With whom and how do you socialize customer insights?
You’re listening to customers. You’re combining their feedback with those bread crumbs of data that they leave with every transaction and interaction with your brand. You’ve developed customer personas to better understand who they are, what problems they are trying to solve, and what jobs they need to get done. You’ve mapped their journeys to understand their experience today and their expectations for a better experience tomorrow. And you’re analyzing all of that together to learn everything you can and to tell a better and more-robust customer story.
(You’ve done all of that, right?)
And there you are. Stuck. Now what? What do you do with all of those insights? How do they get consumed and acted on?
(They must get consumed and acted upon – otherwise, it’s all just expensive trivia!)
It’s time to socialize the insights in an easily-digestible way so that the right people use them to improve the experience for the customer. (I’ve already written about five ways to close the loop on feedback, so I won’t mention those.) There are multiple ways to do that, but be sure to tailor the delivery method and the insights to the audience and the expected and desired outcome.
- Role-based or individual dashboards in your CRM system, VoC platform, or other data democratization platforms give the right people access to the right data and insights.
- CX Champions can help to get the insights out into their respective departments; they’ll know how to best communicate, socialize, and operationalize with their teams.
- Get on the agenda of your executive team staff meeting and brief them on your learnings; they won’t necessarily be the ones to act on the feedback, but they’ll need to be aware, and they’ll need to assign resources within their departments to make any changes or to incorporate the feedback into existing processes or initiatives. They will then need to brief their direct reports so that the insights flow into the hands of the people who will use them.
- During team or department meetings, tell a story about the customer; highlight the insights and how what you learned currently impacts the customer and her ability to complete some job or task.
- Hold regularly-scheduled department, cross-department, or company meetings, brown bag lunches, or town halls to share insights, tell customer stories, answer questions, brainstorm on how to use the insights, etc.
- Create a customer room and share information there – not just the foundational elements (feedback, personas, journey maps) but also the insights, i.e., what does it all mean, for whom, and how should it be operationalized? Ensure that employees can access this room and the information 24/7.
- Share the insights during onboarding, training, and coaching so that employees understand your customers and know what to expect and what is expected of them (in delivering the experience or in helping to design a better experience).
- Develop storyboards (or use journey maps) to depict the before and after, to tell the story of the data and of the new, desired outcome/experience.
- Post feedback and customer comments on posters and/or monitors around the office. Be sure to provide context for employee clarification and understanding.
- Develop videos (or a video series on a predictable cadence, so people come to expect them) to explain what you’ve learned, what it means, what needs to be done, and by whom. Share these videos in meetings, on monitors, via email communications, in the customer room, during onboarding, and more.
- Share customer personas around the office, as well, to give employees a better understanding of who your customers are.
Be sure to develop a communication plan that includes ways to best communicate within your organization. Not all socialization methods work the same in every company; figure out what works best for your company, i.e., what gets them to pay attention and, ultimately and most importantly, take action.
What gets talked about in an organization and how it gets talked about determines what’s going to happen or isn’t going to happen. -Susan Scott
Image courtesy of Pixabay.
Annette Franz is an internationally recognized customer experience thought leader, coach, consultant, and speaker. She’s on the verge of publishing her first book about putting the “customer” into customer experience. Stay tuned for that! In the meantime, sign up for our newsletter for updates, insights, and other great content that you can use to up your CX game.
