Storytelling

Challenge    Selling an internal support service provided by a ticketing system.    One of the achievements I am most proud of in my professional career has been influencing senior  management to install a culture that connects the employee experience with the customer experience. So far,  I have observed that the employee experience has been completely overlooked in the organization, and the  word “culture” - as in the way of working - is not part of the projects’ glossary. The challenge I face is selling  the internal support services towards employees, provided by a global centralized and standardized support  team using a ticketing system and we have evidence of resistance around demanding support with such tools.  Furthermore, from the results of focus groups sessions, we have learned there is a negative connotation  around a global, centralized, standardized service. The perception among employees is that the human touch  will disappear, along with the customized experience and, in addition, employees are used to picking up the  phone and calling someone they trust to request data or information.  The support center is very premature, and it is difficult to calculate trends, benefits or numbers measuring  efficiency and effectiveness to sell the service.    Selection    For this challenge I have selected the “Storytelling” tool, as it puts the human beings and their experience front  and center, taking the listener along on their journey.      The reason why I have selected this tool is because as it turns out, after performing stakeholders’ interviews  - with both, the service requesters, and the service providers - we have discovered there is a completely  lack of trust in the team providing the service. Quoting Christopher Diaz “Storytelling Tool” video from week 2  of the course, “Every great product, every great service, every great institution has a story behind it.” We  need to create an emotional connection to build trust so the employees feel they are not losing the  human touch and their requests will be handled by people, not machines. Therefore, the approach will be  putting a face on the tickets and telling the story of the center and its most valuable asset, its people.    Application      We organized 10 different stakeholders’ interviews performed during a week with a diverse group of people  working at the center from all areas including recruitment, payroll, personal administration, learning and  development, management and the first recruited employee who witnessed the growth of the center and told  us all about the amazing team working on the employees’ requests. We then understood the foundations of  the center, it’s purpose and ways of working. From the team we learnt it is a certified great place to work and  the values behind the center that include collaboration, efficiency, passion, and family among others. After  sitting with teams and individuals from all areas, we analyzed all the information and decided to use the  stories to create a video. We recorded videos of 7 different employees describing the values of the center and  what drives them every morning to go to a great place to work and provide a great employee experience. The  video was then launched among all the internal customers and we had an increase of usage of over 40% the  first 2 months after the launch of the video. Employees were engaged emotionally with stories and values that  are also relevant to them and putting a face and a story behind those tickets really made a difference. The  positive feedback was overwhelming.    Insight    What I learn from this experience is that storytelling is a powerful communication tool because it connects  with the emotions of your audience. It creates a sense of purpose and community and we could have not  achieved such high rates of adoption of the service using any other tool, as we were dealing with the human

side of the change and there was too much resistance around the new ways of working. Design thinking is  about putting the customer at the center, developing empathy to understand what the users really need and  using a human-center approach to create value and a wow experience.    Approach    Not only an alternative approach but an additional approach is using visualization. Visualization helps making  an idea tangible and concrete through drawing an image, taking a picture, or making a map, among other  tools. The reason why I have also selected this tool is because processing a support ticket is a very abstract  idea for the users. From the moment users submit a ticket, until the ticket comes back to them with the  solution, what happens in between is a mystery. Understanding the process, time of processing, actors  involved, and other details, help the users cope with uncertainty and trust the process more. We will use this  tool to clearly define, with all its actors, the users journey, the processing of a ticket, to share a clear picture  with all stakeholders, removing all the technical jargon and bringing to life a complex process to a simple and  more tangible explanation that can also bring opportunities of improvement.  As Angela Myer explains in the Visualization tool video part of week 1 of the course, “Pictures and images  enable us to not only help people understand what it is we're trying to do, but to help really persuade  them in the worthiness of that particular idea, or the strength of that concept.”   This is why visualization is a strong tool to help achieve adoption of the service.

