A major tech enterprise gains more time for in-depth research with Marvin

Customer obsession is in the company's DNA. Employees use Marvin to share valuable insights across the large corporation, embedding research further in the company culture, so everyone (no matter their role) can keep a pulse on the customer voice.

Customer Outcomes

• AI summaries and auto notes have saved each researcher over 15 hours/week while locating important insights and writing reports
• Automation of cumbersome manual tasks helps researchers spend over 25% of their time on deeper conversations and analysis
• Facilitated three cross-functional roles — PMs, designers, and product marketers — to conduct interviews and extract insights easily
• Easily exported research to Figjam, Slack, and Google Docs for hundreds of team members to consume

Research is treated as a strategic advantage at this tech enterprise. The company spends roughly 25% of its annual revenue on research and development. Despite this, researchers and designers comprise less than 1% of the company's 7,000+ workforce.

They work by the idea that UX research is a team sport. People across roles and departments do user interviews and analysis. A repository is key to compiling all the research.

The Right Repository

UX researchers in the company operate cross-functionally, regularly interacting with product, design, and go-to-market teams to understand the customer journey.

Before Marvin, research was time- and effort-intensive. They prepared discussion guides in one tool and recorded calls with another. Then, they manually transcribed the call, often spending a whole week listening and relistening. Only then could they extract themes, add tags, and find quotes.

They needed a centralized tool to conduct cross-interview and cross-project analysis without redesigning the research process.

The company's director of research and design shared the team's rationale for adding Marvin to their research toolkit:

"One of the things that we're excited about is that it's very friendly for non-researchers to use as well. If we can get a lot of the research and note-taking happening in one central place versus it just being scattered.”

The company uses Marvin to build on its foundational understanding of customers.

It can also be really helpful for a bird's eye view of insights, but also for basics like participant tracking – 'Who's been talking to these customers?’ And finally, just making sure we as a research team have a pulse on everything that's being asked of customers."

Marvin's user-friendliness led to its successful adoption across the company. Consolidating and leveraging the organization's learnings is far easier now that insights live in one place. Interviews, tags and notes are in one place and linked, rather than files scattered across employee's personal computers.

Sharing Research

With Marvin, the team can quickly share findings across the massive organization. With a feature to create highlight reels, they spend no time extracting and stitching clips together.

“Storytelling and sharing out is really important. This is where Marvin has been really helpful – being able to share video clips and highlight reels (with) folks who don't have time to join the sessions.”

People not heavily involved in interviews (such as engineers) use these to immediately gain insight into customer feedback or pain points.

The company sends regular updates during and after research to a Slack channel that has multiple teams. Marivn’s Slack integration can automate sharing of call summaries and insight reports. Not only does this free up a researcher’s time, but it also makes sure no important insight is missed out.

Sharing research nuggets keeps everyone in this large company informed and involved with brainstorming and decision-making.

Automated, In-the-Moment Research Assistance

Marvin’s AI offers a lot more beyond transcribing calls, such as auto notes, summaries, surfacing information with Ask AI and even extracting insights from raw data.

One of the UX researchers talked to us about how they think of Marvin:

"I describe Marvin as a perfect research sidekick. It is an invaluable tool for me to use as a companion to my research sessions, which then helps me also better analyze the call and pull out things that are relevant."

• In addition to customer calls, they conduct and record internal calls using Marvin to better track their research planning conversations. The accurate transcription frees up significant time for more strategic work:

"I absolutely love the AI annotation features because that just cuts short so much of me having to write things. I will first have AI do a whole annotation of the file, and then when I'm re-listening I'll go through and tag things individually. These are amazing efficiency shortcuts that AI helps me with."

• Researchers recognize how Marvin’s AI can help locate and surface insights much faster:

"The ability to search for things and not have to go through like 60 minutes of a call. That's huge for me. That's basically what I use it for all the time… I love the links that it'll share with me – 'here's where I think I found your answers' and start my exploration there."

• They use discussion guides during interviews to tag questions and link research across calls and projects.

“When I'm running interviews, I don't have to stress about capturing everything important that was said. I have so many shortcuts into capturing the important things I need to refer to. I can focus a lot more on deeper conversations, better conversations.”

• They do preliminary tagging within Marvin to help with Affinity Mapping exercises.

• Marvin’s many integrations, such as with Figma, connect seamlessly to the existing workflow. This allows the researchers to create clusters of insights and export these links to other FigJam boards. They can then easily share with the wider organization.

• Performing a meta analysis or a spot check before beginning a project used to be difficult. AI-powered search has changed that. Researchers can now query their data and dive deeper into the research sooner.

Marvin has enabled the team to unearth richer insights and do better research. For each project, they understand more about their users in the same amount of time.

" As researchers, we try to be very accurate because we're moving so fast. If we accidentally miscategorize something, and a product decision is made based on that, it's very expensive for us to fix later.

I don't think I do more. I just do it better — way better than I used to before."

Research is Better with Marvin

The director summed up their experience of using Marvin:

"Marvin has been really helpful as a tool. We have all of our recordings of customer interviews and transcriptions in one place. Our researchers on a given project can use it for all the classic features - tagging and spotting trends across a bunch of interviews. It also gives us the added benefit that if we had to go back and reference a project, a certain customer call or anything like that, all the recordings, transcripts and raw data is centralized, which is awesome.”

• A centralized research repository ensures all customer insights live in one place, accessible to everyone.
• New users are onboarded quickly because of the ease of use.
• Marvin's collaborative note-taking product facilitates tagging and allows people from different teams to interact and synthesize their notes and insights.

Bringing on Marvin has facilitated the company to build and maintain an advanced research culture. They have more time and effort to think strategically and collaborate across teams and projects.

Bring on your own research sidekick today. Book time with us to learn more about Marvin.