Making Customer Obsession a Reality

One of Vivint’s key values is “Customer Obsession is Our Advantage.” It’s easy for a company to make such a claim, but much harder to back it up. At Vivint’s Innovation Center, where our products are created and developed, we’ve made a conscious effort to have this value become a reality, and a big part of that has been an initiative called Research Friday.

The genesis of Research Friday was a previous initiative driven by one of our product VPs. He asked if we could set up a bi-weekly customer interview that could be broadcast to all the employees at the Innovation Center, something he had seen work well at a previous company. A product manager and a member of my Research & Insights team worked together to schedule and conduct these interviews, and they quickly became popular.

However, a bi-weekly interview meant that many of our employees were only hearing from or about customers occasionally, especially if they had busy schedules and missed some of the interviews. We also had a ton of other research we were doing for smaller product teams, which many other team members would benefit from if only they knew about it. We came to realize that a weekly research meeting for the Innovation Center could be a great way to solve both problems.

Starting in early 2020, we put “Research Friday” on everyone’s calendar every week at 10am for 90 minutes and began to make a plan to use that time to share research and connect our team members with our customers.

We still do an interview every other week, or two a month. One of those two interviews is conducted live, which allows our employees to submit their own questions to our moderator in real time. This makes for a great discussion which is highly tailored to the interests of our team. The other interview is usually pre-recorded, allowing us flexibility in the types of research we share, including research conducted earlier inside customers’ homes.

Once the COVID pandemic hit and many of our employees began working from home, we worried about how Research Fridays would be impacted, but 2020 ended up being a great year for sharing research. One week, we had product managers, designers, engineers, and program managers practice their own research skills by interviewing family members they were now spending all day with, and we shared these interviews in Research Friday. We also did lots of Zoom interviews with our customers, including live interviews which allowed them to show our teams their Vivint products in their home in real time.

In addition to the bi-weekly interviews, we added monthly Recent Research Roundups to the mix, which allowed us to share other research we were conducting with a broader group. And we also began running monthly training sessions during Research Fridays to help our teams learn to do their own research, because our team always has more research requests than time. Team members learned how to conduct interviews and run surveys, and how to analyze the results, and many of our teams have been doing their own research. Just this past Friday, we had three of our designers share research they led themselves, which was great to see.

Research Friday has become a win-win: we help all our employees live our Customer Obsession value by getting regular customer touchpoints, and we raise the profile of our Research team, making more people aware of the work we’re doing and the things we’re learning about our customers. Our Innovation Center had a goal of three “customer touchpoints” per week for each employee in 2020, and although the pandemic made that more challenging, many of our employees achieved that goal, and Research Fridays were a big contributor to that success.

We believe that, through Research Fridays and the research our team conducts, all our product teams at Vivint are more connected to the customer, have more empathy for them, and as a result create products that our customers love. That makes Vivint a pretty unique place to work.

If you’re a Vivint customer and would like to take part in our research or be interviewed for Research Friday, please contact me at jan.dawson@vivint.com.