UserTesting's Janelle Estes on using human insight to create memorable experiences

In our rush to accelerate digital transformation, we have been obsessed with gathering information. Many and many things. We track every metric, create all kinds of dashboards and use them to inform our every move. But data, while extremely valuable, cannot tell the whole story. It's hard to really understand your customers when you're looking for that one-time NPS boost or to understand their pain points when you're spending all day staring at charts on a computer screen.

To see the world through their eyes, to get a sense of their experience, their pains and their needs, you need a real human connection. You must see their faces and know their stories. And that's exactly why today's guest, Janelle Estes, is so interested in human insight. Janelle is Chief Insight Officer at UserTesting, a video-based UX testing service that makes it easy for companies to test their products before launch. She is also an advisor, co-hosts the aptly named Human Insight Podcast, and is the author of User Tested: How the World's Top Companies Use Human Insight to Create Great Experiences.

Janelle's 20-year career began as a customer experience researcher at Forrester, but she's always been interested in human behavior: how people think, how they process information, and how they make decisions , as far back as she can remember. And it's this kind of understanding of the customer that helps organizations make strategic decisions about which products to build, which features to prioritize, or which channels to market.

Leveraging customer insights can help your business align to a more holistic, customer-centric approach with a real impact on your bottom line, but that insight can be hard to find. How can you capture it? How to find the signal in the noise? And, finally, how do you act?

In this episode, we caught up with Janelle to talk about the power of human insight, how to extend it throughout your organization, and its role in creating a culture of customer empathy .

Here are some of our favorite takeaways from the conversation:

To avoid being overwhelmed with information, define the key question you are trying to answer. Then pair it with a business goal such as reducing costs or increasing customer satisfaction. Our biases lead us to believe that our customers are just like us - it's important to get out of our bubbles and interact with different people to understand who they really are. When prioritizing what to work on, consider the impact it may have on your business and customer experience, as well as the effort needed to address it. For Janelle, scaling customer insights is less about involving more people in collecting it, and more about making it easy for everyone to connect with customer feedback and stories. People are increasingly cautious about how their data is handled, and it's increasingly difficult for companies to collect it. Giving users the option to get opt-in comments is a great way to avoid this.

If you like our discussion, check out other episodes of our podcast. You can follow on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube or grab the RSS feed in the reader of your choice. The following is a slightly edited transcript of the episode.

Call of the CX

Liam Geraghty: Janelle, you're welcome on the show.

Janelle Estes: Thank you so much for having me.

Liam: I'd like to start by hearing about your journey so far. Can you tell us a bit more about your professional background?

Janelle: Yes, absolutely. I've been in my current role as Chief Insights Officer at UserTesting for about four years now. Prior to this position, I held various positions at UserTesting. So I've been with the company for eight years and have played in various places, including our professional services team. Additionally, I started our solutions consulting practice when we were transitioning from transactional sales to a solution/enterprise cell, then led our services team for a period of time before transitioning to this role. Before UserTesting, however, I was at Nielsen Norman Group, which is a leading UX consultancy led by Don Norman and Jakob Nielsen, who are very well known in the field of UX experience and research. But I hadn't planned to land here.

"How do they incorporate the customer into day-to-day decisions, and how do I take what's going on and all the best...