Podcast Show Notes
You’ve got the concept of employee and customer experience wrapped into your digital transformation plans. You may even have an experience plan in place. But where do you go from here, and how do you get there? Understanding maturity — where you are and how you stack up in terms of experience — is the catalyst for defining what you need to do to move forward.
Join us for our third podcast with experience expert, Diane Magers, CCXP, Threadfin’s Experience Practice Lead (and well-known Founder and Chief Experience Officer at Experience Catalysts), as we discuss an experience maturity model that narrows down the actions you can start taking today to drive success.
Click here to take the Experience Management Maturity Model Quiz we reference in this episode!
If you hear something that especially sparks your interest, contact us for deeper conversation tailored to your company’s needs. You can always find us at www.threadfin.com.
Listen to the full episode here.
Take the Experience Management Maturity Model Quiz here.
Podcast Transcript
Intro:
Welcome to Experience Threading: The Podcast where we discuss human-centered, outcome-focused digital transformation. If you’ve ever wondered…How can we make it easier for people to get their work done? How can I move to the cloud and then stay in the cloud? What’s the best way to handle risk in this work anywhere world? Then we invite you to listen in for the tools, techniques, and best practices you need to overcome these challenges.
Sara Keeney:
I’m Sara Keeney with Threadfin. This podcast is part of a longer conversation with our Experience Practice Lead Diane Magers. In this episode, we talk about how to build an experience plan and a maturity model you can use at your organization to narrow down the actions you can start taking today. We also invite you to take our Experience Management Maturity Model Quiz! The link is in the show notes and we can’t wait to see your results!
Sara Keeney:
Diane, I know that some organizations have already really integrated the whole concept of experience in terms of their digital transformation, right? They’re well on their way, others are at the very beginning. What’s really tricky is that some organizations are going to think like, oh, we got this <laugh>, but maybe they need an outsider’s perspective to say, do you really have it? How can an organization know how they stack up today in terms of experience and what’s considered the ultimate? What should an organization be striving for in terms of experience in their maturity as a company with that?
Diane Magers:
<laugh> It’s interesting that you start with that question because one of the things, when I think about organizations that we’ve worked with and talk with and they say, yeah, we’re doing this experience thing. We are trying to really figure out how to create the experience and be experience-led or customer-centric. And the very first question I ask them is, well, do you have a plan? What do you want the experience to be like? And invariably I get this like, no…
Sara Keeney:
Or, it should be good.
Diane Magers:
<laugh>. Yeah, it should be good. And you’re like, well, you define what that is. So I always say, without a good plan and a strategy and a goal for where you’re headed and what you want the experience to be like, how do you know if you achieve it? And how do you get the organization to think about that too? So the very first thing we think about is do you actually have a strategy around your experience for your customers and your employees? And what does it look like and what are you doing to do that? So part of those pieces of that strategy would include things like, well, where are you listening to customers and how are you using the information? So I find a lot of organizations that are fairly, I don’t want to say fairly immature, but what they’re doing is they’ve got a lot of data coming in, they’ve got a lot of feedback, and then they’re just throwing it out to the organization and saying, go fix your stuff.
Diane Magers:
When in fact, they should have a very specific insights to action process. They should have cross-functional team in the room doing those things, right? So you walk through all of the things that those great organizations we all admire do well and build on. There’s kind of a set of maturity of each of those disciplines, like listening, like you can start with listening and doing your surveys and getting your feedback. And mature organizations are using video feedback and emotional indicators to understand where customers like products or like the retail store they walk into. You might think about how you’re using design, right? Design gets used in vacuum that gets used on your products or service, but it doesn’t expand to the business. It doesn’t incorporate everything you’re doing, like designing a script, designing an interaction. You’re just using design for a product or service or UX for example, your digital transformation,
Diane Magers:
If you think about the business value you’re creating, we talked about this earlier, where you think about the impact of what we’re doing is only about what that particular project is going to do and what’s going to yield for you when in fact, if you stand back and look at it, not only does it have an impact on the employee, like the call center, giving them a new call center, giving them new knowledge management, enabling them with chat, enabling them with co-creation with the customer. All those things are a sign of maturity. So when you think about experience management, one of the things that we can help with is we have a maturity model that can kind of walk you through high level, here’s the things that we should be doing. What does it look like if we’re there?
Diane Magers:
So it’s a descriptive model. So you can kind of recognize yourself. But the importance of that is not just where you’re at, but what are you going to do to get to the next phase? How are you going to build that next piece? So what we do in Experience Threading is one of the things we start with is where are you in that maturity? What are the next things you need to do? And how do we start to apply that to a project you’re doing today? So the whole part of becoming more experience-led seems like a big goal out there, which it is. But what we try to do is really start with, well, let’s take a project and let’s just do it differently. Let’s make it experience-led. Let’s use design. Let’s have a bigger value model to it. Let’s really think about the impact through the whole ecosystem, what that can do. And once a company does that, then they’re on the drug <laugh>. They’re like, we should be doing it this way all the time. And it’s like, yes, you should.
Sara Keeney:
So this model, this maturity model, when we initially think about experience, you know, it seems like almost like a unicorn. It’s so broad. It’s a little bit cerebral. It just seems so big. And if you take the maturity model, it breaks it down into chunks. And so you can see, okay, I’m here in this area, I’m there in that area. I want to improve, here are the next things I need to do. So it takes it from being just this big, wow, sounds amazing, I don’t even know where to begin or exactly what to do. And it gives you the real structure around what it looks like for an organization.
Diane Magers:
Yeah, that’s a great sequence to how we can help. We start with that high level model and they go, oh yeah, we thought we were doing really well, but based on what you’re telling me here we’re needing to do some things differently, right? So we plan, we help them understand, you were doing these things great, here’s kind of your next step. So we try to really take the roadmap of what companies do to build this and say, here’s the steps that you need to take. So it’s very structured, flexible, but structured. And then we take, as I said, a project and we really apply some of those concepts so people get a feel for, if you are doing this differently, look at the things you get. You get better collaboration, you get more uptake or adoption of your product or service.
Diane Magers:
You’ve got a cohesive way to make decisions. Imagine! I tell companies this all the time. I want you to do, and I challenge the listeners to do this, I want you to think about and make a list of all the projects your company has in flight right now. And I want you to say which of those five things are most important and valuable to the customers or employees and are going to be the most efficient and effective for us to do as an organization. And invariably people say there’s just too many things going on. We’re just all over the place. And they’re not focused. They’re not focused on the things they really need to pay attention to. So it’s part of just helping an organization get to that point where they understand that. And that’s part of the, not just the maturity model, that’s a start. But it really helps us begin to understand and guide them in this can be done differently. And this is what experience being experienced-led means and how you invest into a project or into an organization.
Sara Keeney:
I like that because experience-and I think a good way to say experience can be really, really broad. And organizations have a variety of projects going on across a broad range of departments or in broad range of areas. And the maturity model really helps you narrow down experience. It takes it from being so broad to here’s exactly what it is and here’s exactly where you are in terms of what it is. And then from there, when you understand where they’re at, you look at this broad range of projects, narrow right in on one or two that will have a huge impact. And then you work through your experience and work on becoming more mature in those areas. Is that right?
Diane Magers:
Yes. Because it is a capability of an organization, the ability to do something well, the ability to use data well, the ability to understand your customer’s needs and design for those needs, like they’re capabilities you’re really building. But I think you bring up a good point about when you really think about the downturn and what we’re going to face this year, organizations are really going to have to make some tough decisions and not having a prioritization of which of these things are most beneficial to retain customers versus acquisition, you know that that’s going to shift. It always does. Pendulum swings one way or the other. And what are we going to do to really make that happen and invest in those right things today? And how is it going to be different from our competitors?
Sara Keeney:
I think what we’re going to find in the short-term future is that organizations who have prioritized well and have focused on the experience of their employees and their customers are going to thrive. And so we’re going to make this maturity model available for organizations to take a look at, just to get an idea of where you are, see if you’re right where you think you are, or maybe you’re more advanced or maybe you have a little more work to do than you had imagined, but we want to make this available to folks so they can check it out and have this resource as a great starting point so they know where to go from here.
Diane Magers:
Yes. And I think part of that is we don’t want people just to take a look at it and go, okay, I’m great. I’ve made a lot of progress, or oh my gosh, I didn’t think we’re as far as we needed to get to. Because once you read it you get a little depressed. Like sometimes we just, I really thought we were further along than that. But what we also will offer with that is the ability to come and talk to us. We can get on the phone and kind of walk through this is where you put yourself, so tell me what you’re really doing and where you are. Because really it’s just a catalyst to start to help people define what they need to do going forward. That’s all it is. And so we want to help them get there.
Sara Keeney:
Yeah. Self-assessment can sometimes to be a little bit harsh and sometimes we’re too hard on ourselves and really it’s less of an assessment and more of a tool so that organizations can use this to say like, ah, yes, okay experience is now very understandable for me and very manageable for me. And here’s how we’re going to take this forward in our organization so that we can thrive.
Diane Magers:
It makes it real. I kind of talk about it like a GPS. If you don’t know where you are today and you don’t really know the road, you kind of know where you want to get to. You have a vision, but you don’t really understand the road to get there. It’s hard to get there. You don’t have people aligned to the same thing and understanding where you’re going and where you’re heading and the plan to get there. And so really all that’s doing is creating that where you’re starting and what are the things we need to do next and next to take that, that journey of a thousand steps. We’ve all heard it, right? The great thing about it right now is the fact that so many organizations have done this and we’ve seen where they’ve failed and we’ve seen the things that have worked that it’s become those best practices and that’s what we really hope to bring to them so they don’t have to struggle with some of the things we struggled with earlier.
Sara Keeney:
Absolutely. The maturity model is basically like our ideo locator. It’s our ‘you are here’ on the map. And then you plan your journey from there. Based on the best practices that we have gleaned from others, they’ve made the mistake so that you don’t have to.
Diane Magers:
That’s right. Sometimes that’s the most benefit. Just say, do this first, don’t do this. It’s always great to have that guidance and we feel like even in a project, like we talked about having a project we could work on to demonstrate what it looks like. It’s amazing to watch when an organization says, oh yeah, we never had anybody in the room like this. I mean, I remember one workshop we did where marketing and the operations team had never really talked about what they were doing and just those conversations they have about, well, we didn’t know you were doing that and here’s how we’re coaching that. And maybe if we said that it would be different. It’s simply amazing to watch that happen.
Outro:
Thanks for listening to Experience Threading: The Podcast. We invite you to leave a rating and a review on the platform you use to listen to this podcast. If you heard something that especially sparked your interest, contact us for a deeper conversation tailored to your needs. You can always find us at threadfin.com.
Special Outro: I hope you loved this episode. To see where your organization stands in terms of employee and customer experience, take the Experience Management Maturity Model Quiz today. You’ll find the link in the show notes.
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Click here to take the Experience Management Maturity Model quiz.
