Applying Design Techniques To Craft Purpose Statements | Aligning Behaviors With Beliefs | Overcoming The Cult Of The Customer

For many, myself included, customer experience is a calling. We are true believers, followers of the cult of customer, fanatical about putting the customer at the center of everything.

Sometimes that’s a problem for us. Why?

In this episode of the CX Patterns podcast and newsletter, I’m talking with Nicole Ornelas about how to use design techniques to first craft a Purpose Statement for a CX team, and then second, and more importantly to start to bring that Purpose Statement to life with Behavior change.

The Dangerous Cult Of The Customer

True believers in customer experience have the strength of their faith to sustain their interest. But their colleagues don’t.

We have faith in CX. Colleagues demand evidence that CX works.

The mismatch comes when we, CX professionals plow ahead with proposed customer experience improvements without first building a strong base of support. We know it’s the right thing to do, and sometimes we are too myopic about how valuable and important customer experience is to stop and think about how we might make that case to our colleagues.

CX Pros Lack Empathy – Wait, How Can That Be?

The problem is that customer experience professionals lack empathy. Now in our world, lacking empathy is a cardinal sin. But sadly it’s true. We fail to take the perspective of our colleagues who have true belief in something other than customer experience. We need to figure out what it is, and tell the why customer experience story in terms they’ll understand and appreciate.

Return to First Principles To Find Your Way Out Of The True Believer Trap

Empathy should be – and is, when we’re doing it right – at the heart of customer experience efforts. That’s not new. What is new is to expand the circle of empathy to include our colleagues, include skeptics of customer experience in who we have empathy for, not just customers, and not just frontline workers.

Seek to understand the narrative, the stories that they’re telling about what matters. Work to fit customer experience into those narratives, to help them see what you see.

Design Mindset is another first principle that is valuable here. Nicole eloquently describes how she and her team used design techniques at Bank Of The West to craft a statement of purpose for the CX team, and then to bring it to life through behavior change. It’s worth listening to the episode to hear Nicole tell the story in her own voice.

Qualitative research – they had each workshop participant first interview 5-10 colleagues and ask them what they thought the company’s purpose statement was. They were all over the map.

Then, they conducted an Insight Safari, going out into the world to get inspiration from other companies and environments.

Those two upfront activities provided fuel for the workshop fire that came next. By working in small groups, they were able to craft versions of a Purpose Statement, and then collaborate to choose one that would guide their team. The discussions and brainstorms also produced values and behaviors that would support the Purpose Statement. Now they had specificity they need to make it real.

There’s so much more to the story of what they did, listen here for the details.

But what I love about this example is that it shows that the mindset we already value – Empathy – and the skills we already possess – Design Techniques – can bring us out of the difficult period we are facing inside of our companies in terms of skepticism around customer experience.

Don’t despair. Get to work.