be waving my hand at and saying like, ‘Hey, I exist. I can help you,’ “ when I don’t even know these companies are out there that are starting to get excited about this and, again, invest in it. For the work that we’re all doing, this is I think tremendous, right.  I think it’s happening earlier in a company’s growth, and it’s happening in a dedicated specific way. 

There’s a job req that has research in the title that is written by someone that—let’s just say they probably know somewhat about what they’re doing. I don’t have a critique of how recruiting is happening.  You can see that it’s happening in all these kinds of nooks and crannies of products and services and brands and technology. Yeah, that’s to your point, that’s in the kind of the corners between what’s coming out on the podcast and it’s just things that I am coming across in my kind of journey through the field. 

[33:23]

Interesting. So you’re seeing as it being…  I mean, obviously, it’s growing in the big company way, but you’re seeing it as something that companies are adopting a lot earlier in their life cycle. And it’s funny you say that cause I’m going through right now this startup phase with my new company. And as part of it, I thought it’d be a good idea to enroll in startup school, which is a free access to free resources. So, in this particular cohort 2019, I believe, it’s 23,000 startup companies, which is amazing. It would be interesting to see a word cloud or something more sophisticated done on like the natural language processing of the presentations we’ve heard. But I bet you “talk to your consumers or customers or users” would be the number one thing that would be flagged or in the top like that and “get to revenue” probably would be the top two things they talk about, right? And so, like there’s a big cultural shift moving away from the “build it; they will come” framework. 

[34:33]

Yeah. I’ve been spending a little more time with my clients and at conferences with the product management professionals, who are super excited about talking to customers. And it’s a thing that they’re doing. They maybe don’t know how overall, but they’re are hungry and they…  It’s not a thing that needs to be persuaded. It’s a thing that’s already understood. And so, the question is how and when. And that also is very exciting. In talking about cultural shifts, it’s just more default now. And I think this is interesting, and it raises challenges that collectively I don’t think we’re ready for. And it goes back to the democratization thing and I think one of your questions was about like, “Is this a role or a process?”  I can’t remember how you phrased it, but is user-experience research or market research or just whatever we want to call it, talking to people to gain insight? Is that a thing that a person with that job title does? Or is that a task or is it a department? How would we ideally want to structure it in eight years to take advantage of this? And I think the corollary there, or the caution also is I fear commoditization of the work and that, obviously, is because I’m a provider of the work. So I’m very biased in that.  The commoditization could be good. I think it’s our job as professionals with these labels to hold onto quality. And so, how to do that in a way that is inclusive that’s inviting people in; it’s not we have to control it. But anyone that does market research, user research hates crappy research that gets misused and propositions get made. 

That is not the thing we want to have happen.  And it is a skill. So as much as we are creating content and writing books and creating all sorts of stuff that empowers people to do it, it also is easy to do poorly and hard to do well. And I don’t have an answer for that. I’d rather be encouraging than sort of fear-mongering, and I want people to do it in practice and get better at it. But I also want there to be…  Not everything needs to win a gold medal, but I think sort of understanding the trade offs that you make. 

[36:56]

Yeah, based on the level of professionalism. I think that’s a solid point. I think, when I first started my career, when I started my career in market research, the way that we priced projects was 3x. So it was like, what’s my costs? Like my recruiting costs, my whatever. Right? And then I just multiply that by three and then I had my project price. I’m not saying that was universal, that was just how we did it in the 90s, how I did it for the company I worked for and was trained to do. So the value there is, obviously, connected to the difficulty of the logistics as opposed to the size and implication of the insight that is being gathered from that particular project. It’s easy also for consumer of research to pay for a large project ‘cause they recognize this really difficult logistically. 

There’s this sidestep that makes it easier for an expensive project for you to pay a lot for it on the analytics side.  So, now to your point, it’s becoming easier and easier to talk to the consumer, which I think gets to a really important issue, which is how do we ultimately price this? Right? Because you can’t just have it as a direct relationship between time value. You know, we’re not lawyers, right? The learning how to have a productive conversation with the consumer that’s going to change, going to have $100 million impact on a business, that’s not a $500 interview, presumably. So, yeah, I don’t know. that to me has my eyes wide open right now on how the terms of trade are going to evolve over the next three to five years, especially as different web services create the perception that I can just upload my data and get a magic answer. 

[38:49]

And then the other factor is that, if you go back to the eras that you and I keep hearkening back to, this work was only done outside corporations, right? They didn’t have…  I mean Intuit wasn’t an innovator in the 90s but for the most part if you wanted this work, you went to a consultant, an agency. And now, that’s the reason I can have this podcast where I talk to people who are in leadership roles in-house is because the investments and the growth is all happening inside organizations and that infrastructure, that operational infrastructure, serves them. It doesn’t serve vendors or consultants as well. And those of us on the outside that are trying to provide that external perspective, external expertise, we are in dwindling numbers. I think that creates concerns that…  We were talking about the podcast a little bit in what that reveals. It’s so interesting to me to talk to people inside of an organization about research and hear them talk appropriately like corporate people. And it’s not a knock on corporate people, but you spend all your time inside a culture. You have a lot of language and a lot of shorthand and there’s just a way of talking about things. And back in my day, as a researcher that was a consultant, your job was to bring that outside in as to mirror the language of the world, not the language of the producer of the tool for the world. And when the person who sort of bringing the outside in is part of the in, they’re going to do that very, very differently. 

So again, I think in a dramatic way I would say they’ve been co-opted. I don’t think that’s true. But the practice has evolved and so, I’m the external voice, but research is being owned by people who are internal voices and they have a stake in the outcome. They are the product success. They have maybe a financial incentive or a job security incentive.  And I think market research, user research, it’s kind of a truth-to-power job. And that’s just very interestingly different when the context changes and the people who work in-house can do so many things that I can’t do because they have that internal map. They have those relationships; they have the history; they have the language; they can speak the language. I can’t speak the language. So the best for me is to have a partnership with that person where we can kind of leverage each other’s strengths and deficits. But, obviously, most research is being handled entirely in-house by in-house, people who are part of that culture. And I don’t know that we have a…  We may need to wait a few more years to sort of see what does that mean, what does that look like and what’s gained and what’s lost and what do we want to do to address that? 

[41:47]

What is your personal motto?  

[41:50]

My personal motto is, “Just keep going.”  I don’t know if I can unpack that a little bit. Some people will have a real plan for everything, and they aim for something and go towards it.  I maybe have a little more of a “informed stagger” towards things. 

[42:08]

I love that. 

[42:11]

You know, and I like surprises and challenge. I like leading a life that’s filled with surprises and challenges.  I don’t know that I like having surprises and challenges. It’d be nice if everything was simple, but I’m doing this for a long time. I’ve been running my own practice for a long time. I still feel like I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m paying attention and thinking about how things are changing. I don’t know what, of all the things we talked about, nowhere in my head is like, “And, therefore, in my own business to be successful, I will do this thing differently.” I don’t know. But like I did Improv for a few years and I’ve talked about improv for a long time as kind of a creative problem-solving mindset. And part of that is you just keep going, you just take things as they come and you add to them and you add to them and you don’t overplan. And things come out of that that you could never have made happen if you had intended to make them happen. And so, it’s a bit of a philosophy. I don’t know. I can’t say I live up to that perfectly all the time, but I think that’s what “Just keep going” models, and it goes back to one of your first questions about what I learned from my family and I think that is also what I saw growing up and probably how we all have learned to succeed as best we can, I think, in a world that you can’t control. 

[43:34]

My guest today has been Steve Portigal, founder of Portigal Consulting. Did I totally screw up the name?

[43:43]

I sympathize with you as a fellow podcast host to say somebody else’s name comfortably is hard even when you’ve asked them before the recording went on was like I said it and you said it back. Yeah. And it’s right.  Saying something out loud that somebody else’s name is hard to do authentically. 

[44:02]

And it’s so important. Thanks for that. If you have any questions at all about user experience, user-experience research and customer-experience research—I’m going to throw that in there too—I hope that you’ll reach out to Steve. His contact information will be linked in the show notes along with the link to his website and Linkedin profile. He’s also very active on Google user group for user experience in the Bay Area, which is how he and I originally got connected. I haven’t found a ton of value on everything he posts. I’m very appreciative, Steve, of you joining me today on the podcast. Thank you so much sir. 

[44:44]

Thank you so much. Really great conversation. 

[44:46]

All the rest of you, if you found value in this episode as much as I have or even just that 10th as much as I have, please take the 50 seconds it will take you to screenshot this, share it on Twitter, tag Happy Market Research. We’ll repost it. As always, our five-star reviews mean the world to us and help everybody else that’s like you find this content. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. Oh, and by the way, I would encourage you to check out Steve’s podcast Dollars to Donuts. Again, I’ve found it very interesting and enlightening relative to, as a market research professional, being able to be relatable to user experience or user-experience research or customer experience. Right. I don’t even know what now, but anyway, something like that. Some nomenclature, very beneficial. Enjoy. Have a great rest of your day.

[45:35]

This episode is brought to you by HubUx.  HubUx is a productivity tool for qualitative research.  It creates a seamless workflow across your tools and team.  Originally, came up with the idea as I was listening to research professionals in both the quant and qual space complain about and articulate the pain, I guess more succinctly, around managing qualitative research.  The one big problem with qualitative is it’s synchronous in nature, and it requires 100% of the attention of the respondent. This creates a big barrier, and, I believe, a tremendous opportunity inside of the marketplace.  So what we do is we take the tools that you use; we integrate them into a work flow so that, ultimately, you enter in your project details, that is, who it is that you want to talk to, when you want to talk to them, whether it’s a focus group, in-person, or virtual or IDI’s or ethnos; and we connect you to those right people in the times that you want to have those conversations or connections – Push-Button Qualitative Insights, HubUx.  If you have any questions, reach out to me directly. I would appreciate it. Jamin@HubUx.com