S2 Ep 33 Watch, Don't Ask: Closing the Say-Do Gap in Voice of Customer

Matt Wilkinson and Jasmine Gruia-Gray take apart the gap between what customers say they do and what they actually do, starting with a King's College London observation study and ending with the one habit that wastes the most time on a site visit. Along the way Jasmine sets out the three tiers of customer access and the three things a product manager should bring back from every visit, and Matt draws on his own ethnography work to show how a company's entrance predicts the way its meetings will run. Speaker turns have been lightly cleaned for clear transcription errors and duplicated cross-talk between recording channels.

The say-do gap: what the King's College study reveals

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [00:02]

Hey Jasmine, how you doing?

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [00:03]

Hello, hello, I'm great, how about you?

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [00:07]

I'm good, thank you, and I'm excited to dig in today about an article you just wrote on one of my favourite topics, which is ethnography. Without further ado, you talk about how, in the middle of the pandemic, three researchers at King's College London ran a small experiment on their own campus. They asked people how often they cleaned their hands and kept their distance walking into campus buildings. 68% said they always washed their hands, 49% said they always kept their distance. Then the researchers stood at the entrance and actually watched. No sign, no warning. Only 16% actually cleaned their hands, and only 7% kept their distance. That's not people lying on a survey, it's people reporting the version of themselves they believe to be true, but not the one anyone could film. Now put that same gap and transfer it to the laboratory. A bench scientist who taps a pipette twice against the tube rim before every single transfer, a habit left over from a training programme that shut down years ago, isn't going to mention that on a customer survey. Not because they're hiding it, but because it stopped feeling like a decision so long ago, it just feels like turning a dial. If you ask them what they do, they'll describe the method. Watch, and you get the method, plus the one motion that's quietly been part of your results the whole time, and that could be leading to the differences you're seeing between the expected result and the reality. So Jasmine, what got you writing about watching instead of asking in the first place?

Where this idea came from: habits nobody writes down

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [02:05]

Yeah, I was reminiscing with a friend about our postdoc days, which was long ago, and all the manual processes we used to use. And she'd mentioned how she used to run the same assay what felt like at least thousands of times. And after a while, all the steps were part of her muscle memory, or as you were mentioning, habits. And there were tweaks she'd made to the protocol that she never even wrote down. It was just invisible to her because it was part of her routine, so to speak. So I was thinking about that and how that applies to the voice of customer, or a type of voice of customer, that product managers should use more often than they actually do, and that's ethnographic research.

How to interview someone into revealing a hidden habit

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [03:00]

So did you ever catch yourself doing something like that yourself? You know, how do you even get someone to admit to a habit that you don't know that you have?

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [03:14]

Yeah, I did quite often catch myself at it. Sometimes I would remember to write it down or flag it in a printed SOP, but more often than not, I wouldn't. Sometimes you would find post-it notes on instruments, whether I put them there or my colleagues put them there, as a reminder of those tweaks. And sometimes you didn't.

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [03:31]

You don't get it by asking a person to confirm what they saw. That's the cold hard truth, you never will. The workaround stops being a decision. You have to ask a researcher, whether they're a postdoc or a well-experienced scientist, to actually narrate what they're doing. Ask them questions like, walk me through what happens at each step, and assume something is going to be left out if you read the SOP. But if they're walking you through it, they're more likely to put in the habit. Or you can say, do you do anything extra here between these three or four steps, to try and really tease out what those habits and that muscle memory actually is?

The Miele vacuum cleaner: when watching beats the survey

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [04:44]

Yeah, there was a great example from a company called Miele, they make vacuum cleaners. You think vacuum cleaners, great, what's that got to do with ethnography? But they went and studied asthmatics and how asthmatics cleaned their floors and other things as well, their mattresses. What they found was that people were habitually going over the same spots time and time again because they didn't know when something was clean. Dust has a slight charge, so you can actually measure when dust stops coming up off the floor. So what they did was integrate a small sensor within the vacuum cleaner so you could see the air being sucked up changing its charge, and when that went back down to a normal level, you could see that this area is now clean, move on to another spot. Wildly successful amongst a group of asthmatics, huge response online about a really simple feature nobody would ever think about, because most of us just clean a floor, look, is that clean enough, yes, move on. Being able to see those differences was so important. What they would say is, I just vacuum the floor. What they don't tell you is that every room would take them 30 minutes, because they were cleaning over and over and over again.

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [06:26]

I bet you the product manager of that product wouldn't even have known the question to ask. It was through the observation that questions then got pulled out and the feature got developed.

Why sales never sees what product needs to see

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [06:41]

Absolutely. And it's definitely not something that sales would do. If someone sells into that kind of account, can you imagine those sales conversations?

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [06:55]

Right, it's a different intent. The salesperson's job certainly is to make sure the customer's experience is at the delight level. But again, they're not likely to sit and watch a customer use the product or prep their sample before using the product. Yeah, the salesperson's job is very different from the product manager's job. And that's why product managers either have to tag along to those sales visits or schedule their own visits with customers.

Reading a company's hierarchy before you ask a single question

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [07:23]

Now I completely agree. I did some ethnography with a company maybe a decade ago. I was leading a big e-commerce transformation, and we went into a number of different companies, and there were some really interesting tales. You could look at how people parked outside the building, what the hierarchy of the business was like. You could guess straight away: outside the building, are there dedicated spaces for the CEO, the CFO, the C-suite, the VPs? Does leadership have their own spaces? What's the entrance like? Some organisations were very much about worshipping at the idol of the CEO and leadership. Others respected knowledge, and patents would be all over the walls, and you could tell what was important. What was really interesting is when you went into meetings with them, you could predict how those meetings would go just based on what the organisation looked like as you walked in. Those that respected the patents and the knowledge they generated were just interested in developing new knowledge, looking at outcomes for the customer, for the patient. Others you'd walk into, and when you've got that very hierarchical structure, you could tell that in meetings everything had to be funnelled through the highest-ranked person in the room. Seeing those differences becomes really interesting, both for a salesperson, but even more so when you're observing: what's the context in this business, how are decisions made?

Hierarchy, SOPs and the DNA sequence copy-paste problem

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [09:30]

So did you also find that there was a correlation between those very hierarchical businesses and how closely the scientists or the users of the product followed their SOPs? In a very hierarchical organisation, for example, was there no point in the product manager observing the user, because what's written down is exactly what the user would follow?

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [10:00]

Was it less likely that you'd be able to go and observe in the more hierarchical places? There's more likely that they would say, well, here's our SOP. Whereas in those places where knowledge was more interesting, they're more likely to let you in and observe, because actually understanding what's going on on the ground was more interesting. And they were looking to see: are there problems, or challenges, that we haven't necessarily looked at yet? And that was what was really interesting. One company went into, they would find that when placing orders, there was a lot of DNA sequences being copied and pasted from an Excel sheet into an ordering system, maybe even taken from one spreadsheet to another to then email off. And if you get just one letter wrong, miss a letter from the front or back of that sequence when copying and pasting, the order doesn't work. If you're a scientist, you can understand what's happening, but very often these weren't scientists placing the order, they were receiving something from a scientist and having to do the manual process of placing the order. That was incredibly stressful because they knew how important it was from a business perspective to get it right, but they didn't really understand what they were looking at. These were just inexplicable sequences of letters. They didn't necessarily understand, and what everyone said, they just knew it was really important not to miss off the A or the T from the beginning, or miss a C or a G from the end. That was an incredibly stressful thing, and we realised that every order was this little packet of emotions, that it was stressful placing it, and there was relief when it came through correctly. That's one of the things we tried to design for: to reduce that stress. How can we make it as easy as possible, particularly if it's something they're just reordering, something they know is already in the system? That confidence, I think, was really important to build in people.

Watching for emotion: body language and frustration in the lab

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [12:20]

I think you're really bringing out a very important part of ethnography, that it's not only watching the steps and trying to understand why the user is following a certain pattern, but also to watch their body language, watch their facial expressions. Are there areas of frustration in some of the steps? And certainly, if in a tightly regulated lab you may not be allowed entry into the lab, you can certainly walk through the steps with the user and ask them specifically: point out the steps that are most frustrating to you, point out the steps you're skeptical about how well you can do those steps. Where do you have uncertainty? Where do you have doubt in these steps? That emotional side of ethnography, I think, can open huge doors.

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [13:23]

Absolutely. I found that going in and really trying to get under the skin of customers and see what they were doing, how they were doing it, was incredibly helpful. Understanding their context, we talk about context in terms of AI and how important that is, but I think context in terms of our end users is massively underrated. I think even just getting a transcript is good, but being able to go and witness it and feel what's going on adds something special, I think.

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [14:09]

Yeah, especially in science and with scientific equipment, the overall concept is reproducibility, because that's what's going to lead to believable data, that's going to lead to publications that can be reproduced, and so on. And so if there are steps within your protocol that aren't reproducible, that you don't feel confident about, that leads to frustration. I think the whole pyramid of what science is about collapses.

The three access tiers and the limits of observation

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [14:49]

Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned in your article sort of three access tiers to customers. I think tier one is full access to the laboratory, where you can go in, maybe watch the method as it's being performed, maybe even record it. That's often tougher to get. Tier two is maybe more common, you get an escorted walkthrough, you still get physical evidence, but there's no real unsupervised time, just watching. And then tier three, there's no real physical access at all, you're working from documents or a phone call, you're not really getting under the skin. Can we dig into tier three for a minute? That feels like a polite way of saying you couldn't get into the room, so you're reading paperwork instead and calling it fieldwork?

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [15:46]

Yeah, it could be interpreted in that way. The way I choose to interpret it is still to have a conversation with the user, again to pull out the emotional side of things, to understand why they're doing certain steps in a particular order. What's not on the paper? Asking those kinds of questions, I think, are certainly within scope of the conversation. Asking if you could see the run log, any training materials that were used, those can also help to uncover where there are gaps in what the product does and how the product does it.

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [16:15]

So your whole case for watching over what people are doing rests on the idea that if you wait long enough, something stops performing, they stop being performative and start acting in reality. How do you actually know when that's happened?

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [16:49]

Yeah, fair enough. I don't have a clean test for that. I think it's more a timing issue, if you spend half a day with somebody, you'll eventually start seeing where habit and muscle memory start seeping into what they're doing. But yes, that's a real limitation of the method, and it's not something I can say here's the easy answer to fixing.

Weighing ethnography against a survey

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [17:26]

So obviously, going in and spending a lot of time with customers is a time-consuming and therefore costly endeavour, both for them and for you. So how do you look at that compared with, shall we say, a survey?

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [17:45]

So I think those are two very complementary things. A survey, again, is going to be what people believe that they are doing, you're not going to get a lot of emotion out of a survey. Ethnography is the conversation, ethnography is the observation, and I'd even say is the most human aspect of market research and voice of customer.

Access is shrinking: adapting to regulated sites

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [18:13]

Okay, sounds good. Now with regulated sites, they keep getting stricter about photos, videos, even room access. Yeah, the company that sponsored my PhD, we had to leave phones outside, we had to put our shoes through airport-style scanners, it was that strict. So if access keeps shrinking, how do we make sure that we can really dig under the skin of those sorts of customers?

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [18:48]

Yeah, that is a problem, and it's getting even more acute even in academia. And I think that's where you have to be a little bit more creative and ask for that researcher to step out of the lab and have that conversation again, as we were talking about earlier, where are the breakdowns, where's the muscle memory? Ask them to wish: if they could wish for how this protocol could be shortened by 50%, what areas would they choose? Ask them where their frustrations are. So I think it comes down to again being human and having the conversation, and helping that user educate you on what could be improved.

What to walk out of a site visit with, and what nothing means

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [19:18]

Fantastic. Now for a product manager getting ready to book a visit, what are the three things that they should be looking to walk out of those visits with?

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [19:57]

Yeah. One is to look for the undocumented step, something outside the standard operating procedure or SOP, that costs you very little in time but can lead to a lot of information. Another is to look for artifacts that they've built themselves, post-it notes on pieces of equipment, post-it notes in lab books. And the third is to have a conversation with that user and ask the questions around emotion, ask the questions around reducing time by a specific percentage.

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [20:25]

Wow. And so what happens if somebody goes on a visit and finds nothing? No workaround, nothing patched, nothing taped anywhere?

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [20:53]

Yeah, I'd offer that that's information also, and it's the answer people are least prepared to hear, for sure. But if you check a few sites and nobody's compensating for any gaps in any way, so there are no workarounds, there's no borrowed tools, that's usually a demand problem, not an observation problem. So more site visits won't manufacture a need that isn't there already. It means that the concept doesn't have a real problem behind it, perhaps yet, at least not one that anyone's currently working with.

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [21:19]

Okay. And then, is it legitimate to go for tier one first of all, and settle for tier three if that's all you can get?

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [21:46]

I think so. It's one of those things, if you don't ask, you don't get, you just never know. There might have been a change in their protocols that do allow you to get to the bench and observe. I highly doubt you'll be able to take pictures and videos, but again, if you don't ask, you won't know.

The habit that wastes the most time, and where to read more

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [22:10]

One last sort of question, what's the habit that quietly wastes the most time when you're in person?

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [22:16]

Asking what the product should do while you're standing there. It feels productive in that very moment, but it's the fastest way to turn your one source of unstated evidence into a feature request nobody actually asked for. Observe, have conversations, really dig deep.

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [22:38]

Brilliant, thank you. Now the full piece is called What Ethnography Actually Gets You and What It Costs. It's on the Strivenn Thinking website, and it walks through all three access tiers with the exact three categories that belong in a trip report.

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [22:55]

And if your team keeps running commercial visits and filing them as voice of customer in air quotes, that's exactly the gap we work through on a growth consultation, and we'd be thrilled to have you book one of those free consultations at strivenn.com forward slash contact.

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [23:13]

Yeah, most product managers skip the one method that would actually show them the thing they don't know they're missing.

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [23:26]

Yeah, because it's slower than a survey, and it just happens to be the only one that shows you the truth instead of the story that you believe about yourself. So thanks again for a great conversation, Matt.

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [23:40]

Yeah, thank you, Jasmine. Was fun as always.

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [23:43]

All right, and looking forward to seeing you again on another episode of A Splice of Life Science Marketing.

Speaker: Matt Wilkinson [23:50]

Likewise, bye for now.

Speaker: Jasmine Gruia-Gray [23:52]

Bye.

Q&A

We don't have budget for a full ethnographic study. How do I start with almost nothing?

Pick one customer you already have a good relationship with and ask to shadow a single protocol run, even for thirty minutes. Leave the slide deck behind and bring two questions: walk me through what happens at each step, and do you do anything extra between these steps? The visit costs an hour or a video call. Write down every action that differs from their SOP, however small, and share the list with your team the same week.

How is this different from what our sales team already tells us about customers?

Sales visits exist to keep the account happy, so the rep is rarely watching for friction or improvised fixes. Ask your sales lead whether you can join one upcoming visit purely to observe. Stay quiet during sample preparation and note every moment of hesitation or visible frustration. Afterwards, compare your notes with the rep's call report. The differences between the two documents show you what your current voice of customer process is missing.

What do I actually ask when I get fifteen minutes with a scientist?

Ask them to walk you through what happens at each step, then ask whether they do anything extra between steps. Both questions invite a demonstration, which is where habits surface. Follow up on emotion: which step do they doubt, and if they could cut the protocol time by 50 per cent, which part would they remove? Try this on your next customer call this week, even by video.

A site visit turned up no workarounds at all. Did we waste the trip?

Treat the empty result as evidence. If several sites show nobody compensating for a gap, borrowing tools or taping reminders to instruments, you are most likely looking at a demand problem. More visits will not manufacture a need. Check one or two further sites to rule out a sampling fluke, then take the finding to your roadmap review and ask whether the concept should keep its budget.

Regulated sites keep restricting access. How do I still get something useful?

Ask for tier one anyway, because protocols change and access rules sometimes loosen. If you land at tier three, ask the researcher to step out of the lab and talk you through the protocol. Ask where they feel doubt and where frustration builds. Request the run log and any training materials, since both show where practice drifts from the documented method. None of this needs bench access, and it can be booked this week.