Visualization to Align Clients

Challenge & Selection:

Being a consultant, I often have to work with a variety of clients who may be at various levels within the company and have different perspectives on a problem. While many of my clients are mid-level managers, often there are also more junior resources as well as executives. Often I find that the most difficult part is not coming up with a solution, but getting everyone to agree on what the problem is in the first place. This is because everyone in the organization is looking at the problem through different lense. A junior resource may only look at the problem from a physical angle (what actions a customer takes) while an executive or mid-level resource may look at it from a financial or objective level (was the customer able to do what they wanted to). In addition to the clients, the type of customer that the client deals with as well as the channels that they use can vary as well. Given the variety of clients and customers who can be involved in a single engagement, getting everybody on the same page as to what the problem and possible solution may be can be difficult.

I found visualization, especially from a storytelling perspective of the customer, can significantly aidin aligning clients around how a customer interacts and wear pain points may be.  Because most clients are used to thinking of customer experience more in terms of data and other non-tangible items, having them think about what a customer goes through really helps them reflect on the human aspect of the customer rather than just the numerical aspect.  What thisl helps is really getting to the root of the problem that they're trying to solve rather than making guesses and inferences to what the problem may be.

Application

My standard tool is a whiteboard.  Generally when I go into these meetings I will have done background research and reviewed any material the client has provided to me.  In addition I tal to my main stakeholder and understand their perspective of the problem so I have a base to work from. I may also map out a draft customer journey in my head to make sure I understand the major interaction points with customer has. When possible I also like to have selected

images from the web to help me illustrate various aspects of the customer to help clients empathize during the actual meeting. So for example if the situation is that a customer is calling in from home, depending on the problem the client is trying to address I may, for example, find an image of somebody on the phone with children running around in the background to illustrate that the customer has multiple things going on at the same time.

During the actual meeting I will ask an open question around the customer and based on the answer use the white board to start mapping out the customer and customer journey.  If, let’s say, it is a doctor’s office, I will draw out a stick figure to represent the patient, or two stick figures one with a cane to illustrate a person bringing their older parent in.  I will then draw out vital aspects of the customer’s journey.  Where to they check in, where do they wait, etc.  I will use my preselected images, if they help drive the conversation or consider different aspects. My end goal is that at the end of the meeting everyone is aligned around who the customer is, and what steps they take to achieve what the business wants them to.  This highlights what channel they use and what pain points they face. Ultimately this makes the next step of identify appropriate solutions much washer and efficient.

Insights and Approach

When I first started doing this it wasn't a result of truly understanding what visualization was but it was to address the immediate problem that I was having which was to get everybody on the same page.   What I have learned is that using visualization, my clients start looking at the problem from the perspective of the customer.  They go from asking questions like, “why does it take 10 minutes to check someone in” to asking questions like “why does a patient need to see 3 people to get fully checked in” or “why is the check-in desk in the corner where you can’t see it from the entryway”.  This not only helps them solve the business problem at hand, but also helps them identify ways to make the overall customer experience easier, and that is the important part because people have a lot of options today and they are going to choose companies that make their overall experience better.

I've used this technique though throughout my career and continue to refine it as I learned from each experience.  This course also helped me put a more structured approach to some of these ideas of how to make what I do from a visualization perspective better.  For example the use of colors and at times even patterns to help steer and guide clients and identify problems in a more structured manner.

