THE POWER OF HUMAN-CENTERED STRATEGY
Tags: Human Centered Design, Empathy, Strategy, Insights, Building

In our blossoming experience economy, competitive advantage has shifted. Strategy’s former focus on beating the competition has transitioned to an obsession with delivering exceptional experiences to the customer. In this new world, necessity may be the mother of invention, but human circumstance, passion, and motivation spark inspiration. Customers live at the center of a successful strategy. They should drive tradeoffs, processes, innovations, and investments. The customer-centric mentality pays off — companies with a customer-experience mindset drive 4–8% higher revenue and are 60% more profitable than their competitors.[i]

Designing a customer-centric strategy is only one piece of the puzzle, however. Employees are the drivers of the execution. Customer experience is inherently linked to employee experience. You cannot have highly satisfied customers without highly engaged employees. As customer experience expert Shep Hyken aptly stated, “the internal customer experience determines the external customer experience.”[ii]

Therefore, strategy of the future must go beyond customer-centricity to emphasize people-centricity. An organization must deliver positive experiences to all humans involved in the strategy’s success. In doing so, companies must understand, empathize, and innovate for the customer and employee alike.

1. Empathize

Great innovation stems from a deep connection to the human experience. For example, after witnessing a particularly bad car accident in 1920, Garrett Morgan ideated the three-signal traffic light to safely direct cars. In 1894, W.K. Kellogg was inspired by his brother’s hospital patients to invent corn flakes, a digestible breakfast replacement to bread. In both instances, whether creating a lifesaving bedrock of our modern transportation system or a breakfast cereal, progress was born of empathy — a deep understanding of people and their values.

Customer values entail far more than recognizing the superficial interests defined in a customer persona. Values are multidimensional and consist of four components: needs, passions, circumstances, and motivations. The culmination of customer values results in the reasons customers need, dream about, and ultimately buy products, services, and experiences.

Similarly, companies must build a compelling employee value proposition. Companies often assess reasons for turnover via exit interviews and questionnaires. Rarely, however, do they delve into the reasons why employees stay. What do their people care about? What drives their experience at their organization? What is the unique set of benefits — growth, compensation, skills development, and purpose — that your company offers and how does that align with employees’ values?

For both the customer and employee, a comprehensive view of their values is built and updated by implementing a continuous feedback loop.

Gather insights: First, understand what is working or broken in their experiences. Collect data via surveys to capture a baseline experience score. For customers, this might entail administering surveys such as Net Promoter Score, conducting transaction polling to gauge their satisfaction at point of contact, or building customer focus groups. There should be similar mechanisms in place to continuously elicit employee feedback. Employee satisfaction surveys or pulse surveys can be helpful indicators of how employees feel about their work and the company culture. Incorporating anonymous feedback tools can drive the candor and transparency necessary to understand where your culture currently stands.

First, understand what is working or broken in their experiences. Collect data via surveys to capture a baseline experience score. For customers, this might entail administering surveys such as Net Promoter Score, conducting transaction polling to gauge their satisfaction at point of contact, or building customer focus groups. There should be similar mechanisms in place to continuously elicit employee feedback. Employee satisfaction surveys or pulse surveys can be helpful indicators of how employees feel about their work and the company culture. Incorporating anonymous feedback tools can drive the candor and transparency necessary to understand where your culture currently stands. Observe: Beyond the online surveys and polls, empathy gets to the heart of peoples’ emotions, needs, and thoughts. Empathizing requires astute observation. Hiring mystery shoppers or implementing a customer experience audit helps companies live the customer journey. In this stage, it is critical to observe how customers move through the journey naturally. Then, you can determine how to adjust processes to support the customers’ inclinations. Campus planners at Michigan State University foster empathy by letting students pave their way, literally. They have left paths unpaved, waiting for students to forge their own tracks through the campus and then paving over them.[iii]

Empathizing with the employee experience also requires investigation. Sit in on team meetings and evaluate interactions to gauge the climate and see which teammates have a voice in the meeting. Observe employee career pathing to identify employee aspirations and carve out common values. Interview employees to understand how their values align with the current organizational culture. Taking the time to understand the employee’s day-to-day will provide you with critical insights to determine what aspects of the employee experience to preserve and what to adjust.