Lets begin at the beginning: The process of empathy building - Part 1

PROBLEM STATEMENT:

“To turn around and improve the Customer Experience scores of the Product Support Contact Center"

In this Blog Series on Problem Solving I have used the above problem statement and will share how Design Thinking and Data Science tools and techniques such as empathy building, hypothesis testing, correlation analysis and observation can be used effectively to solve problems.

Armed with huge data sets, visualization charts, statistical insights, correlation graphs, linear regression models, data flow diagrams, process maps and heaps of notes I walked into another exciting journey of Problem-Solving using Design Thinking.

As I sat in the big boardroom of Senior Executives, Managers, Developers and Team Members, I could not help but feel the nervous energy in each one of the participants, there was an air of anticipation as well as anxiety.

While the Mission and Goal of the workshop were discussed for the first 30 minutes we wandered into various discussions which included statements like “The REAL PROBLEM is” and “The SOLUTION is”. :)

If you are new to Design Thinking let me point out that the foundation is in building Empathy. It is a slow process of building confidence in the group that they will be heard and their views will be valued irrespective of their position in the hierarchy, skill level or experience.

After the first 30 minutes of free flow and getting all that was on their mind on the whiteboard for future discussion I threw my first DT salvowhere I opened with ‘Pray lets begin at the beginning.’

To begin at the beginning is to understand the Process from it’s Inception. For instance in the current business case getting answers to some very simple but pertinent questions like

1. When was this team setup?
2. Why was this team setup?
3. How was the team setup?
4. Why was the team setup the way it was setup?
5. What used to happen before the team was setup?
6. Who were involved in the team setup?
7. What was expected from the team when it was setup?

Our attempt was to Build Empathy by going to the very root of the problem that this team was setup to solve and helped us to understand the gap between Expectations and Reality. The problem was not the customer experience score. That was just the outcome.

The process of Empathy Building is the foundation of problem solving and it helps

1)    All stakeholders build more context and awareness about the problem that they may have not been aware of

2)    Refine and Define the problem in more detail with more perspectives than just the senior management’s view of the problem

By starting at the beginning, we were able to refine our problem with regards to

1. Assumptions
2. Poorly defined scope
3. Performance measures
4. Gap between aspiration and reality

By drawing Empathy Maps we could look at the same problem from various perspective of the user, the senior management, the front line leader and the associate.

It also changed the entire course of the next three days of the workshop as each stakeholder right from the senior leadership to the associate understood the various layers of the problem and how they were directly and indirectly responsible for the same.

By listening to each individual in the room, we were able to get data points that we may never have been able to get from data sets generated by the machine.

Empathy Building therefore is the foundation of Design Thinking as from here on the focus through out the problem solving journey will be human centric, user stories, their experience and the emotional journey.

In the next post we will discuss how we use Data Science and Observation Techniques to carry out Hypothesis Testing to refine the problem further.

(editing credits to @Shalu Kurian)