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“The question is not what you look at, but what you see.” Henry David Thoreau
In the domains of Customer Experience, Customer Service & Contact Centers, people can look at the same ‘thing’ but see something quite different than those around them.
Sometimes these differences can be due to petulance – “I don’t like that definition of CX!” (mine is better)
Or due to intellectual sparring – “That’s not the best formula!” (you should do it this way)
Sometimes there’s an agenda – “Surveys are dead!” (so buy my technology)
But perhaps – most commonly – it’s just a lack of shared understanding –
“Hi everyone, we’ve all listened to the same call but we all came up with different opinions about whether it’s a good call or not.” (so let’s work on a shared understanding)
If we all see different things, we’ll all end up doing different things
The seeing part directly impacts the doing part.
If I see it this way, I’ll go down this path. If you see it that way, then you’ll go down that path. And we both think we’re right.
But in this case, two rights don’t equal a ‘better’ right.
They add up to different – and even inconsistent decisions. We end up doing different things.
To get the right things done (strategy execution) and move our organization perceptibly forward (to achieve our vision and strategic objectives), a shared understanding is essential.
This is where Thoreau’s quote lands for me.
Diverge and converge – what we can learn from Human Centered Design
Seeing things differently is valuable. Some of you may have already been saying that as you read the opening.
The question for me is at what point is it valuable to air differences and at what point do we go with a shared understanding.
I think there’s a lesson we can learn from Human Centered Design (HCD).
With any change – whether that’s a Customer-centric transformation or redo of the Quality standards for the Contact Center – it’s valuable to have different people bring their different points of view to the conversation.
I liken this to the Ideate Phase in Human Centered Design where no idea is a bad idea.
Ideate is a ‘diverge’ phase in the Human Centered Design process where we open ourselves up to everything. The diamond in the picture opens.
Bring on those ideas.
But at some point, only a few of these ideas are worthy enough to bring forward into the prototyping and testing phases. The rest get discarded.
This is the ‘converge’ phase. There’s a winnowing down that happens in the Prototyping Phase. The diamond in the picture closes.
We’ve made some decisions. The best ideas get chosen to move forward.
Here are examples of gaps between looking and seeing
In the Customer ecosystem there are plenty of examples of the gaps that exist between what people look at and what people see.
Gaps that great Customer leaders can help to close to nurture and strengthen our shared understanding.
Interpreting Interaction Quality
When you listened to that call recording or read that chat transcript from our Customer Service Agent, what did you ‘see’?
When you listen to how Managers & Team Leaders describe what they heard on a call or read on a chat transcript it’s possible that you hear interpretations that are all over the place.
Or, to try and avoid opinions being all over the place, only the most basic Quality standards have been selected.
But enabling that improvement in ‘shared understanding’ is offset by the delivery of a large robotic experience to Customers.
Yes – shared understanding is the goal. But not at the expense of delivering an intended experience to Customers.
Getting people to ‘see’ Quality and align around a shared understanding of Quality makes Customer lives better.
And it makes Employee lives better too.
Because when management gives clarity – people can do better work.
They can say, “Yeah, we know what we’re supposed to deliver and we get clear and structured support from our company management on how to deliver that.”
Interpreting Metric results
When you look at those 27 Contact Center metrics you report every week – what do you ‘see’?
Because I work in many Centers around the world, I see the level of variation in the ‘what’ metrics people select and and ‘how’ they look at them.
Some Contact Center metrics are unnecessary, secondary at best, interpreted incorrectly, are weighted too much (or too little) or are interpreted in different ways among the Team.
A Contact Center is an ‘interrelated system of causes’ which is a fancy way of saying that everything is connected.
So it’s important to understand the interrelationships and trade-offs that exist between metrics. And how to explain what they mean as they move together – not just how they move in isolation.
Looking at a dashboard of metrics, and having the entire Team accurately interpret what they ‘see’ – unlocks a world of shared understanding.
Interpreting how Customers behave
When that Customer scolded you while you were serving them what did you ‘see’?
Don’t be surprised when some Frontline folks – after being scolded by a Customer – say they saw a ‘jerk’. Or that they were being ‘abused’.
We hear descriptions like these when we teach how to deal with difficult Customer situations.
We’ve found that in even Customer-centric organizations, some real world discussion about difficult Customers needs to happen.
Because as you’ll find out when you talk to people, there is a pretty big difference between Customer behavior that is indeed ‘abusive’ versus Customer behavior that we just don’t like.
Helping your folks see that – and manage those situations better – is an important leadership responsibility.
For all of us who seek to be leaders, our job is to help and inspire others see things too
In management workshops Participants ask the following questions:
– How can I get my bosses to ‘see’ that our Contact Center is a profit center, not a cost center?
– How can I get my Employees to ‘see’ that the values we’ve chosen for culture change really matter?
– How can I get other departments to ‘see’ how important CX is?
I find that much of the practitioner discussion these days has to do with helping people ‘see’ better. Because when they ‘see’ better – and we create that shared understanding – they do better.
They make better decisions. They align & unite around common language & goals. They improve their ability to influence others.
When Clients reach out to us it often sounds like this:
“Dan, .can you help our people see how to run our Center better? See what CX means and how to bring it to life. See how to be a better boss. See how to improve coaching outcomes. See how to communicate better with Customers.”
It’s not that they haven’t looked at it.
It’s that they don’t yet see it.
Thank you for reading!
Thank you for taking the time to read this article today.
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Daniel Ord
[email protected] / www.omnitouchinternational.com
Banner photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash
