Your New User Experience Hero: The Super Rep
By: Colin Hynes
Tags: UX Research, Design Thinking, User Experience, UX, Ux Strategy

Maybe you’ve been there. Staring down an endless aisle of some technology, trying to find that perfect mix of form, function, features, reliability and price. Or maybe you were choosing a Caribbean cruise for you and the kids. Or the best online training investment to catapult your career without breaking the bank.

All are complex decisions with seemingly infinite options and ripple-effect outcomes. And because we often lack sufficient knowledge or capacity to make them confidently, what starts as a promising adventure can end in a paralyzing paradox of choice.

Hopefully, you’ve been here too: Right as you’re about to throw in the towel, a helpful sales person swoops in or a chat pops with real, live person on the other end and, like a release valve, makes it all better. They ask the right questions in an attentive but low-pressure way. Every query builds upon something you’ve shared with them. You feel heard and understood.

By the end, this once stranger is now a trusted advisor who seems like they are out for your best interests. You wonder how you can clone this person for the next time you’re staring down some endless aisle. Because you know that time is coming.

Introducing…the Super Rep

At ZeroDegrees we call these saviors ‘Super Reps’ and we use them as a powerful tool in creating exceptional user experiences. We’ve found that if you can replicate that real-world Super Rep through your experience touch points, you can evoke the same customer connection and positive business outcomes.

Conceptually, a Super Rep is similar to a customer persona (which we are also fans of when done well). They are both archetypes ideally created through thoughtful research and used to engender empathy.

However, while personas are typically based in some present reality of a target segment, a Super Rep is far more aspirational. They are the ideal combination of IQ and EQ with unparalleled expertise in your subject matter. Basically, they have an omniscient brain and a giving heart that makes them, well, super.

Effective Super Reps have the right mix of the knowledge, instinct and empathy.

In this article we’ll outline how to find your Super Rep and how to best use them. And while we’ll cover how Super Reps are critical in activities like prioritizing scenarios and establishing roadmaps, their benefit transcends project-based activities.

That’s because, like well-done personas, Super Reps are an expression of the shared understanding (or lack thereof) of how to best serve your customer. They are the personification of your brand values and help answer key questions like:

When should you first engage with a customer?

How do you quickly assess their core need?

How do you react to the hard questions?

Is it OK to tell a prospect that you don’t have the solution for them?

The process to create your Super Rep can help raise important misalignments within your internal team. It may even feel like an intervention of sorts where you’re confronted with some of the thorniest questions about who you are and what you stand for. And like any intervention, having a neutral moderator and a focused topic goes a long way to constructive dialog, clarity and consensus (or at least shared understanding of differences).

Enter, the Super Rep.

How to Find Your Super Rep

Many of our clients have a form of Super Rep in real life (or a combination of people who add up to a one). When planning stakeholder interviews, we ask to speak to the most effective customer-facing associates. The response from our client is often: “Oh, you must spend some time talking to Jody. Customers just love her!”

Our job is to dig into what makes Jody so effective. We shadow Jody on the job, interview her colleagues and talk to customers post-Jody interaction. We focus in on:

What Jody says and how she says it.

The stories she shares that create empathy.

The trust triggers that engender confidence with the customer.

How she takes volatile service issues and turns them into opportunities to create loyalty.

‘Golden questions’ that Jody asks to qualify if a customer is a good candidate for Solution A vs Solution B.

How Jody ultimately gets the customer to convert. And if she doesn’t, how she keeps the door open for a future conversation.

The exercise is a mix of mind mapping, behavioral psychology and deciphering the emotional imprinting that happens in the most effective conversations. We focus on style and substance and the ratios of those levers based on context.

For example, when picking out an assisted living facility, imparting empathy may be paramount.

Caregiver: My mother has late-stage dementia and it’s been really hard to find somewhere she’ll feel comfortable and that we can afford. Jody: That can be so difficult. We have many residents with dementia and know how stressful it can be to find the right home for them. Our staff has been specifically trained in the cognitive and emotional challenges that dementia brings. We’ll treat your mother with the kind of care and respect we would want for our own parent. And we’ll find a way to make it work financially too.

However, deciding on the best cloud storage solution for your SMB weighs heavily on rational, substance-based evidence. How does ‘the Jody’ find that right balance based on the path of the conversation? And what if the IT lead looking for that cloud storage is going to be fired if they make the wrong decision? How does Jody pivot to emotionland and then back into rationalville?

IT Manager: Our current cloud SaaS vendor has been dropping the ball lately and we can’t afford another problem. Jobs are on the line. Reliability and security are critical and if you can’t promise that, we’ll need to keep looking. Jody: I totally understand. If your storage isn’t reliable and secure it’s worthless. That’s why from the time we started the company it was our top priority. Because we began there, we’re far ahead of our next competitor. In fact we’re at 11 nines data durability and that’s significantly better than anyone out there. I’d be glad to send you a couple case studies done by Forrester that get into the details….

Of course, you can’t just listen to one Jody to understand what makes your rep super. Like other formative research, you need to sample across key attributes to ensure you’re seeing the whole picture. For example, you may interview reps with a range of tenures, customer segment focus or product responsibilities.

When interviewing them, keep a keen eye out for patterns of persuasion and which techniques are most effective with different types of situations and customers. You may, for instance, find that consensus is an important psychological principle to reinforce in the later stages of the sales cycle with a certain type of buyer.

Or you may find that attaching reciprocity is a powerful way to turn a dissatisfied customer into an advocate for your brand. For example, when observing a customer complaint call, you may notice that Jody is empowered to text the customer a discount code as an immediate ‘make good’. At what point did she activate that technique? When was it clear that the customer was not lost, just in need of something to make them feel whole? What do the analytics tell you about the lifetime value of customers who come in with service concerns and then receive a code?

Pulling the right levers at the right time in the right way across a journey is challenging. What is practical and possible often wins out over the aspiration. However, even at the most basic level, there are many ways to use the Super Rep to focus efforts efficiently and effectively.

Leveraging Your Super Rep

You’ve done the work to identify your own Super Rep (or maybe multiple Reps). Nice job you!

Unfortunately, a real, live Jody can’t be in your app 24/7/365 and field all comers. So how do you leverage and scale your Super Rep? Here are just a handful of ways:

1. Use them as a corollary to your customer personas.

Think of your personas as the outside stimulus and the Super Rep is the internal response set. Like service design, you can align the Super Rep within the persona journey and identify the way that rep would respond. The ‘response’ may come in the form of a needed piece of content, functionality, policy change or any other way you can react to the customer need to drive the target outcomes.

2. Align your information architecture and content strategy to the path of the conversations.

When you think of the overarching structure and pathways you provide your users, are you thinking of it as a conversation? Users have questions. You should be providing answers in the quickest way possible.

Prospective Student: I’m looking to find the best way to finance my degree through subsidized loans and grants. Super Rep: Let me get you to a really helpful calculator and some information about the best rates…

Based on that narrative you can start to see how content and information architecture comes to life. The mapping process of Persona ‘Q’ to Super Rep ‘A’ is a great way to get started.

The logical extension of this ‘conversation’ is a wizard which matches tone and logic to mirror your Super Rep. But it can go far beyond and into the way you prioritize taxonomy in your global or secondary navigation, how you create and order your guided navigation, what gets amplified visually and even your legal terms and conditions.

3. Give them a seat at the table.

Bringing the Super Rep voice into the internal conversations is a powerful way to optimize your experiences.

Much like weaving personas into the lexicon of the product team (and ideally the executive team) can be an effective way to instill customer centricity, Super Reps can also be ‘invited’ to your meetings. How would Jody deliver that hard message to the VP of Procurement at this point in the shopping funnel? How does Jody diffuse a heated customer service call when the customer is encountering a known issue? How would Jody cross sell this item when she already knows the customer would likely not be interested?

The more you used a shared reference point to refer to the key members in a process, the more aligned the internal team will be when optimizing that process.

4. User testing role playing.

As much as we like to keep our testing real, there is always an element of ‘pretend’. In those simulations, we often will ask the participant to think of us as someone in the process, like an academic advisor, travel agent or other player. This is a great time to use your Super Rep and pressure test what you think your ‘Jody’ would say and how the user may react. With continuous customer input, evolve your Super Rep so she is a ‘living’ knowledge base.

5. Input into AI logic.

In a more sophisticated use case, your Super Rep can be leveraged to inform the algorithm that drives how you interact with the customer through artificial intelligence. Reflecting the sensibilities and sensitivities of that ‘real’ person in an autochat conversation or a path to content is a great start to make the interaction feel more intelligent than artificial. Of course, the algorithm should get smarter as it acquires intelligence which then can be fed back into the notion of what makes an effective Super Rep. A virtuous cycle of learning, applying, measuring and applying again.

Ready to Find Your Super Rep?

If you’ve made it this far in the article you’re probably fairly interested in unlocking and unleashing your very own Super Rep. As you move down the road, know that the internal conversations to get there will likely be just as valuable as the end product.

Be prepared to challenge assumptions. Be ready to question your own notion of what really matters to your customers and how to guide them through a conversation. And be aware that as you reflect your Super Rep in the way you relate to your customers at every step, your eyes will open to the great power and responsibility you now have to better serve them.