Oticon reached out to UserTribe when they realised they needed the right business partner to better understand and map out the customer journey. The target group was broad in the sense that it should have covered new and existing end users across Germany, France and the United States.

Oticon’s many years of experience had taught them that acquiring a new hearing aid can be both a difficult and long process. Aside from the technical aspect of acquiring a new hearing aid, the purchase includes a lot of dimensions on a very emotional and personal level. And by uncovering the customer journey it was these dimensions Oticon wanted to get a deeper and better understanding with human insights from UserTribe.

When you as Oticon choose to deep-dive into the customer journey, you get the complete picture of the thought process, feelings and sentiments – and even more importantly: you learn exactly when and why they occur. With this insight, Oticon could develop a tangible action plan that would lead to growing sales and customer loyalty.

Oticon turned to UserTribe for two reasons. Firstly, they knew that getting a deeper understanding of their customers required a more human and qualitative approach. Secondly, they needed a partner who could both source and deliver the insights fast from several different markets – and with local specialist interpretation of data to ensure context and meaning.

The initial study objective was executed in close collaboration with UserTribe certified anthropologists in three different markets and the task design was formulated with a minimum of stimuli to reduce bias.

Hearing aid users in Germany, France and the United States were interviewed with our self-interview solution. This gives the participants the opportunity to participate whenever and wherever they want to. But most importantly it improves the data dramatically because the participants can talk freely in their own chosen surroundings.

With UserTribes context overview, Oticon could effortlessly see a grand overview of the customer journey as a whole and deep-dive into the single touchpoints and connected sentiments.

UserTribe context customer journey map

The human insights delivered from UserTribe gave Oticon a much more in-depth understanding of the users’ customer journey. This made them capable of making actionable improvements to embrace all the facets that are related to getting hearing aids.

Furthermore, Oticon could also distinguish between the different influences and motivational drivers for buying hearing aids between the US, German and France market.

The insights also uncovered the physiological changes users are experiencing. Many new users are juggling with the emotions of frustrations, embarrassment, isolation and the limits that follow impaired hearing.

Additionally, it revealed that in many cases it was not the user itself that took the decision of investigating the possibilities of hearing aids. It was actually their spouses or doctor who gave them the final push.

With human qualitative data, Oticon did not only know users with hearing aids much better. They also knew all the stakeholders that surrounded the customer and the kind of impact they had.

Today, Oticon is not only using the insights to strengthen their sales and marketing activities but also for onboarding new employees to give them a better understanding of users with hearing aids.