Lessons from the Field

Customer visits are an important research method that is central to Mailchimp’s culture. The visits provide insight into the emotional nuance of our users’ experiences and, ultimately, elevate the customer voice throughout the company.

Questions we’ll consider:
– How does Mailchimp’s customer visit program work?
– How do insights from customer visits enable decisions within product marketing, product, and design?
– How do customer visits complement and inform other research methods and practices?
– How could you experiment with implementing customer visits at your workplace?

In exploring these questions, we’ll help you build a business case for doing your own customer visits. We’ll also share road warrior stories and the lessons we’ve learned along the way.
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Chelsea Bullock is a Senior UX Researcher at Mailchimp; her current work focuses on their audience management strategies. Prior to Mailchimp, she’s worked on UX teams at The Weather Company and Pardot. She specializes in experimentation design, design thinking methods and workshop facilitation, and snark.

Robin Wall is a Research Manager on the Market Insights team at Mailchimp where she focuses on understanding our current and prospective customers – who they are, what they need, how they work, and how our product and marketing are relevant (or not!) to them. Robin honed her skills at various digital, experiential, and marketing agencies throughout New York and Atlanta and has experience with a variety of qualitative and quantitative research techniques – from ethnography and online surveys to shop-a-longs and usability testing.