How to craft a killer customer panel experience

As part of a recent senior leadership staff meeting, I was asked to help create an experience for the leadership that grounds them on our customers. We discussed many options for how this could come to life but ultimately, we agreed that we did not want an intellectual exercise. We wanted to craft a shared empathy experience that would set a strong foundation for the rest of the day. We’ve seen this first hand in our teams — when a team experiences the customer problem together, it actually fuels decision-making.

One such way to do that is a customer panel. I’ll say it now, a panel is not a cheap “bang for your buck” empathy experience. Having a meaningful, memorable and powerful panel experience takes work. To have a panel experience that hits the audience in their hearts and minds is not simply about finding 3 people that are willing to speak on stage.

Panels are not group interviews. They’re plays.

As a designer of a customer panel, your job is to find the right characters to bring to life the insights that you want the audience to internalize through the sharing of their stories and experiences.

And that is where you begin — what are the takeaways you want the audience to have around this group of people. Intuit makes TurboTax and QuickBooks, so naturally one of the biggest customer problems we try to solve for small businesses and consumers face is — making ends meet. So essentially I’m hunting for compelling stories about what it’s like to make ends meet. So the first step is to cast for the right “talent” for this play. You cast a wide net and screen them through 30–60 minute zoom meetings. Through these calls, you’re listening for the right stories, sound-bytes, analogies that you feel will amplify the insights that you care about. You’re also looking across the characters in both looking for unity of theme and diversity of cast. Do you bring in small businesses at completely different life stages? Do you find a mix of completely different characters to make the panel interesting? All those are good questions to ask as you narrow to the finalists.

Breathing life to words through analogies

One of the best storytelling tricks I learnt from my colleague, Danny Ortega, is that analogies help amplify emotions. But, they don’t come naturally to everyone. You sometimes have to fish for them or help them articulate it. Here are some ways we try to prime it…

• If you could paint a picture of what it would look like, what would you see in the picture?
• It’s hard for me to feel what you’re feeling, so what do you see when you’re describing this?
• Imagine you had a piece of paper and crayons right now, what would you draw on it to show me how you’re feeling.
• So you’re a musician right? How would you use instruments, or music, or songwriting to describe what it’s like to be living in this world of debt? (This one is one of my favorites, because you anchor an analogy in a world that they are already familiar with. It’s a great tee-up!)

One of the most compelling analogies I heard was about how it feels to be overwhelmed with debt:

For me, the picture is more of a little boat out in the ocean where tornadoes are coming towards me. But I’m all alone, and nowhere to go. And they just keep coming.

Wow.

Insights > Individual stories > Narrative

When I was in the early stages of screening talent, my manager received some nervous 6AM phone calls from stakeholders that were worried we weren’t going to pull it off. (To be fair, screening people was taking longer than they would have liked). He assured them that I would share a discussion guide so that they would know what was going to come out of it.

I did not.

Why? I had not yet crafted the narrative of the panel, even though I knew the stories people were sharing. Sharing a discussion guide at this point would actually erode confidence rather than build it. A discussion guide is not the same as the script. True enough, as I continued to listen I noticed trends around the stories people were sharing and this is where it gets exciting as a storyteller. I got to craft a unique narrative for this customer panel.

Prototype the narrative

You can prototype anything, and never wait to do it. It isn’t a term reserved for clickable invision prototypes. It represents a mindset of immediately making your thoughts and ideas tangible. My friend, Hannah Hudson, said it best:

Think of prototyping as a verb, not a noun.

One of the newest storytelling prototyping tools on the market is Reduct.video. It takes video or audio files, transcribes it and makes it super easy to edit/cut clips into what they call “reels”. Since I had recorded all my screening calls, I was able to use Reduct to quickly find, cut and assemble key customer quotes into a highlight “reel”. I can move things around and create multiple reels to compare different arcs. Prototyping a storyline with video clips has never been so easy!

Cutting and tagging highlights in re.duct

Transitions really matter — they make or break it

With a panel, you can’t just stitch together opening question and hope it works. I mean… you can, but you run the risk of feeling like a disjointed experience, when really you want a seamless story to unfold. Here are some prompts I use to help me stitch individual stories together:

• What question do you have to ask to unlock the story at the right altitude?
• Who will agree with what is just said but offer a different point of view?
• Who will disagree with what is just said but offer an alternate/interesting point of view?
• Who can amplify another story with an analogy or example?
• Who can offer a reflection into the past? or hopes for the future?
• Who can support or dispute something that is commonly known?
• Who can point out the elephant in the room in the most compelling way?
• If a moving story was shared, what story can we transition to that doesn’t take way from the emotion?
• Who has the best “set up” story for another person’s story? I call this the assist.

After the panel was over, I had a received a ton of great feedback. I will humble brag — they called me an excellent moderator. What they probably didn’t realize is that I actually did not say much at all. The craft was in creating the connective tissue for the narrative to come to life. I wasn’t a moderator, I was a director.

The outtro — figure that out first

This is essential Pixar’s #7 rule of storytelling. This is where the story actually lands. You could have a “hero” panelist that you know will have an amazing story to close things out with. But always have your own outtro in your pocket, just in case things don’t land the way you want it to.

Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front. — Rule #7

I knew that the emotion I wanted to end on was not pity or sympathy. I wanted the audience to be inspired by their grit, independence and “keep fucking going” attitude. So I started with the outtro and worked my way back to the narrative (iterating along the way).

When words aren’t enough

Your panel is only going to be as powerful as the panelists and the stories itself. If there’s a story that needs to be told with a little bit more than just words, think about what you can do with pictures and video. I’m proud to say that most of my “formal training” in panel design comes from just watching talkshow host, Ellen do her magic. I immediately think of the episode where Kristen Bell is re-telling the story of how her husband, Dax Shepard, surprised her with a sloth on her 31st birthday. You just simply don’t get the gravity of what a sloth can do to Kristen Bell until Ellen shows the footage (begin at 01:58).

I didn’t get to play that card in our panel because I didn’t need to. Words were enough. But think about when they actually aren’t.

Other tips

• Good screening takes time. I video conferenced with 12 people before I was able to narrow to 3 and weave the narrative.
• Make sure you balance the energy and personalities. Diversity is always a good rule of thumb to have.
• Have a back-up plan. Will the script work if one of your panelists call in with the flu? Visualize the impact it would have on the story and have contingencies in place. You might want to have video recordings ready of all the key segments.
• Actually write the script. This will help you rehearse as a director/moderator and also ensure that the experience is durable asset should YOU call in sick and someone else have to take over.
• There should be very little surprises once you have a script, but be prepared for heightened drama. Have tissue on standby and think through scenarios for what to do if someone breaks down and is unable to continue. Will you give them a moment? Will you ask for a break? Or will you keep going like when Tom Cruise lost his shit on Oprah?
• Prep your panelists ahead of time. E-mail them a copy of the questions you will be asking them as well as the stories you would like them to share in response. If analogies or catchy quotes were used, remind them of them. Do not expect them to remember.
• Always have a rehearsal. Just don’t call it that, it might freak the panelists out! Call it “lunch”. During a nice relaxed “lunch”, you’re going to warm your panelists up. You’ll give them a play-by play of how the discussion will go (that’s why your script is handy). Make sure you tell them who is speaking, what questions they will be asked and what stories they’re going to share. You are not leading the witnesses, you are merely reminding them of what they’ve already told you.

One of the things I love most about working at Intuit, is how much we obsess about our customers and put them at the center of what we do. It doesn’t matter if we’re in a 3-person brainstorming session about a new feature or at a 9000+ employee company-wide all-hands, we always start with the customer. There are many ways to get to deep customer empathy — 1:1 interviews, watching customer videos, playing “in your customer shoes” games, listening to customer care calls or even poring over behavioral analytics. Customer panels are just another way to internalize the insights. Start with the “why are we doing this” and then figure out the right “how”.

Love customer panels? Share your experiences in the comments. Thank you!

Want to join us in bringing compelling customer stories and experiences to life? We’re looking for visual designers, motion designers, content strategists, design researchers and data storytellers. The Intuit Brand Experiences & Storytelling team is hiring!