For companies undergoing a CX transformation, one of the most pressing needs is understanding your customer. Empathy building experiences are core to becoming more human-centered. (Empathy defined as the ability to be aware of, understanding of, and sensitive to another person’s feelings and thoughts without having had the same experience). Enabling employees to experience how they collectively impact their customers is critical for larger, mature organizations where many employees do not interact with customers day-to-day.
We helped our client connect its 3,000 employees with its evolving customer experience through hands-on experiences at a traveling organization-wide CX event. In addition to building empathy with their customers, the event raised awareness of CX best practices. It featured impactful CX work already being done across the organization, showcasing new and inspiring ways of working differently on behalf of their customers.
Internal Interviews
Highly Immersive Experiences
Interactive Stations
Planned and Facilitated CX Event
We worked with our client on the design challenge of creating empathy for their customers across 3 locations and communicating the organization’s progress on becoming more customer-centric. On CX Day, our client wanted their employees to have a realistic sense of their customers’ experience and their role in it.
In addition to designing and building three immersive experiences, we went on a listening tour across the organization to surface CX improvements not just about the customer, but also about newly-created capabilities. This informed our design of nine additional interactive stations that would help the teams tell the story of CX improvements through new ways of working.
The immersive stations were especially popular: the first was an immersion room, which was a full-scale build-out of a person’s living space. We gave visitors to the immersion room a list of questions to answer as they explored the room and interacted with the artifacts, such as an answering machine, laptop, and a stack of mail. After exiting the room, we asked visitors to vote on which action the customer should take. This demonstrated the complexity of the customer experience and how difficult it can be to make an informed decision.
Another exhibit that we created was “Customer Mirrors.” We recorded interviews with several customers to hear about their journey and displayed each on a monitor covered by a two-way mirror. When an employee first walked up to the station, they would see their face in the mirror. As they picked up a pair of headphones, the mirror would transform into the image of the customer, and the video would begin playing. The impact of looking into a mirror and seeing someone else’s face was even more significant than we had predicted.
Another popular station was virtual reality. Our client was piloting new services in a rural location, and we wanted to give the employees a sense of what it felt like to visit the town. To accomplish this, we traveled to the city and conducted interviews with several community owners and business owners that had benefited from the community investment. While at each location, we captured 360-degree images of the businesses and surrounding areas. We then created a virtual reality tour of the city using Unity 3D and Google Cardboard viewers. At CX Day, employees were able to use the viewers to tour the town and watch interviews, bringing the experience to life in ways they couldn’t have imagined.
CX Day set a new standard of the power of organization-wide events to create excitement and mobilize culture change. Hundreds of employees from all functions and levels of the organization visited the event space, with the vast majority of them visiting all stations and engaging in CX conversations.
"Everything about the event was spectacular and clearly showed a lot of thought, planning, teamwork, and creativity."
