Do you ever feel like most things in business are just common sense things that we seem to have over complicated?
We recently embarked on creating a white paper that covers a topic that seems like complete common sense, yet is often lacking in many organizations; and that’s how to deliver better experiences by aligning the customer experience (CX) with the employee experience (EX) through service design. Really, it’s a simple concept. I don’t say that to discredit our work (quite the contrary), but I can’t seem to wrap my head around how more people don’t understand the root cause of so many issues within a business is when CX and EX are misaligned. I guess that’s what makes us so good at what we do, though.
Technically I’m a marketing and sales guy, although I look at myself more as an educator (and maybe a little bit of an instigator). In my role, I deal with a lot of marketers who unfortunately don’t have responsibilities across human resources, finance, product, or operations. As a result, they aren’t thinking about connecting employee experience with customer experience, because they aren’t looking at things holistically. They come to Studio Science wanting to purchase tangible things from us, whether that’s a new website, new brand, new digital product, or all of the above. But they struggle to see how all of these things work together to create a total experience – for both customers and employees, cohesively.
One of the reasons customer experience and employee experience are often misaligned is because different departments within an organization are working in silos, kind of like the marketers who initially come to me for help. Little do they know that more often than not, I’m going to show them that what they need isn’t a new brand, but instead to become advocates for taking a service design approach to their business.
The Peter Principle (not to be confused with the PITA Principle, which also feels oddly relevant to me) observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to “a level of respective incompetence.”
But how do you know if this applies to you? If you’re running marketing at a company and you can’t understand what’s in the white paper, or how to connect these siloed parts, you may have reached the top of your career.
You don’t need to be an expert in your field. You just need to be an expert at playing the political game in your organization, and that includes knowing when you don’t know something and finding people who can fill in the gaps.
If I didn’t care about the success of our clients and didn’t want to create a lasting relationship with them, I would probably be fine selling them the one-off products they think they need. All of our work starts with discovery, using tools and methods to uncover the human-centered insights that will guide the strategy and eventual execution. As part of the process, I guarantee that we will uncover things that you didn’t know about your business, your customers, and your employees – all of which will lead to a more meaningful experience overall.
