In our recent Reset Show, we were joined by Kerrie Hughes and Paul Bailey from Sparck – a design and innovation consultancy. They shared their thoughts on what EX can learn from customer experience (CX) and user experience (UX). Spoiler alert – a lot! Paul even shared some ingenious ideas on how design thinking has helped his parenting skills – check out this talk from Paul, aka Design Thinking Dad.
Kerrie has worked in the field of customer experience for nearly twenty years and she shared some thoughts from the world of CX which are helpful to EX practitioners in our recently published book:
CX nuggets for EX from Kerrie Hughes
I’ve been working in the field of CX since 2001, when the company I was at had the vision to set up a customer experience team. As a new team, we were passionate and ready to fight the fight on behalf of our customers. But being a very new discipline, this wasn’t something you could buy a book about, or google, in fact google was barely a thing! So we went with our gut and what felt right.
Our early focus was on defining our brand, and translating that across our touch-points. We did a journey mapping sessions and banned our SMEs from talking process, and instead asked them to ‘be the customer’. I loved it and have never looked back. So, as a veteran of CX I’ve been asked ‘what can EX learn from CX?’
A good place to start is at the beginning. If you google ‘design process’ you will see that all good design starts with words such as research, analyse, understand, listen. In the design thinking process, this step is known as “Empathise’. Essentially, this step is about developing a deep understanding of the people you are designing for and the problem you are trying to solve. As a CX practitioner this can be the trickiest, and most difficult part to get an organisation to commit to.
There is an urgency, and therefore a tendency to jump straight to solutions. It takes time, and money to empathise. But spending time up front to get out there and find the people you are designing for, is critical. Utilising one or more of the many methodologies to truly understand and discover who they are, what their needs are, what frustrates them, what motivates them, what the real problem is that needs solving is perhaps the most crucial step.
This is where my jealousy kicks in, as in the world of EX, this Holy Grail of insight, that is the difference between good design and well, guess work, does not even require you to leave the (virtual) building! No expensive recruitment, just your employee’s time. So, seize this opportunity with both hands. Build in this time to your work. I promise you that time spent here will make a significant and positive impact on your employee experience design. It also has the added benefit of providing research and insight to call on when dealing with HIPPOs (highest paid persons opinion).
My next tip for EX by design is…don’t be afraid of emotions. It’s an often used quote because it’s too perfect not to call on, as Mary Angelou said ‘People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.’
This emotional layer is something that should always be captured when creating the ‘as-is’ journey map. Personally, I always capture ‘thinking’ and ‘feeling’ separately, and use these in the write-up to draw the emotional curve and identify the good, bad and neutral points.
A great tool I use when designing new experiences is the Dramatic Arc, also referred to as ‘Boom. Wow. Wow! WOW! BOOOM! Taken from film, stories and plays, it makes you consider how you want to design the emotional experience and be deliberate and appropriate with where your ‘Booms’ and your ‘Wows’ are.
Finally, remember it’s a marathon not a sprint, the work is never finished and things always change. So, identify the key experiences, the moments that matter and prioritise to avoid being overwhelmed. Monitor and manage the experiences by building in mechanisms for employees to easily feedback and continue to iterate, refine and adapt.
Some brilliant advice here, and the big take-away is, we have instant and ready access to the people we are designing experiences for – our employees. So there really is no excuse – get out there and start learning more about your people today, you won’t regret it.
If you’d like to find out more about designing brilliant experiences for your people that deliver engagement you can:
- Buy a copy of our book – use AHR20 for 20% off
- Download our EX Powertools series to get you started
- Watch our Reset Show
- Or get in touch to find out how we can help you with your EX
