Post Office UK + UserTesting

Post Office Ltd is a government-owned company in the United Kingdom that provides a wide range of products and services to the public through its nationwide network of retail branches. 

While Post Office is at the heart of so many communities across the United Kingdom, Penny Rance, UX Researcher, feels the teams working on their digital products had lost touch with the customers. 

“When I joined in November of 2019, no one really understood what UX research was or how it could help them. Slowly, I started to educate the teams.  Firstly, my immediate colleagues and then the other product teams. Because many of the products we sell are supplied by partner companies, product teams didn't fully understand who our customers were, let alone why they used Post Office products.”

Penny helped show the different teams how qualitative insights from UX research are different from CRO or analytics and that human insight could help them to empathize with customers - not just learning where to change customer journeys to improve conversion, but also understanding customer behaviors and preferences and how to market products to them. 

When the pandemic struck in March of 2020, running expensive lab sessions was no longer an option. Penny dove into UserTesting’s full potential. She completed over 70 online modules on UserTesting University, she joined the London HUG (a local user group), and engaged with The CommUnity (UserTesting’s online advocacy platform). Backed with her newfound knowledge of the solution, she ran a wide array of studies on customer behavior. As colleagues noticed the speed at which she set up her tests and received back results, they became intrigued with the potential. 

In the past year,  Penny ran over 360 individual sessions, gathering valuable feedback across many of the 170+ products the Post Office sells, including mail service; customs forms and navigation; as well as financial products like mortgages, savings, personal loans, and multiple forms of insurance.

Each test helped Post Office understand the good, the bad, and the ugly of customer sentiments related to their products. And Product Teams gained the knowledge they need to adjust travel and car insurance offerings, credit card plans (where they discovered a hidden bug in the signup process), broadband service, and even the alignment of in-store marketing versus the digital experience - a true omnichannel approach! 

Penny explains, “With the experience we’ve developed, UserTesting will continue to be a valuable resource. It will allow us to democratize research across the UX team, empowering the designers to check their ideas as and when they need to. These are exciting times and we are still at the beginning of our journey.”