CSC ServiceWorks: Laundry Mental Models + Attitudes

Conducted a divergent research effort as the Consumer Research Manager to establish an understanding of consumer perceptions that would set the foundation for convergent research and introduce personas.

PROJECT OBJECTIVE

I was expected to device a research program strategy, and give the organization a first study that would engage and intrigue leaders across the organization. One of the initial studies I felt was important to engaging leadership (and analysts) across the company was to establish a common, baseline understanding of mental models and attitudes across the nation. We started with a broad study of perspectives to give us a broad set of themes - with saliency and frequency. I expected this to give the organization an understanding of research's value as well as spark interest in deeper studies on revealed themes. I also expected to establish proto-personas to discuss the variations in findings from a human perspective, and create a structure for recruiting for - and design of, future studies.

ROLE

As the first Researcher brought into the organization to establish a new practice, I was expected to influence and inform business and product decisions with quantitative and qualitative consumer studies about personal laundry and the use of our community IoT and basic laundry rooms.

CHALLENGES

Research was new to the organization with senior leaders and analysts not experienced with consumer research and its impact and influence on their work and decisions.

The Direct Marketing Senior Leader and one Product Manager were experienced with traditional marketing harnessing analysis rooted in demographics rather than mental models.

There are minimal broad studies in the industry about the act of laundry with more concentration on product usage and sensitivities.

CONSIDERATIONS

The VP who hired me and created this role, had spent the past year preparing the organization for this role and research. I was impressed as I met the senior leaders throughout the organization - They all had their questions for research. They did not request specific methods.

The VP's perspective was grounded in Indi Young's book Mental Models.

The company is the oldest laundry company in the US. The employees are highly experienced, and most are long-time employees of CSC ServiceWorks or a company acquired by CSC ServiceWorks. Their experience and mental models of the industry and people's laundry are very regional - and essential to my work. During my introductory stakeholder interviews, I heard variations in these mental models and I quickly understood the arguments between different perspectives. I identified the need to unify our understanding of laundry and community laundry room usage - and its variations. I was relieved and excited about the level of expertise and felt more confident in being able to design strong studies by harnessing this expertise.

There is an assumption that the account holder is the person doing laundry. I suspected there are multiple people doing laundry (and wondered about different laundry roles) and perhaps multiple people using one account.

Some Senior Leaders assumed that the majority of people doing laundry were women. Some people insisted that laundry approaches varied by gender.

I learned that some regions had patterns of neighbors doing their neighbors' laundry for cash for unknown reasons.

Coming out of COVID Lockdowns, the company was sensitive to people and properties' boundaries during to COVID concerns. I was not permitted to visit our customers' community laundry rooms as they minimized direct engagement.

Although there is a consistent business model across the company, how the business operates varies by branch due to established ways of doing business, regional business culture, and/or employee perspectives.

Many people were looking for the "average", not understanding that behavior has variations with frequency and saliency to our objectives and overall business.

APPROACH - HARNESS EXISTING EXPERTISE + COLLABORATE

I worked collaboratively with the Product Management team and leadership across the organization to understand questions about our consumers and understand the different facets of our industry. I designed the study and follow-up interviews to probe our basic assumptions and themes to establish a unified understanding of consumer perceptions about - laundry, technology, and themselves to define consumer segments/draft personas. I also wanted this study to establish there are ranges of attitudes and behaviors within our consumer population - with frequency and saliency to our objectives and priorities. I also knew I needed to ensure that all branches of business felt represented in each study or they would not value or identify with the results.

A previous marketing consultant had drafted a quantitative survey to establish segments grounded in demographics. The consultant had worked with product and marketing to establish the criteria. I built upon this foundation and moved it to a foundation that moved it towards attitudes and mental models rather than demographics - making demographics a smaller focus on the survey as attributes. The survey focused on technology, laundry habits, household make-up and laundry roles, payment, COVID, and usage.

We started with a quantitative survey. My VP advised me that statistical results are essential to the success of research within our culture as well as the link to business numbers.

This study will be my introduction to working with teams, and serve as a catalyst for establishing collaborative relationships and work with an objective for my role to influence business and product decisions.

I created a "print" version of the document after hearing the executives and leadership are more likely to print and read, and some will read in "lean back mode". Simultaneously I was working with our internal Tools and Security team to establish where I could create an internal research site accessible to everyone in the organization. I planned to make research accessible with an information site organized by topic, not a repository of reports.

Representative Sample

Usage Patterns + Account Analysis - My VP had already done a bit of analysis to establish categories of usage via the existing mobile app. I did an updated analysis with his encouragement. We reviewed the results together and refined his categories with slightly different definitions of usage categories and added ratios of usage patterns across the population. Note some community laundry rooms offered other payment methods that were not tracked including Kiosk/Cards, Coin, and/or Credit Card with or without the mobile app option.

Branch Representation - To ensure geographic representation to explore whether there are cultural differences in laundry as well as customers within different branches - potentially different attitudes towards service and contract variations, I worked with two very experienced team members who have worked in the field. I analyzed account data from SalesForce as well as industry data from ALN (Apartment data), to find potential groupings of our branches to form categories for customer recruitment. My coworkers were very patient with me! (ha ha) as we reviewed some ideas I drafted while they were out for the December/January holidays. We discussed how the business could be represented looking at SalesForce data. We drafted logical "Branch Groups" based primarily on machine counts per account and region, and a few other attributes. I reviewed with senior leaders for an initial agreement. This allowed me to invite and drive a representation of our business and potentially different business models experienced (not documented).

Sample Size - We agreed upon a targeted sample size based on an estimated population of 5m consumers, we needed at least 2400 participants to achieve a Margin of Error of 3% and a Confidence Level of 95% for 5m people. 2507 completed the survey with less than 25 were flagged for removal by Qualtrics. (I reviewed the comments for sections to consistency between the quantitative responses and comments of each to determine whether to remove them.) Its important to note that approximately one-third of our consumer population is using a mobile app. The mobile apps and IoT laundry rooms are in a 2-year roll-out roadmap.

Personas - That can drive design AND product decisions. Although my priority is to influence business and product and service decisions, I know I have an opportunity to establish user needs with mental models that drive the value of personas to inform design decisions. This survey will establish proto-personas primarily with attitudes and self-perceptions.

I have created a set of questions based on the work of Everett M. Rogers's Diffusion of Technology to capture attitudes and perceptions of self with technology that I have used over the last 10 years. I created a version for my studies building upon his original themes as well as themes relating to IoT laundry rooms such as mobile payment, security, cleanliness and safety, etc. using 5-point weighted Likert scales - and always include a comment box.

Mental Model Introductions + Iterative Drafts - I worked with my direct team - Product, and Direct Marketing to review the survey draft - taking the opportunity to introduce the design of a formal quantitative study as well as harnessing UX Design principles to design an experience - not just an instrument, for higher response rates and gathering more data in one study. We refined questions together.

Using Qualtrics I engaged my team to review my work by taking the survey. I reviewed their results and refined questions further.

Recruitment Strategy + Response coming soon as Blog post

I rolled out the survey in batches representing the population reviewing the results of the first group ensuring the results looked complete and meaningful for analysis. I continued to review participants and the alignment to our recruitment goals to tailor each invite batch until we reached our sample goals.

I worked closely with my VP to craft an impactful summary. I wanted to emphasize Divergent vs Convergent research and what would come next.

The Analysis included looking at the results from a business perspective - starting with my target audiences' mental models. After the general background, approach, and methods section I presented the first of the analysis - the representation of the business and results.

Since we had people in the organization insisting that gender determines laundry behavior, I looked at the data from a gender perspective and showed a comparison between female and Male responses for both laundry and technology themes. No notable statistical differences. This is also an example of demonstrating the range of results with frequency. In the end, regardless of gender, everyone does laundry, knowledge, and attitudes about it are relevant with a 5% Margin of Error. Whenever I use a weighted Likert scale I like to include an opportunity to express themselves via "Comments". I analyzed the comments and used the quotes in reporting and personas.

I drafted proto-personas from the results and used them to present the variations in results in a meaningful, and rememberable manner. I also used two of the six profiles to teach the organization to look at results with greater complexity than just averages for each question.

It was important to include senior profiles because of an assumption that seniors are tech-phobic and not tech-savvy. Although confidence levels are slightly lower, they are not dominating the lower range. There are those seniors who are less confident- and people within each age group, it is a smaller part of our population. I noted seniors have support from different groups including family, AARP, SSA, etc. that make efforts to educate and support their use. In previous studies, I have seen greater awareness of tech security among seniors than younger generations.

There was a prevalent assumption that accounts/people with higher incomes are more open to technology and more technically savvy. This is combined with the assumption that one account represents one person. I explored these assumptions and found that our accounts represented households with a range of members. This gives a different perspective of income. I also gathered sources of income such as set income - retired, set-income gov assistance, full-time employed, number of people employed, etc. so we understand what this income means. This immediately influenced the analysis of pricing and the question of how much can we increase prices without impacting usage. I started to work with Finance in complementary analysis/studies.

With any business, we have goals to increase engagement. Beginning to understand personal laundry with self-reported triggers.

With any business, we have goals to increase engagement. Beginning to understand personal laundry with self-reported use of options and the potential for increasing engagement.

Understanding the laundry experience includes the variations in the emotional experience. This finding began to reveal insights into increasing internal empathy and increasing engagement.

The finding that had an immediate impact on product roadmaps was the finding that accounts are shared. This survey also began to explore laundry roles and needs including managing funds, needing to guide children in doing laundry, and the need for multiple users at one time.

A sample of the quantitative personas I eventually produced with iterative updates from quantitative and qualitative studies. I used the foundational proto-personas to create survey questions I repeated with all surveys and interviews to allow for meta-analysis across studies. Because the personas started with this efforts smaller "proto-personas" the organization was able to learn how to use them with smaller sets of data, get to know the personas, and slowly expand their understanding and depth of usage.

I used gender-neutral names, avoided pronouns, used signatures rather than photos, and selected names from across the world to reduce the likelihood of personal bias towards people and cultures to influence use.

OUTCOMES

As noted the roadmaps for the mobile app changed immediately to support shared accounts including allowing multiple users at once, and the discussion about the value of allowing different users and roles for accounts - for both users and our insights, began.

This survey influenced leadership support of a new service - Wash and Fold. It also generated curiosity about overall satisfaction after reading laundry frustrations and mentions of the room and machines (CSC's Service) setting the foundation for a benchmark study in customer satisfaction.

From a research perspective, the report and presentation successfully introduced the idea of personas, the value of the range and variations of mental models to inform strategies that strive to increase engagement and challenged the approach to determine increases in prices that wouldn't decrease usage.

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