Empower Experience

After a long, complicated, and very, very expensive project, the result of the social media analysis was presented. The outcome was interestingly shocking. The marketing customer journeys seemed not to exist in the way the customers acted. Company jargon was different from customer wording. Topics were more diverse, the sentiment was different. The day-to-day conversations indicated a different set of intent. Starting with a static value proposition canvas, designing customer journeys, and then trying to find data to support those journeys did not seem to describe the real customer. When the conclusions were accidentally shared with some call-center agents, they laughed. Already knew that, for years! We tried to tell you that, but no one listened. We offer human intervention when the system fails. But maybe we should change the system itself. 

Social media analysis supported and confirmed by the call center agents. Information that was already available. Solutions and changes how to do better, up for grabs. Why is it so hard to act on the information that is the best you have: the information on the interaction point between customer and company: the call center agent? We reject employees’ ideas by stating they are not aligned with the company culture. We don’t do that, please follow the process. Human resources that focus on individual achievements. Management practice that effectively creates silos of one. Innovation that mainly focuses on developing new products and services. Startup culture defined as skills in development and technology. 

All seems to contradict the definition of digital transformation as the capacity to manage and change the way things get done. Getting done to create value. Value to ensure company continuity. In that definition, company culture is measured differently. Measured in the quality of human interactions at work and between the customer and the company. Alignment to culture becomes an alignment to focus on value. Culture as the combination of process and interaction glued together to create value for the customer. Innovation also becomes the capability to change processes when needed, on the fly. Fluid process innovation as the main driver for creating customer value by adoption to the evolving wants and needs. Process innovation that can be made real by the business infrastructure fragmentation that creates small pockets of functionality. Functionality that can be assembled into new business structures like Lego blocks. Microservices as the exponent of the delegation of decision-making to the edge of the company. The trend towards DevOps and microservices, breaking everything up into smaller building blocks, and a focus on what it takes to stitch together at the edge of customer interaction. Give employees the work experience they need. Empower them to match the experience needed by their customers without a supervisor. Let them improvise, change the rules, decide what is best for the customer. Let technology eliminate the divide between doers and decision-makers.

The edge of your company that interacts the most with customers, the edge that knows best. The harder it gets to develop expertise and accumulate value by the repetition of tasks, the more we need people who can do tasks that nobody ever has tried before. Letting people take on these new, never done before tasks, might expose the ingenuity, passion, and creativity that they usually park at the entrance when entering the office. If we allow our employees to be tested, to test themselves each day, enable them to improve their capabilities, they might go home at the end of the day with a feeling they did something cool. Imagine, work could even be fun! In that setting, we might find people welcome change, not resists it. The old conflict of wanting to do better, but the process forbids it, now turns into alignment with the vision and mission of the company. And as it is not individual but rather collective knowledge that creates the best insight, management turns into leadership that sets the optimal conditions for the social interaction needed to co-create that knowledge. Social interaction that captures the collective intelligence of the group over the silo of one individual.

Collective intelligence on the edge of the company helps to extend the old simple product-market combinations. Geos, age, gender, or income used to drive customer segmentation. With all the data and insights we can harvest from social media, from all the conversations before the customer journeys, we can know so much more about our customers. Information we can confirm with the knowledge, insight, emotions from the people working on the edge of the company. Allow for a decision process that allows employees to do work by assessing what is needed as it becomes apparent in interactions with customers. Delegate decision-making to the edge. Let them decide to stop, continue, or speed up innovation based on the accumulation of information at the coalface. Innovation sounds like empowerment to me. Empower experience. 

Recent blogs: Conversation centers run point / Talk to me before the journey / Innovation Tour Guide / The science of experience / The impact of experience / Service before contact / The value is in the experience / On Trust / Guiding Principles in customer focus / Work Life balance / Earlier blogs

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