Your ideas are great, but don’t consider them in a vacuum. As customers behave as tightly connected networks, every business must learn to harness the power and potential of their customer networks. Get your customers to feedback, collaborate with and bring them into this process so they can help you co-design solutions, beyond the point of initial purchase. Think about ways you can leverage the ways that happy customers influence others and drive new business opportunities.
User-state journeys
A useful technique is to create user-state or customer journeys in groups. Each group should take on the identity of a typical existing customer of the organisation. You could give that user a name, age and brief description (“Suzy is a 38 year old mother of 2 under 5’s. She currently enjoys coming to our café, buys all her presents at our shop and when she can get a baby sitter brings her husband along to the Christmas dinner and show.”) Suzy is the user or persona, her description is her state. The journey she is to go on is in a year’s time, when the organisation has implemented the digital developments just brainstormed. Think about what the user wants to do and why, what aspects of that happen digitally, and what aspects of that interaction with your organisation are newly digital or enhanced by digital. Use the personas tool below to help you define who you’re focussing on.
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Create a touchpoints diagram, that describes the different touchpoints that characterises a person(a)’s interaction with your organisation a year from now, when the digital development is implemented. In this kind of visualisation, the interaction of the persona’s interaction with your organisation is described step by step, but with an emphasis on some aspects as the flux of physical and digital information and the physical and digital devices involved.
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Create an actions blueprint diagram, that describes the different actions users/personas take at points in their interaction with your organisation (in a year’s time, when the new digital developments are implemented). The actions blueprint also gets you to think about what the organisation is doing: what are front line staff doing? What’s happening in the back office? What are the means and processes and systems involved? This exercise gives you a clear view of where the gaps are between what your organisation does now, and what its staff task and organisational process set up is, and what it needs to be when the digital developments are embedded.
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Storytelling
Resistance is a common reaction to a new idea, so describing it a way that emphasises the features and benefits might be the way that you engage people with the new vision! You can do this through role playing or story telling an interaction with your organisation as different kinds characters that typically are your customers and stakeholders. You could create and tell a story of a day in life of a persona like Suzy. For an example, see Hannah Rudman’s video of a story told in 2008 for a Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, projecting a vision through a story of what things might be like in 2011 (which is now in the past – so you can tell whether she was right!)
As you tell the stories to each other, the digital and IT needs to make the ideas possible should be teased out and noted down under the broad headings. Someone should then write-up all the ideas captured under the broad headings. These should then be shared with the team.
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