Why and how do you carry out a customer field study

If you’ve explored all methods to gain a solid understanding of your customers, i.e. 1:1 interviews, group interviews, and workshops, but still fell short, perhaps it’s time to try field study.

In this context, field study means visiting the customer’s proprietary business area for a few days and observing their activities in their authentic environment. Without disturbing any work, have conversations with every type of persona who uses your product.

This article covers the motivation, research preparation and process. Feel free to scroll to the parts that interest you the most.

Why are usual research methods not enough

Comprehension of the entire customer journey

It’s common for B2B SaaS software to solve complex issues and run massive processes, which often involve different personas collaborating on the same task. For Product Managers who must think through the end-to-end user journey in order to design suitable product logic, it’s paramount to have a solid understanding of the entire journey and the people involved.

What we usually do is interview users, exploring their perspectives, pains, and needs. However, some users are easier to get in touch with, and some nearly impossible. So we end up knowing one or two, but now all sides of the story.

For example, incident management software such as ours offers ultimate visibility into what’s unsafe in the production area, so that the safety managers can make data-informed decisions to prevent incidents from happening. (This is only one aspect of it, but it’s enough for the context of this article.) Unsurprisingly, safety managers don’t operate machinery or sit in the production area, but rather in an office or the head office of a big corporation. Thus they need the software to be their eyes and window. But safety data don’t just pop into the KPI dashboard by itself. It takes every end user – worker, to record any concern they see and any injury that’s happened. And that’s just the beginning. Afterwards, there’s a chain of people responsible for the follow-ups— ensuring data quality, assigning tasks, implementing protective measures, etc. So every dot and line on the KPI chart is a result of the effort of many people. That’s why we want to learn everyone’s individual needs, to ensure the software is convenient for everyone to do their parts.

And that had been impossible. Interviewing the safety managers is straightforward— they are typically our points of contact; Interviewing the next persona down the journey is challenging, but not impossible. About 10% of our interviews involve the safety representatives who sit close to production areas and workers. But neither of them is the main contributor to data collection. Those who are, workers and line managers, would never hop on a call with us. We must shift ourselves to their territory.

Break away from theoretical understanding

There was another motivation that drove us to carry out a field study. The industries that we solve problems for are not the apparent ones you get to experience in daily life, e.g. food delivery, eCommerce, or social media marketing. They are rather manufacturing, construction, or utilities, which you don’t get to experience just by clicking away on the internet or carrying on with your usual days. Despite the vivid descriptions during customer interviews, without actually seeing the frontline in action, our understandings were inevitably on a rather theoretical level.

A wonderful chance to work with the customer

Behind every enterprise B2B sale, there is a buyer who not only committed to our software but also promised their internal organisation a reliable product and a smooth transition. That’s an enormous job for them to take on. We can ease their burden by ensuring their organisation opposes the change as little as possible. And that means improving user experience for all types of users.

Field study planning

Planning the field study primarily means working out a plan together with the customer. But prior to that, determining which customers are most suitable to visit is vital.

Which customers are most suitable

The ideal customers to visit can vary per product. But firstly, I’d strongly recommend that you only visit those customers that you already know, meaning you’ve already had an interview or workshop with. Because an understanding of their processes and main challenges is the foundation for effective field study. Frontline is overwhelming. There are a lot of things and people to observe, and a lot of conversations to be had. You won’t be able to make the best out of it by going in blindly and asking generic questions.

Secondly, they should fall into your ideal customer profile (ICP). We know that it’s not 100% the case that our product is sold to an ideal customer. So take the step to qualify the customer pool, making sure the study focuses on the people and jobs that our product is designed for.

Lastly, the customer is in a relaxed state with your business. In B2B, account relationships are long-term, meaning they go up and down over time. Work with your Account Management Team to make sure that the current relationship is gree-lighted and your visit does not add to any unnecessary complication.

How do you ask the customers about field study

It’s extremely unlikely that you’re their first visitor, so simply ask. They will give the go-ahead or no-sorry very quickly, given that you have communicated all the background.

Prior to asking a customer, prepare a one-pager that states the full purpose and goal of the visit, so that you’re always ready to convey the messages, and for the customer to pass on internally when needed. Especially for those customers who have multiple locations or subsidiaries, they need an idea of your research purpose to tell which location is the most suitable for you to visit.

On the same note, it’s absolutely fine to be uncertain of all the activities and scenarios you’d like to observe upfront. After all, you’ve never seen the area, and cannot plan what you’ll be encountering. In my case, I had written in the one pager that I’d like to observe how people report safety concerns on their mobile App, and how they conduct safety training and inspections, etc. But in reality, these events cannot be planned, unless you’d like the customer to stage it, which will lose the meaning of observing the authentic environment.

How do you plan it with the customer

Your visit will be official, obviously not sneaking in and causing suspicion, meaning you’re registered as a visitor in their system, and you’ll be wearing a proper visitor badge or name tag throughout the day. And all the people whose activities you’ll be observing will already have been briefed.

So when a customer agrees to have you, it’s an enormous time commitment that they make. Appreciate that they’d have to plan a schedule that works for all the key personas, brief the entire frontline area that there will be some “software people” visiting and observing their work, tell them not to worry and that we won’t be grading or judging their performance, even encourage them to talk to you freely, etc. Try to make it as easy for them as possible by communicating all information clearly and consistently from the first meeting. When they come back with a date, adhere to their proposal and follow their schedule, e.g. some plants start working and close very early.

Once again, it’s unrealistic to plan everything perfectly before actually seeing the place. So keep the goal in mind and fill in the details as you go. That’s also partially the reason the field study should last a few days. Another major reason is that it takes a long time to find plenty of opportunities to talk to all the personas.

This is the first field study which we did purely from a customer research perspective. All I can say is that the efforts were fully paid off. It’s not only all the user knowledge that we gained, but also the role of our software — looking at everyone’s daily business, all the software and hardware they operate, where and when our software comes into play. When speaking of user experience, we rarely consider the world outside our software bubble, while in reality, the users may have completed various other activities until making a stop in our system, before moving on to the next one. It was a fantastic experience to witness the first-hand perspective and begin to consider improving the user experience from before they landed in our system.