Small Business Customer Discovery During a Crisis
The challenge
Small business owners are the hardest people to study well. They're time-starved, skeptical of anything that pulls them away from running their business, and inconsistent in how they work. Then COVID-19 hit in the middle of the engagement. The client needed to understand how their customers were actually using the platform while those customers were simultaneously trying to keep their businesses alive.
What we did
Small businesses were at the center of this engagement from the start.
The client builds tools that help small business owners market themselves, which made this research a direct window into the challenges of running a business when everything around you is uncertain. I spoke to owners post-COVID-19, who were navigating a platform while simultaneously trying to keep their businesses alive.
I designed and led a series of studies covering two questions: how small business owners were actually using the platform day to day, and what the real impact of the pandemic was on how they communicated with their customers.
The findings shaped product decisions and customer outreach strategy. The team used them to make targeted improvements to the experience for the exact users who needed the most support at the worst possible time.
What changed
The findings informed a team building resources to support small businesses in the aftermath of COVID-19. The research gave them a clear picture of what owners were actually dealing with, not the assumed experience, but the real one. The client used it to shape partnerships and support programs designed around how small business owners were navigating recovery, not how the company imagined they were.