By Adam Sherman, Social Media Director at New York Life.
Fiction Factory, a Scottish pop group from the 80s, was in rotation on Sirius XM’s New Wave channel this morning.
The band’s name struck a chord with me. It turns out the music group’s moniker aptly captures the zeitgeist that is playing out in our digital spaces, in both our personal and professional lives.
Fiction, in the form of social content, advertising or search queries, is, at times, being masqueraded as fact.
People appear to be losing their ability to differentiate the two. Our new information ecosystem now contains what Columbia Journalism Review [cjr.org] describes as digital fragmentation, where news consumers face challenges around distinguishing between qualified reporting and unreliable sources.
This sobering reality should not be lost on those in the financial services space, many of which also suffer from deficits of trust and transparency in their own customer experiences.
These organizations must first look at identifying the future of truth [or post-truth] through a clear and optimized lens of its customers.
As insurers and financial services companies gather more and more personal data about their clients – for many enterprises analytics and data sciences will be top strategic initiatives in 2018 – they should resist monetizing that data at the expense of the customer experience.
According to Augie Ray, a leading authority on customer experience for Gartner, the data which companies have at their disposal is typically designed to help them maximize what they want: traffic, leads, acquisition, conversions. Those metrics, at times, come at the expense of – or substitute for – what the customer wants and needs: ease, value and trust.
“I’m always bringing people [companies] back to the “Holy Trinity” of CX, which is: satisfactions, loyalty and advocacy,” says Ray.
Organizations can and should design solutions and outcomes that put the customer [or candidate] at the center of the experience. It’s only when that thinking and the execution of the process around that thinking is at the forefront of an organization’s mindset and culture will it begin to see its considered measurements of growth realized.
One of the ways in which organizations are reimagining how to put themselves in the shoes of its customers, including ways in which to account for both quantitative and qualitative metrics, is through the process of design thinking.
According Design Gym, a company which helps organizations to spark culture change through the process, design thinking is a creative problem-solving methodology that is human-centered, iterative and collaborative. It also employs empathetic research techniques and creative brainstorming skills.
I have had the fortunate pleasure of participating in a few design thinking sessions with my company. The verdict: it’s an honest, intelligent and thought-provoking approach to providing rapid prototypes of what could be improved outcomes in customer experiences. Also, it was fun and made me reorient my mind around the perspective of, in this case, our Advisor-candidates, as they go through the interviewing and on-boarding processes.
Ours was a three-day session; at the end of it we broke into a smaller group, which represented distinct parts of the company and candidate process. We then were asked to provide recommendations based on our tasks that related to the process.
Here is the five-step process that kicked off one of our sessions:
- Examine: Dig into the problem. Look at its history, the context, the objects, the data and most importantly the people involved in the experience
- Understand: Go deeper on and find patterns. Establish open questions to build on
- Ideate: Have lots of ideas, good or bad. Don’t stop at the obvious or the impossible.
- Experiment: Try some things out. Make some things. Fail inexpensively and fast
- Distill: Strip your solution down to the essentials and share your story with others
Getting the customer experience right won’t be easy or fast. In the face of transformational and blurring change taking place in the consumer marketplace, organizations must genuinely account for who they serve and make them a priority, free of self-interest and deceit.
To meet Adam Sherman and learn more about this subject, please attend FTF’s SMAC conference, November 16, in NYC.
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