Reﬂection - Storytelling

Challenge & Selection

I work as a quality manager on brick and mortar store which sells and provides tech support for  smartphones. More than selling and solving every customer’s issue, our objective is help the  customer to make the right purchase for his/her needs and delight the customer by providing an  unique experience. We use to say that we we want to provide more than just a solution for a given  issue, we want to enrich the customer’s life through the device they have purchased.

To accomplish this, our main challenge is to make the sales and support advisors to really  understand the customer needs, issues, desires and how they will use the device they want to  purchase or how the issue they are having affect their lives. Knowing that, the team will be able to  be more assertive on which smartphone model is the best purchase or which smartphone’s  features is more tailored to address the customer needs.

Based on this challenge, I have researched  the tools available on our course and I decided by the  Storytelling approach. The main reason I have chose this tool is because the ideia of “know your  audience” that has a perfect ﬁt when we have to identify solutions for customers. Through the  Storytelling, we set up workshops with the sales and support team to build up some customer’s  proﬁles and exercise what would be the best smartphone and best solutions based up on their  needs and possible issues.

Application

We designed the customer’s proﬁles based on gender, relationship status, family status (have kids  or not),  pet friendly (have pets or not), profession, mobility option (have car or uses public  transportation) and hobbies. Based on that, we create a few examples of customer proﬁles and the  team had the opportunity to exercise conversation with those proﬁle and specially be able to “walk  the customer shoe” and think on solutions based on their proﬁle and needs.

We did not create a check list to be asked to every customer. Our idea is to enable the team to  assess those informations during a normal conversation with customers.

Insights

We had some ﬁndings along this way. The most relevant one is related to the kind of training the  new members gets after hired. They are trained 100% on technical skills and 0% on a customer  centric skills. They just don’t know how to start a friendly conversation with customers, they only  ask “what do you want” and became only an order taker. On this old way, they will be only able to  sell what the customer wants and we want them to provide a consultive sales.

We ended up reviewing all the training content and we included an workshop on the training based  on what was described on the Application section above. With this, the new employees comes to  the ﬂoor with this human centric approach on mind.

Approach

Thinking on an alternative tool and what we could have done better on this process, I think that we  should have ﬁrst applied a Learning Launch after the customer’s proﬁle, to create a control group  and being able to assess the improvements on the results of a team applying the new concepts vs.  a team applying the old concepts.

The course overall brought me some new ideas, but in overall it helped me organize the ideas into  a very logic way. It will be easier to assess and plan improvement opportunities from now on.

