Customer Advisory Panel
Until 2020, America’s Test Kitchen (ATK) would primarily receive feedback from customers about their digital spaces through interviews and UX exercises for siloed projects and through the customer service department. In the middle of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, I initiated and organized a customer advisory panel to ask highly-engaged ATK members directly about their cooking experiences & pre-launched digital product features. The purpose of the panel is to maintain long-lasting connections with customers, and to learn how decision-making around the dinner table is affected by the ebb and flow of daily life.
Background
At America’s Test Kitchen, our teams have been looking for creative ways to connect with our members and brand fans.
Our Consumer Insights and Marketing teams (among others) have found ways to capture snippets of our customers’ behaviors and backgrounds primarily through quantitative research. What we were missing is the full story of a typical day in the life of our home cook, how ATK fits into their lives, and how they’d like ATK to play a role in giving them culinary confidence and inspiration.
The Food for Thought Advisory Panel is a customer panel program consisting of Digital All-Access members who share their thoughts and opinions with the digital design team at America’s Test Kitchen in a private Facebook group. As a moderator, I post questions and organize research activities for panel members to gather insights around their home cooking stories, kitchen experiences and feedback for upcoming features to help shape the digital experience for ATK’s community of home cooks.
Team Goals & Mindsets
In order to ensure that customer advocacy was the guiding light in moderating the panel, I adopted the following mindsets over time:
Representing the member in their ATK digital experiences
ATK should aim to create powerful and delightful experiences by centering around members' preferences.
Complement the in-kitchen experience
Internal teams are encouraged to look for ways to support members beyond the kitchen by making ATK more welcoming, versatile, and rewarding to return to.
Reduce decision fatigue
Cooking involves making a million decisions; we're interested in reducing the number of steps it takes for members to find exactly what they're looking for.
Context matters
ATK members' decisions are affected by factors like motivation, resource availability, bandwidth and dietary restrictions.
How I Approached Panelists
ATK members are the UX team’s partners in research; they’re as committed to enhancing the value of ATK’s digital platform as we are! With this in mind, I encouraged them to hold nothing back. These candid conversations can only happen if the UX team makes space for members to feel safe and comfortable hanging out with us, so I build our relationships up between research sessions by participating in activities alongside them. While they had the chance to interact with the faces behind the scenes in ATK, we’ve got to see the inside of their fridges, hot sauce collections and much more! As a result, members would come through for our teams with their honest feedback, truthfully expressing the joys and pains of using ATK’s platform via polls, diary studies, interviews, and other research methods shown below.
Socializing Learnings
Leveraging user insights, research, and business strategy, we’ve evolved our digital brand over time with the help of customer stories. We shared what we learned with our dev, QA, marketing/branding, and customer service teams through reports, routine research updates via Slack and on our internal UX research site.
CREDITS
Office: America’s Test Kitchen