What’s Next for Insights: From Customer Experience to Stakeholder Experience

Customer insights teams can and should help their organizations improve the experiences of all stakeholders - not just customers. Here are three ways you can help your organization do that.

I’ve written previously about the steady progress of a massive movement among our largest organizations to prioritize creating great customer experiences. 

Whether we track it by the number of executive leaders meeting customers in their homes, the number of headlines about customer-oriented initiatives, or the increasing availability of customer feedback tools and survey systems -- customers’ needs and voices play a much more central role in the strategies, processes and decisions of large organizations than any time in recent memory.

There are many different teams and leaders who have taken on this mantle -  customer experience (“CX”), user experience (“UX”), customer research, design, design research, design thinking, customer success, innovation and corporate strategy among them - but they’re pursuing a common cause. They believe that what customers care about matters. They’ve created methods and tools that help them learn about their customers. And they’re hard at work putting customers’ needs into the products, services and strategies that their organizations offer to the world.

We often collectively refer to the group of people driving this effort forward as “insights leaders.”

I’m so proud of the impact of the work that these leaders have made in these past few years. The progress is fantastic. They’re the drivers of a fundamental shift in organizational design. From decision-making based on the “bottom line” to decision-making that’s focused on the growth and profits that come from long-term customer relationships. 

Even the most number-crunching folks - CFO’s - have stopped simply asking “is it possible” and “is it profitable,” adding “what does the customer want” into the mix of what they prize and care about.

So given all that progress, what’s next?

Insights leaders have been helping their organizations design for one stakeholder: the customer’s experience. 

We’re now reaching a point where organizations will want to start designing experiences for all stakeholders.

Design Experiences for All Stakeholders

Customers are just one of many types of stakeholders. Investors and shareholders are another. So are the employees, partners (like suppliers, distributors, and technology vendors), communities, and environment that make what the organization does possible.

For a few decades, many of our largest organizations adopted a simple heuristic to help coordinate all their people and decision-makers toward a common goal. “Let’s maximize shareholder value,” they said. 

It wasn’t that these organizations didn’t acknowledge the other stakeholders. But when it came down to it - they collectively believed that maximizing returns to shareholders would create the greatest amount of value that the organization could achieve. That’s why they call it “the bottom line.” Everyone can agree on that number. It’s an easy thing to coordinate around.

It turns out that this little heuristic is too simple for our complicated world. 

Leaders, the court of public opinion and maybe even the regulators want to begin shifting our largest organizations from being shareholder-focused to being stakeholder-focused.

Here’s just a few of many signposts we’re tracking:

1. Elizabeth Warren has proposed a federal charter for all companies (>$1B) where its directors commit to service stakeholders not just shareholders.
2. Coalitions of businesses are coming together to redefine the “purpose” of companies. The Business Roundtable organized 181 CEO’s who “pledged” to re-orient their business toward all stakeholders. Conscious Capitalism put stakeholder orientation as one of its 5 pillars and there are many other movements like it.
3. Google and Facebook recently committed $1B each - and Apple $2.5 billion -  to support investments in affordable housing in California, expanding the scope of what generations of companies supported through CSR to a new approach to community responsibility.

As CEOs and boards begin to think more broadly about their organizations’ responsibility “for all,”  so too will everyone else in these organizations.

What’s great is that these organizations won’t have to start from scratch in figuring out how to do this. The customer experience movement is underway, and it’s the first great step that most organizations will take in designing for the experience of all stakeholders.

I believe the same leaders who drove forward the customer experience movement forward are best positioned to expand on this progress and will now begin to help their organizations learn about the needs of all stakeholders. 

It’s you – the VP’s of insights, data science, CX, UX, design and strategy- you’re going to lead this effort.

You’ve created the practices that diagnose customer behavior and translate that knowledge into compelling strategies, stories, metrics and customer experiences. 

You’ve been working hard to facilitate learning for your colleagues in other functions - to help them learn about customers needs. 

You’ve been creating ways to collaborate across all sorts of different agendas and goals - those of product, marketing, HR, operations, finance - to help get the best possible customer experiences out into the world.

Now, it’s time to begin evolving your practices - and expand your responsibility - to learn about stakeholder needs beyond the customer’s.

You’ll gather the data.

You’ll begin to coordinate and facilitate decisions about strategy and product designs with the other functions of your organization.

You'll tell the story of who these stakeholders are, what they need and why. 

I can’t tell you how to do this in entirety. Very few organizations do this at a world class level today. But I can share what we’ve learned from many leaders who are beginning to push their practices forward in this way.

3 Steps Insights Leaders Can Take to Design for Stakeholders

1. Go to the Gemba.

One of the simplest and strongest techniques that insights teams use is the research visit to the “gemba” – or the natural home environment or "real place" - of research participants. 

Over the years, my teams have led interviews with customers everywhere from the cab of a freight truck to the hallways of the Pentagon. In these cases, we were adapting the core research tools of B2C customer research for B2B environments. We were observing, shadowing and interviewing the customers of B2B companies - who are folks like truck drivers or government procurement managers.

Now the same techniques of ethnographic observation are being adapted for stakeholder insights research. Beyond just researching customers, insights teams are using the same techniques to study employees (and their families), suppliers, community leaders, regulators and more.

Go see your stakeholders wherever they spend their most time - in their headquarters, field offices or homes.

Make the visit all about them – not a sales pitch. Observe everything from the art on the walls and the trophies on the bookshelves to the words and language of everyday interactions there. Listen, ask open-ended questions and take lots of notes. Study their organizations and their customers. Learn about their roles, their goals and what they’re like outside of work, too.

2. Launch strategic insights projects for key stakeholder groups.

Each year, Jump runs projects for our clients to discover insights and generate new ideas and strategies, which have typically focused on their key customer segments.

Recently, we’ve had insights leaders ask us to help their organizations learn about stakeholder groups, spread new insights, and launch new programs.

This includes companies who have a key community that they need to connect with better.

It includes companies who have a key employee segment that they need to tap into, increase relevance with or improve retention of.

And it includes companies who have key strategic partners – for instance in the supply chain – that have capabilities, needs and behaviors that could present future opportunities.

3. Incorporate stakeholder insights during annual strategic planning.

One way you can do this is during strategy planning off-sites. In a one- or two-day working session, have your leadership team learn about the needs and mindsets of a priority set of stakeholders.

Jump recently facilitated a session like this for a non-profit whose stakeholders included students, tech partners and donors. There were several parts to the working session - a quantitative performance review, a deep-dive into customer needs, and a rich diagnosis of the organization’s strengths and capabilities. In addition to that, the leaders spent time learning about the different needs of each key stakeholder group. By the end of the day, the non-profit had surfaced high-priority ideas that re-directed its annual plan and incorporated a real sense of empathy for their stakeholders.

Insights Leaders can Get Started Now

This is how it starts.

With insights leaders like you taking the exact processes and capabilities you’ve tuned so well for customer experience…and expanding your focus to spread insights through your organizations of stakeholders beyond end-users and customers.

2020 will be the year that your insights transform into to better employee experiences, better supplier and partner experiences, and better experiences for the whole community.