A Success Story
One realization we came to early on was that we should aim to keep our conversations informal and relaxed to make our customers feel comfortable sharing their experiences and attitudes with us. We also knew that we would want to keep the discussion of software bugs or problems with functionality to a minimum. These points are valid, but we have a dedicated service desk to address them.
We wanted to understand what users want to do with Celonis rather than to collect a list of their issues and missing functionality to resolve. This is a common aspect of UX field research. In fact, the enterprise software company Intuit credits their early success to a user research strategy developed alongside its first successful software, Quicken, which was designed to help consumers balance their checkbooks digitally at home. Initial surveying of their user-base revealed that, unexpectedly, people were using Quicken mostly at their offices, which prompted management to ask why this was the case. Through their "Follow-me-Home" approach of on-site observation, which involved researchers following customers back to their offices to witness their first interaction with the software, it became clear that the unexpected issues and complaints their users originally reported finally made sense within the context of its usage. What was their shocking discovery? The creators of Quicken had unknowingly developed a revolutionary new tool to handle accounting for small businesses. With their clever research tactic, Quicken evolved to incorporate even more powerful functionality and its strategic trajectory changed.
While we cannot follow customers home from a store to observe their behavior like the researchers at Quicken did back in the 1980’s, we are able to speak with novice users and those that work to get Celonis adopted within their organizations. Fortunately, our first interviews proposed were to be done with Celonis champions, which we characterize as individuals who are particularly invested in our software’s success and who are making Celonis successful within their organizations. We took into consideration the fact that our champions would be the most willing to take time out of their busy schedules to meet with us. And, for our first interviews, it would be the most conducive environment for us to refine our research methodologies to be expanded to other customer types.
Our first step was to understand from our customer success managers what we might expect from these individuals we would speak with, and we supplemented their perspective with any public information we could uncover pre-interview. For example, we spent time understanding our customer’s background through LinkedIn, where we found better insights into their education and their history with the company they work for. This was incredibly inspiring and uncovered obvious questions we could ask to better understand how Celonis compliments their role’s responsibilities and vision. Our next step was to compile a series of standard research questions.
One of our favorite interview questions is, "How would you describe your unofficial job title?" We typically ask our customer after we have gone over their official duties.Their unofficial job titles usually reveal a more realistic picture of their day-to-day duties and how they interact with Celonis.
