Making CX Better by Making Work Harder

In Brief

Your front-line teams are the people who are frequently closest to the edge of the organization, most likely to be the point of contact with a customer at a potentially memorable time. And, as many of you CX pros deal with every day, there’s a natural temptation for them to fall into a rut and start behaving kind of robotically. The solution to this turns out not to be in making their jobs easier, but rather in making them harder.

This article is the companion piece to a video that recently appeared on Customeville’s weekly CX vlog, 40 Billion Reasons. LinkedIn subscribers can see it above, and all past editions are available at www.customerville.com/vlog.

It’s a problem that customer experience leaders deal with all the time. Whenever we find teams of customer-facing employees who are dealing with repetitive, relatively low-skill tasks, there’s a natural temptation for them to fall into a rut and start behaving robotically.

This is a huge issue for the company and the brand. But it’s also a problem for the employee; These people really need to be adding value to the customer experience if they want to have jobs in the future. If your job has you behaving robotically, after all, nobody will be surprised when you’re replaced with a bot.

If your job has you behaving robotically, after all, nobody will be surprised when you’re replaced with a bot.

So, how can we help are fellow humans to press their unique advantages? How can we get them to shine in the face of monotony? The answer turns out to be not in making their jobs easier, but rather in making them harder. It has to do with a behavioral science concept called “flow state”, which offers us a view into how people whose jobs have them stuck in tasks that fall below their capabilities get bored and frustrated. Perhaps more importantly, it gives us a framework for understanding the specific ways we can make their jobs harder such that the worker remains more engaged.

Lessons in fixing the mundane...from something complex

One of my favorite examples that illustrate this point appears in the nearby video we did on this subject for our CX vlog, 40 Billion Reasons. We unearthed a video from way back in 1997 of the Russian pianist Evgeny Kissin, still quite young at the time, performing the incredibly demanding piece, La Campanella. It’s absolutely jaw dropping.

This performance is also probably the best example I know of flow state, and it helps us vividly understand engagement not just in something incredibly difficult like Kissin’s performance of La Campanella, but also engagement at the other end of the spectrum in relatively simple tasks.

Flow state is a term coined by the Hungarian-born psychologist, Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi. (Pro tip: “Mee-high Chick-sent-me-high”) We actually write a chapter about him in our book, Design-driven Feedback.

Czikszentmihalyi’s theory explains how engagement is the product of matching two things:

• Level of difficulty of a task
• Level of skill you bring to bear on that thing

Have a look at the nearby chart. The vertical axis, represents the difficulty of a challenge. The horizontal axis represents the skills level you have to accomplish that challenge. A line right up the middle represents a perfect balance of skills and challenge. That’s flow state.

A person with skill level 1 tasked with a job of difficulty 1 would land low on the flow state line, and a person with skill level 5 tasked with a job of difficulty 5 would high on it. But they’re both on the right place in the Flow State line for them under the circumstances.

Reframing the discussion about work difficulty and engagement

What’s important about this is how it frames this discussion about things like work satisfaction or engagement and difficulty. In his research, Csikszentmihalyi found that people who landed on the line -- in balance between skills and difficulty -- tended to be satisfied, engaged and present.

This explains how Kissin manages to stay at this. He worked day in and day out over what I estimated to be 40,000 hours of work at something that is exceedingly difficult and involves frequent struggle and failures along the way. Yes, the work is a 10 out of 10 difficulty. But he’s pretty much got 10 out of 10 skills. As long as he’s in balance or pretty close to in balance, he can stay in there, fighting his way yet higher.

He worked day in and day out over what I estimated to be 40,000 hours of work at something that is exceedingly difficult and involves frequent struggle and failures along the way.

Okay, so what about when people end up in situations where their job difficulty exceeds skill level? In that case, they end up what I call NORTH of flow state. They feel a constant state of being over one’s head. The dread this produces creates all kinds of problems, and that is a subject worthy of study. But in the case of the employees we’re talking about -- those tasked with simple, repetitive tasks, that’s not really what’s going on.

No, most of the people we’re talking about today -- like those people you see working at TSA -- end up SOUTH of flow state. Their skills actually exceed the difficulty of the job. And that creates boredom, frustration and eventually the just kind of check out. And boy can you tell.

Making the job harder

So, what’s the answer? You’ve got to the work HARDER, moving them back “north” on the chart so that they’re closer to the flow state line. They’ve got a job that’s a good match for their social skill capabilities.

Does that mean we make them juggle chainsaws while the work? That kind of harder?

No, there are four specific things you’ve got to do -- four conditions you can create that will make your company culture “flow state-friendly.” Over the next couple of articles (and episodes of our vlog, 40 Billion Reasons) we’ll learn from CX leaders at companies like Trek Bicycles, Microsoft, Premera Blue Cross and Verizon how they leverage flow state.

Max Israel is founder and CEO of Customerville, the design-driven Customer Experience Management platform. Customerville is dedicated to blending technology, art and behavioral science to vividly elevate the customer and employee experience.

Max is the author of the 2017 book, Design-driven Feedback. His weekly vlog on the subject of Customer Experience, 40 Billion Reasons, is viewed by over 10,000 people in the CX community each month.

The watercolors in this article were created by Customerville designer, Justine Jammes.