I learned as part of being acquired by Walgreen’s, Duane Reade introduced a flexible vaccination service, allowing customers to get a flu shot any hours that the pharmacy is open (albeit not well advertised). Some large survey by a market research company probably told them that 87% of customers don’t get flu shots because of inconvenient timing.

But who cares why they are doing it! This is great, or so I thought, until I started this seemingly ideal patient experience process.

I returned the next morning and the pharmacist said, “I’ll meet you over there.” I had no idea where there was, so I waited while she gathered the necessary clinical materials (gloves, needle disposal bin, etc.) from multiple locations and carried everything to a table with 2 chairs outside the entrance to the employees-only pharmacy area and placed everything down in a pile. Picture Rachel Ray carrying ingredients in her studio… except this is someone’s health, not chimichangas.  

Would you get your flu shot here?

I mentioned to her that it was great that she was offering flu shots at any time.  “Yep, we all had to get trained,” she said. I proceeded, “But it’s sorta a pain for you, I mean you have to stop what you’re doing to do this?” She replied,  “Yeah, it can be….”

The flu shot was painless, pharmacy staff was pleasant, and for me the overall experience was just fine. I’ll put aside:

• The original “we are backed up” issue (although many customers may not)….
• The poor advertising about the flexible service…
• The 7-min wait for ‘nurse-in-training’ pharmacist to prep…
• The confusion about where I should sit because of the counter divide between pharmacy staff and customer….
• The seemingly discombobulated setup that gave the impression this was their first time doing this….

Those are issues that can be solved – though not easily – with better customer communications and improved spatial design. But what about the pharmacists and employees at Duane Reade who need to literally stop the  work they are doing and the flow of their day for each and every flu shot customer? And if they don’t, they have more of those “15-minute backup issues” and potentially disappointed flu shot customers….

Or what about those non-flu Rx customers whose experience is disrupted by the flu shot processes – those patients who simply need to ask a question about their new Rx while the pharmacist is busy giving flu shots. Finally, what about these inefficiencies’ subsequent impact to DR’s bottom line? For every flu shot customer, assume 10 minutes of lost pharmacist work time.

This is a great example for why you can’t have blind focus on the customer, patient or any single group. Without considering the experience and change management for all people: pharmacists, pharmacy support, customers (both flu shot and not), Duane Reade may have started a tidal wave of good intentions that has ripple effects to the business that they didn’t see coming.

So why not apply this same principle when designing your employee experience? After all, employees are essentially your organization’s internal customers. Often companies will focus their internal efforts on improving performance on processes and new tools/technologies, but that misses a big part of the picture.  Process improvements and new tools won’t have their desired impact on your bottom line if your employees don’t embrace them. Simply announcing such changes won’t ensure your employees are aligned with your business goals; and it certainly won’t turn them into advocates.

Design your employee experiences to make an emotional connection, and you change everything. When designed to delight your employees, new processes become something they follow because they want to, not because they have to. New tools become those things they’ve been asking and waiting for to help them do a better job.

To put this in context, consider something like the current push towards enhanced collaboration.  Say you have a corporate mandate to increase collaboration among your globally dispersed business unit.  And let’s assume you’ve done the research to confirm that a collaboration tool is the answer to your business need.  Custom or off-the-shelf, you’ve built it, and with launch a few months away it’s time to think about providing some basic training.  That’s a good start, but will likely not be enough if you want your employees to truly adopt it into their daily working life.

You may be thinking, “Understood, but they don’t have to like it. They just have to use it.”  That may be true, but the question is not will they use it; you can always make them use it.  The real questions are will they use it in the way you intended, and will that use achieve your business goals as you intended? Will employee resistance or fear regarding the use of a new tool create more productivity issues than the tool was intended to solve?

If employees don’t embrace your collaboration tool and truly view it as something that makes them better at what they do, they will only use it as required (if that much), and it becomes useless to the organization.

So how do you make that emotional connection?

1. Understand your employees beyond their job function.
You need to understand how your employees feel about collaboration. Not about collaboration tools but actual collaboration with others.  Is it something that comes naturally to them, or do they tend to work alone or in silos. What motivates them? If they are not collaborative, why? Do they have fears around collaboration? Are there misperceptions regarding what it means?

You also need to understand their pain points. Get at what frustrates them on a daily basis.  Showing them how a certain tool can help them overcome these frustrations will make them feel the tool was developed with them in mind.

While you are getting at what frustrates them, find out what makes them happy about their job. What is working? What inspires them? What gets them out of bed in the morning? This reveals their perception of success and value and also helps you understand the things that are working for them now.

One of the biggest pitfalls of launching a new tool is changing something that the employee thinks already works. While the tool might provide a better way to do something, there will be a learning curve or a change in behavior that is required.  Just as customers react strongly to changes in experiences they are accustomed to, employees tend to be especially resistant to this kind of change. You need to make them understand why this new way is better for them in the long run.

2. Build realistic personas that capture not only their function but also their wants, needs, and fears.
As part of the exercise of getting to know your employees, document core personas that can be used for a variety of purposes going forward, including communication and change management. Continuing with our example of collaboration, include the more emotional aspects like attitude toward collaboration and change, or views of success. One employee type might be something like: “research scientist, biologicals, collaboration resistant”. This tells you that messaging, training, and roll out need to speak not just to what they do and how they do it, but also to how collaboration (beyond the tool) will enable the success that they (and the organization) value. That success might be something like the ability to develop more innovative products faster.

3. Develop an overarching promise for the change and create value propositions that map to the employee types identified in your persona exercise.
What do you hope to achieve with this collaborative tool? What will each employee type stand to gain from use of it?  Tell them.  Make sure to denote more than just the positive messages. If there are particular messages to be avoided, (such as telling administrative assistants that it will increase their productivity when they already feel they are overwhelmed with work), make sure they are noted and communicated out to anyone (including supervisors) who might be charged with delivering communications about the tool to the employees.

4. Develop real-world scenarios to show the tool in action.
Use the value propositions and employee personas to develop real-world scenarios of how the tool can be used, and what value will be gained from using it. Long before the tool launches, you need to garner excitement and receptiveness to the tool. When employees see someone just like them using a system or tool to overcome the same frustrations they have, it provides powerful evidence the tool was developed with them in mind

5. Develop an employee-centered communications plan and align all communications points to the promise and value propositions.
Don’t base things like frequency and timing of messages on the roll-out schedule of your development team; base them on the information needs of your audience. Tailor the visual design, messaging and channel to what will resonate with your audience. Whereas posters might work for some employees, others might prefer to get regular email updates straight from the top. They may even have trusted sources, such as their direct supervisors from whom they want information directly. Identify these trusted sources and give them key messaging points that they can communicate to people who may come to them for answers.  Put the timing of these trusted resource messages into your communications plan.

By understanding your employees on an emotional level and finding ways to connect your strategies, initiatives, and plans to their own success, you can overcome many of the barriers that often cause the employee experience to fall short. Done right, even your most fearful or skeptical employees may become internal advocates for the change to which your organization aspires.

1. Do You Need a Moose?  Yes – you all ready that correctly.  During our community intercepts a week ago, one of our participants offered the museum a taxidermied moose to add to their animal exhibit.  Apparently the participant’s father was a taxidermist who had donated a brown bear many years ago and in his recent passing, the kids found a moose that they could “just picture standing strong and proud next to the bear”.  See what you learn when you ask your audience how they would like to contribute?

2. Putting Your Money Where Your Mouth Is: During our branding workshops, you may recall reading about the proverbial wall that appears to exist between the theater and the museum when it comes to their day to day operations.  Even though we have not finalized our blueprint or our recommendations around how the teams need to be doing a better job collaborating together – during our branding workshop some of the challenges of being as misaligned as they can be starting to come out.  A few weeks after a particularly challenging example of this misalignment, we are starting to see signs (even though they may be small ones) that they get the problem and know they need to start addressing it. The first step?  Talking more to one another.  Example that they are?   Co-developing a programming list for the Hollywood glam exhibit that ties the gala, theater performances, exhibit, and other social events together.  This may sound like a small and obvious step – but trust me, for these guys it is anything but.

3. Plasmas, Kiosks, and iPads oh My! For those of you who know me, you know I am closet techno junkie. That said – I am very conservative when it comes to introducing a shiny new toy to a client.  I do not believe in the me-too syndrome.  When it comes to the MM/ BT however, that is not the case.  They actually need to find ways to leverage the digital space to enhance and expand the experience their visitors, donors, and supporters are having with them.  Enter – shiny new toy.  Imagine being able to put that moose next to the brown bear in a virtual exhibit (something you probably would not do in the actual exhibit) and compare their respective sizes, colors, the apparent force.  Or better yet imagine trying on Elizabeth Taylor’s costume from Anthony and Cleopatra and posting the picture to your Facebook page as a way to entice your friends to check out the exhibit online.  The value of these kinds of interactions is that they pull the experience outside of the physical space into the virtual space so that anyone anywhere can engage with the museum (or theater) and in so doing – expand the footprint of these two establishments and their supporting programs/ exhibits.

 
As you can see – lots of exciting things going on!  Stay tuned for a more formal update in a week or so when we finalize our brand promise and start digging into our competitive research.

Cheers!

The Morris Museum, Morristown, NJ

MISI Company is very excited to launch this blog series covering our work with the Morris Museum & Bickford Theater located in Morristown, New Jersey.  The project  is focused on delivering an end-to-end Strategic Experience Alignment (SEA) engagement in hopes of helping them resolve some challenges they are facing around brand, marketing, and communications as they seek to engage a new generation of museum and theater supporters.  And we would like to enlist you to join our project team.

Over the course of the next few months you will be privy to a behind the scenes look at what a SEA project looks like – who is part of the project team, what types of activities are involved, and ultimately – the types of deliverables and results that can be expected.

Throughout this series, we will be asking for your input on concepts/ideas we are hatching as well as your objective thoughts on how we are doing.  To kick this part off, please click this link to a 5 minute survey (and I really mean 5 minutes) about why you support cultural destinations near you.  Your input is going to be folded into our first primary research activity focused on identifying the key value propositions for different audiences when it comes to participating in museum and theater events.

For those of you who need a little more convincing before jumping in, here’s a little background on what we’re doing. In Phase 1, you will hear about the experience audit we are conducting which will include activities such as branding workshops, primary research with MM supporters and members of the surrounding community, a touch point analysis and competitive survey, and ultimately – identification of key brand promises and value propositions for their audiences, as well as what it all means to the staff members, who are tasked with getting the word out and engaging their supporters and community members at large.  In other words, we will begin to answer our key SEA questions:

• Who is your audience?
• What are they trying to do?
• How can we help them do it?

In Phase 2, we will start pulling through and implementing the strategy defined in phase 1 to usable assets and processes:  branding and design standards, conceptual and finalized marketing assets, a new website and social media strategy, and a supporting foundation of change management and governance strategies needed to ensure that we design and ultimately implement is sustainable over the long term.  

Finally, in Phase 3, you will learn about the fruits of our labor.  The new website will be launched, the new communication strategy implemented, and most importantly – the updated branding and end to end experience of how supporters engage with the museum and theater live and in steady state.  We will have a baseline of metrics in place that we can begin testing progress against to see where and how our path needs to be adjusted to ensure we meeting and exceeding the expectations of all of our audiences.

Phew – hopefully that is a good representation of the lofty project ahead.  I cannot overstate how excited we are to be embarking on this journey and we hope you will share in our excitment as you follow – and contribute to – our progress.  

Thanks and looking forward to our next touchpoint with you!
The MISI MM & Bickford Theater Team

Please click here to take our 5-minute survey.

Please click here to follow our progress…

This is about the bank that “serviced” (I use the word loosely) my home equity line of credit (HELOC), and it goes something like this…

Chapter 1) I dutifully make my monthly payments early for three years.

Chapter 2) The bank’s automatic reappraisal of the value of my home leads to a form letter saying I can no longer access my credit line.

Chapter 3) I call and am told my house has been compared to selling prices of others in the area. I inform my Customer Service rep the comparables they used don’t match my house. “That’s what our records show for your address. Sorry, there’s nothing I can do.” Of course not.

Chapter 4) I dutifully continue paying down my outstanding balance waiting for the HELOC to be automatically restored at a new, lower level.

Chapter 5) No restoration notice arrives even as I approach a zero balance, so I go to their web site. I find the option to email them. The error message tells me I have to register before I can send them an email. Register? That provides no value to me, but okay. I enter my loan number and it isn’t recognized. I can’t register!

Chapter 6) I call, again. After deciphering the automated call center menu, I reach a Customer Service representative who can’t help me (irony). I need to talk to someone who deals with reactivating accounts, which apparently doesn’t qualify as a customer service.

Chapter 7) I am transferred. Several static-filled muzak minutes later, I have another human being on the line.

Denouement:  Here’s the deal: If I want the HELOC reactivated I have to pay for an appraisal and reapply.

Post Script:  Really!  I mean, really?!  Are you kidding me?

Systems and desired experience not aligned

What I have just described is a bank’s integrated online and offline “Customer Service” system that is seemingly strategically devoted to making my experience of doing business with them so painful that I will refuse to go through the experience ever again. Do you think that is in their mission statement?

I told you that story so I could make the following point:  Businesses that succeed are those that differentiate themselves by making the experience of doing business with them delightful. To do so, you have to ensure that every system and employee that is part of the experience is doing their part to sustain a successful, ongoing relationship with your customer. When it is done with intention, planning and by design, we call this phenomenon Strategic Experience Alignment (SEA^sm).

SEA Starts at C-Level
SEA is founded on a very basic principle: For your business to be successful, your audience must succeed in its interactions with you. Of course this statement must be qualified. Customers aren’t always right or always reasonable. But their expectations are generally set by you; all they are looking for is for you to live up to them. If you do, all those people and systems you’ve ostensibly designed to provide some bottom line benefit to your company will pay off. Whether the benefit you seek is increased efficiency or lower costs, increased sales or greater brand awareness, your success hinges on the audience achieving what they set out to accomplish by interacting with you.

The fly in this ointment is that your customer probably has different criteria for success than you do. You may be thinking, “Success is this guy registering so I can get him into my database and shove marketing messages at him.” Your customer is thinking, “I just want to email customer service a question; why do I have to go through this registration process before I can get a simple answer to my question?” Pretty good question. And a pretty solid barrier to your company’s success since the customer who can’t see the value in registering is just going to go elsewhere. So how do you avoid putting up these barriers to success? By making aligning your people and systems around the facilitation of customer success a strategic imperative.

While many business leaders we speak to about the concept of strategic experience alignment agree with its basic tenets, few fully appreciate and connect two key truths regarding what it takes to create real business value in your interactions:

1) You must cede a substantial amount of the control of the experience to your audience, and…

2) To ensure success, a company’s entire organization needs to be aware of and aligned with the experience your audience desires.

True audience-centricity requires a company-wide commitment that begins at the highest levels of the organization. Without this directive, various departments or business silos will continue to do their own interpretation of how to deal with your target audiences. Inevitable conflicts will arise and those conflicts will likely express themselves in ways that disrupt the desired customer experience.

Okay, cool acronym, but does SEA really mean anything?
SEA is an approach to experience design that begins with your target audience and ends with your business objectives. It utilizes proven tools and methodologies to answer three fundamental questions:

• Who is your audience?
• What are your various audience members trying to achieve?
• How must your organization align to help your audience members achieve their goals?

SEA marks a fundamental shift away from a traditional “bottom-up” focus on measuring the effectiveness of isolated interactions with specific audience touch points, such as a website or a call center. Instead SEA begins by mapping the desired audience experience in the context of the organization’s strategic imperatives. It then seeks to align business objectives and tactics with that desired experience. The resulting alignment provides the foundational strategic guidance for any and all initiatives affecting the outcome of the experience.

For example, if asked to assess the effectiveness of a company’s customer-facing website, SEA dictates that we first look at the entire customer experience the website is designed to support. We consider what the customer does before considering interaction with the web, what aspects of the experience the customer prefers to handle online, how successful and satisfied customers are when interacting with the site, what the customer does after leaving the site, et cetera. This holistic approach to experience design can be applied to every interaction between a company and its audience, whether online, offline or between the lines.