CX Day is coming on October 1 – you can learn more at www.cxday.org. It’s your annual moment to make a splash. You’re always looking for ways to bring your customers to life for your employees – here’s a great opportunity.
CX Day, sponsored by the CXPA, gives you the excuse to get in front of employees to share the latest information on your customers – their needs, their desires, and how to be help them. As you get ready for the day, I’d like to suggest a few guidelines:
1. Make it fun! Games lower the barriers to learning. In my interview with Natalie Schneider when she was with the health insurance company Anthem, Inc., she mentioned how they created a card game based on the game of Life. “Participants were assigned a character and then went through their lives. Things would happen like they would lose their job, then their wife might get pregnant, then they’d draw a card and get diabetes—really getting people invested in individual stories… The game was both easy and inexpensive, but had a huge impact. An Excel spreadsheet or a PowerPoint presentation just doesn’t rise to that level of compelling, real engagement.”
2. Ban the bullet point. If you must use PowerPoint, then just use it to launch customer videos. Showing, not telling, is the key.
3. Bring in an actual customer. You’ll have to move quickly, but why not bring in actual customers to talk with your teams? These are always a highlight for employees – in most B2B or B2B2C companies, 90% of employees never get to see a customer in person. Block your biggest conference room, or maybe your lunchroom, bring in three customers, and have them talk about how they use your product or service. This never fails to create impact.
4. Skip the meaningless pledge. Some like to use this opportunity to have a big pledge on the wall and have everybody sign it. It feels great! But it doesn’t accomplish anything. In his classic book Influence, Robert Cialdini wrote about how to build commitment. The pledge must be “active, public, effortful, and done without strong outside pressure, such as a large reward or threat.” Putting your pledge on a big wall and asking everybody to sign is active and public but doesn’t involve effort (it’s typically easier to sign than to not sign), and it does include peer pressure. Before you consider a pledge, make employees earn the right to sign it, through quizzes or activities they must complete. That will have far more impact. (I wrote about this previously here.)
5. Just do something. It doesn’t have to be the most elaborate event, and you don’t have to spend a ton of money. But use this as an opportunity to move your company forward. Consider using your existing videos (you do have videos of your customers, right?) to share the new of your customers, or perhaps recorded calls. Anything to bring your customer to life.
And when you’re done, send me an email ([email protected]) with what you did. Maybe we’ll write an article about it!
