Reflection Storytelling

Challenge

I’m a member of my organizations IT Strategic Services and my challenge was to improve customer  experience through their end to end travel journey.  The scope of the project was to map the  customer journey, highlight the pain points and identify different initiatives we were going to launch  that will help solve these issues. The steering group wanted to complete the first part in 30 days and  then map the initiatives and kick-off the prototypes in the next 90 days. The working group was  made from internal solution design team, innovation team and business stakeholders. External  teams were also involved from our different partners.

Selection

I have used different tools to achieve the set objectives, mind-mapping for the journey mapping and  then storytelling to highlight the pain areas and we will in the future use launch learning to help us  identify the correct initiatives we need to implement mass-scale to enhance these customer  experiences. However I would like to focus on storytelling in this exercise. I have selected this tool  because when going through the different internal and external workshops to solve for this  challenge everyone come with their own ideas and solutions; this is normal behavior known as  anchoring. The problem with this approach is that it always tends to drive discussions into a  challenging path as people get attached to their ideas and if things become personal people tend to  move away from objectivity. Using storytelling ensures neutrality as it places customer interest as  first priority. Using storytelling we tell the customer pain points, which are clear, specific,  measurable and require action to solve. It aligns everyone to a common objective.

Application

Before the workshops I and a team of colleagues have done a set of customer interviews with pre- set questions on the different journey segments. The questions were very general and broad not to  limit the customers from expressing their own views and remarks. They were drafted in a way to let  the pain points come out. e.g. “how was your drive to the destination?” “How do you rate the  reception staff?” “Was the mobile app useful?” We have then used these interviews in forming  general personas to tell stories and we have also used specific examples to make things more  personal. What I learned from this course is that solving one persons’ problem is solving all people  problem as the one in all likelihood reflects on the many.

Insight

The storytelling approach has helped us identify many pain points with the customer journey; it has  also helped us identify issues with wrong use of technology or solutions which someone behind a  desk thought is smart enough and needed. These insights will now be given as the challenge to solve  for and we will map initiatives against each of these insights and hopefully soon launch proof of  concepts that will help us identify if we got the right solutions or not to later scale. Operating in  short stints have made everyone very focused to deliver and having the right sponsorship has also  made this a success.

Approach

The launching tool is another interesting application in the next phase. I will be using this tool to try  to measure the success of the pilots against the set challenge and initiatives and help me evaluate  success and give feedback to the different teams on what to scale and what not to scale. I already  had a lot of positive feedback on the way workshops are running without people knowing I’m  following any specific methodology, what I have definitely noticed is that this pre-planned approach  in handling innovation has made everyone at ease and it has provided a flow for activities and  initiatives. It has kind-off put something chaotic in nature in a system without anyone realizing the  set plan from the beginning. It was very useful application.

