A management consulting firm focused on
CX strategy and design.
Driving business growth by uncovering target market insights
"Saloni is an excellent UX professional who brings a fun and positive energy to every facet of her work.
The research was well planned and professionally executed and analyzed, while her ability to find creative ways to solve challenging problems played a key role in getting us the insight we sought to recalibrate our services to what our clients need."
Overview
Role: UX Researcher (solo)​
Duration: 3 months (Aug - Oct, 2023)
Tools: Asana, Fathom Notetaker, Google Docs, Zoom, Google Forms, Miro
Deliverables: Research Report, Presentation to Founding Partners
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Research planning
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Desk research
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Stakeholder interviews
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Target market definition
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Participant recruitment
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Qualitative research (in-depth interviews)
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Quantitative research
​ (survey design) ​
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Actionable insights presentation to stakeholders
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Data analysis (affinity mapping & thematic analysis)
Key Skills
As a small management consulting business with limited resources, CX by Design needed a deeper understanding of their customers' needs in order to improve market alignment and strategic focus.
Design and execute a research plan to uncover the needs, goals, and challenges of the target market.
Project Goal
Achieved a 2x increase in customer acquisition and a 30% reduction in marketing expenses by leveraging research insights to optimize service offerings
Impact, August 2024 edit
APPROACH
I began by drafting a research plan that centered around answering a crucial question: What are the CX needs, goals, and challenges of our target market? The plan outlined the research methods, rationale for their selection, and timelines for completion.
How I started
Starting as a new recruit, I conducted desk research to understand the company’s business goals, service offerings, and market positioning, while reviewing existing target market research to build on prior findings.
Stakeholder interviews
Following that, I interviewed the company's founders to understand their views on current service offerings, company goals, and target market. These discussions clarified their vision and provided essential context for shaping the research focus.
With a clear understanding of the target market — small to mid-sized companies with high CX awareness but low maturity in the CPG, Health/Wellness, Financial Services, and Retail/E-Commerce sectors,
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I planned to conduct remote, in-depth interviews to learn their growth goals, CX goals, challenges, ideal solutions, current CX initiatives, and the resources they needed to improve their CX strategy and design.
Recruitment strategy &
what went wrong
I aimed to recruit 8 participants—CX managers, business owners, and VPs of marketing—from companies that fit our criteria. This number was chosen to ensure a manageable and focused sample size for in-depth insights.
Recruitment was initially difficult due to low response rates from LinkedIn outreach, as our formal messages were mistaken for spam. After adjusting the tone to be more casual and human, the response rate improved significantly.
after
before
Conducting in-depth interviews
Concurrently, I wrote a discussion guide for the interviews, which included warm-up questions, open-ended, and follow-up questions. Once participants were recruited, I scheduled and conducted 40-minute Zoom interviews, using an AI note-taker for efficient data capture. These interviews provided deep qualitative insights.
"I see a need to embed customer-centric capabilities into the organization's culture and processes to make sure they become an integral part of how our business operates."
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- Senior Vice President of Direct to Consumer Marketing
(mid-sized financial services company)
How I analyzed qualitative data
Using affinity diagramming and thematic analysis, I organized the qualitative data into meaningful clusters, identifying recurring themes and patterns.
Quantitative validation - survey
To further validate the findings, I designed a survey targeting 30 participants within our defined market. This survey asked participants to rank the identified CX needs, challenges, and goals, providing quantitative backing to our qualitative insights.
sample questions
A few insights ...
The highest-rated pain point was limited CX budgets.
Customer feedback survey was the most common CX initiative, while customer journey mapping was the least.
Expanding customer reach was prioritized over building customer loyalty.
OUTCOME
The research resulted in actionable insights for the company, which were prioritized and presented to the founders as a tactical, executable roadmap.
These insights directly influenced the launch of a new service focused on instilling customer-centric values within client organizations and led to strategic changes in the company's marketing efforts.
NEXT STEPS - WEBSITE REDESIGN
January 2024 - My next project with CXBY was to lead the redesign of the company website with another UX professional.
1. We began by mapping customer needs uncovered from above research to relevant website pages, ensuring the site addressed these key insights.
2. With a clear understanding of which needs to satisfy on each page, we then developed a new information architecture. This allowed us to logically reorganize the site content and sitemap for intuitive navigation.
3. Next, we created an interaction model to shape how customers engage with the site, guiding the creation of low-fidelity wireframes.
4. Finally, we collaborated with a UX writer to align the copy with customer needs, before testing and refining the design through usability testing.
By August 2024, high-fidelity wireframes were handed off to developers.