Length
4 min read
When you know your customers are struggling, your instinct as a researcher or service designer is to talk to them directly. What happens when that’s not possible? When your customers are experiencing genuine hardship such as financial stress, health crises, family emergencies, language barriers or other vulnerable circumstances, the last thing they need is a researcher asking them to relive their difficulties for the sake of ‘insights’.
These are often the very experiences we most need to understand if we’re going to improve our services. How do you learn enough to move forward when traditional interviews feel inappropriate or impossible?
The answer lies in piecing together the understanding from multiple sources that don’t require putting vulnerable people under additional pressure.
Observe the what: Service desk interactions tell a story.
There’s enormous value in simply watching how services unfold in real time. Observing interactions at service desks, call centres or support channels that can reveal patterns of difficulty that might never make it into formal feedback channels.
For instance, you might notice that customers repeatedly ask the same clarifying question about a form, even after staff have explained it. They’re not confused because they’re not listening, they’re confused because the form itself is genuinely confusing. Alternatively, you might observe customers arriving with incomplete documentation, not because they’re disorganised, but because the requirements weren’t clearly communicated at the right moment in their journey.
I once watched a series of interactions at a customer service centre where customers consistently struggled with particular forms. What stood out wasn’t just that people had questions, it was the specific point where they got stuck. Almost everyone would pause at the same section. Some would approach the desk; others would quietly leave the concierge when they didn’t have enough clarity. The pattern was unmistakable, even though no one explicitly said, “this bit is impossible”.
These observations give you the ‘what’, the tangible evidence that something isn’t working but they rarely tell you the ‘why’.
Talk to service staff: The underrated source of truth.
This is where frontline staff become invaluable, they’re one of the most underutilised sources of insights in service design. The people who staff service desks, answer phones or respond to emails are in constant contact with your customers. They hear the same question dozens of times a day. They see the workarounds people create. They know which policies cause the most confusion and which processes make people upset or embarrassed. They understand cultural differences and how to talk to different types of customers.
More importantly, they often know why things are difficult in ways that go beyond the obvious. A customer might struggle with an online form not just because it’s poorly designed, but because they don’t have reliable internet access at home and are trying to complete it on a phone in a car park. Someone might not be able to commit to an appointment because they’re struggling financially, they cannot find someone who can help translate for them or they are managing a work schedule with no flexibility.
Staff members build this contextual understanding over time, through hundreds of interactions. They recognise patterns. They develop empathy. If you create space for them to share what they really know, not just what’s captured in official complaints, they can fill in the ‘why’ behind the difficulties you’ve observed.
The key is to approach these conversations with genuine curiosity and respect for their expertise. These aren’t just data collection sessions; they’re collaborative sense-making with people who have knowledge you simply don’t have access to any other way.
Connect the ‘what’ and the ‘why’: Making sense together.
Observations and staff insights are powerful individually, but their real value emerges when you bring them together.
Start by mapping what you’ve observed against what staff have told you. When you noticed customers struggling with particular form sections, what did staff say about the questions they typically receive? Do the observed patterns align with staff experiences? Where do they diverge and what might that tell you?
Look for the stories that explain the patterns. If you observed someone leaving the service centre without completing their transaction and staff mention that many customers become overwhelmed when they realise they need documents they don’t have with them, you’re starting to build a more complete picture. The observation showed you the moment of the breakdown. The staff insight explained the underlying cause.
This is also where you can test your hypothesis without putting vulnerable customers through additional stress. If staff consistently report that customers struggle with a particular requirement because it assumes everyone has a fixed address, you can validate that by reviewing the design of your forms and communications. You don’t need to interview someone who doesn’t have a place of residence to understand why “permanent residential address” is a barrier.
The synthesis isn’t just about combining data sources; it’s about building empathy and understanding through triangulation. You’re creating a layered picture of the customer experience that respects people’s circumstances while still giving you enough insight to make meaningful improvements.
Finding a way forward.
Perfect research conditions rarely exist and when you’re working with vulnerable populations, they almost never do. But the absence of traditional interviews doesn’t mean you can’t develop genuine understanding.
Sometimes you have to find a way to learn enough to keep going, even when the method isn’t ‘just’ interviews. By observing real interactions and deeply engaging with frontline staff who work with customers every day, you can build sufficient insight to identify problems, understand root causes and design better services.
This approach requires honesty – acknowledging that your understanding will always be partial and that you’re constructing insight rather than hearing it directly. It requires creativity in how you gather and synthesise information. It requires trust in the expertise of people who are often closest to the problems you’re trying to solve.
Most importantly, it keeps the focus where it belongs: on making services work better for people who are already dealing with enough difficulty. Sometimes the most respectful form of user research is finding ways to learn that don’t add to someone’s burden. Often, those methods can teach us just as much, if not more, than a formal interview ever would.
