Podcast Show Notes
Your organization may have determined what issues that need to be solved—and you may have also already prioritized which to tackle first. But how can you make sure you have the right people at the experience design table to get the results you’re really after?
In this podcast with experience expert, Diane Magers, CCXP, Threadfin’s Experience Practice Lead, we discuss who needs to be involved in the experience design process and how organizations can take a purposeful, intentional approach to solving problems. 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.
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 quick episode, we talk about who needs to be involved in the experience design process and how organizations can take a purposeful approach to solving problems.
Sara Keeney:
What about when we are doing our journey mapping and let’s say an organization realizes, hey, we’ve got a lot of issues that we need to address. I hear you saying we’re picking the most impactful and going with those first and moving from there. But I think also having a variety of people in on the discussions will really help organizations preempt problems that could come up as part of the digital transformation. If you have only the C-suite saying, here’s what we’re doing, there are things that frontline agents would know that need to be considered. There are things that customers are experiencing that they need to be made aware of. And so having that broader discussion than what an organization might be used to is going to be really, really key too.
Diane Magers:
And that’s the whole design piece of not just designing business. But when you find something that you need to solve for, it’s going back out and doing a deeper dive on that and really understanding the steps that are being taken, the way that you’re using the data, looking at information, talking to customers. It’s all of those things that people, I think, kind of take for granted, but they don’t actually use that when they’re solving the problem. So I see what I call the knee jerk reaction all the time. We’ll prioritize this. We’ll have a list of things we want to do and we’ll prioritize by value to the customer and complexity and value to the organization. So lots of organizations have a matrix they use to make decisions on how they’re going to prioritize. Okay. But what happens after that is they go, oh, we know exactly what’s causing a problem. We’re going to go fix that. And it’s like, no. Do we really know?
Diane Magers:
You think it’s what it is, but maybe we need to do a deeper dive. So mature organizations will go and do a lot more, and not necessarily a heavy research, but they’ll go observe customers and they’ll talk to their users and they’ll look at decision makers versus users and people in procurement if they’re a b2b. And really understand the problem they’re trying to solve first and co-create with customers along the way. Bringing them in to weigh in on opportunity and prototypes before they go out the door with it. So by the time they go out the door with a solution, they know exactly how it’s going to be launched. They know exactly what they may find their hyper sensitive to, we have to watch what calls come into the care center or what people are doing on the web to understand did we design it right? Because if we didn’t, we may see these things. So it’s interesting, the purposeful, intentional way that they think about solving problems and because they’ve invested and focused their efforts, they can take the deeper dive into really solving the right problem. Because they hear that all the time. It’s like, we don’t have time to design, we just have to go fix it. And it’s like, well, okay, you can go fix it. But it’s, it’s kind of like putting a band-aid on something, right?
Sara Keeney:
And we’ve already said band-aids are expensive. <Laugh>.
Diane Magers:
Exactly. And I think that’s the thing that digital transformation has run into.
Sara Keeney:
I love that you brought up observation. That is such an easy, powerful tool. I mean, I’ve spent a lot of time in a contact center and I can’t tell you how much I have learned by just listening to agent calls. I can learn the things that need to be corrected, the things that are going well, the things that are not going well. Spend some time with your procurement team, spend some time listening to the calls, spend some time out there in the field with your salespeople. When you’re seeing what’s actually happening with your own eyes, it’s a whole different perspective. So I think adding that to the, the fact finding, the information gathering process is huge.
Diane Magers:
And I love that because if you think about the observations, think about the design phases, right? You understand, if you’re getting ready to design, think about who has the vast amount of knowledge about exactly what’s happening with the customers. It’s the people that are doing the work, that are doing that front line work who can come in and tell you, this will work, this won’t, this is the pain point, this is the expectation. If we don’t do this, it’s going to be a failure. But if you do that, here’s what’s going to break. Right? We also want to go down the unhappy path. It’s the other thing with digital transformation, I don’t think people recognize as much that you have to think about what could go wrong? Let’s say my grandmother for example. If she was going to call in and or she wanted to get online to try to fix something, would what you’re doing solve for her?
Diane Magers:
Would it also solve for my 20 year old? So there’s, there’s this whole, have you really thought through this solution and what it’s going to do for all the people who are using your product or your service? So that’s the other piece behind experience management. When we think about Experience Threading, that’s what we try to bring to digital transformation, to technology change, just to organizations in general. Because they’re kind of on this same mantra back when we were, in the 2000s, when organizations could do marketing and that’s the way that they got new customers. And that was fine and dandy, but now, nope, it’s word of mouth. It’s referrals, it’s advocacy, it’s your brand is out there. And no marketing can overcome sometimes the really bad things. But if you’ve got great things going on, you better believe that’s going to be spread just as well. I think it’s an interesting concept about how companies grow today.
Sara Keeney:
Yeah, I think you’re right. And I think that when companies do this well, when they’re very thoughtful about it, when they’re very intentional about it, the results can be amazing. Especially in this year where we’re thinking maybe there’s going to be a downturn. It might not be as strong a year as we’ve seen in the past. Organizations that are really paying close attention to this are the ones that are going to come out just thriving.
Diane Magers:
Yes. I agree.
Outro:
Thanks for listening to Experience Threading: The Podcast. We invite you to leave a rating and a review on the platform you used 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.
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