Your Customer's Success

Begins With Your Team's

Success

Stacey Seronick

Content Strategist

LavaCon 2016

Las Vegas, October, 2016

© 2016 Wells Fargo Bank, N.A. All rights reserved.

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Intro

Almost 20 years designing and writing for digital and physical experiences, services, and products

Fine artist -> Graphic Artist -> Web Designer -> Interaction Designer -> Content Manager -> Service Designer ->Learning Path Designer -> Content and Experience Strategist

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What will you learn?

Definition of success is not universal

More engaged team members

= more successful team members

= better experience for customer

= business objectives and goals met

= happy customers and happy executives.

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What is success?

Customer Success

– Generally defined by the business in form of KPIs

Team Success

– Generally defined by a set of internal KPIs

– Has little to do with how each team member perceives their own success

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Why is this important?

Why should I spend time and money on this? From a customer’s point of view…

Research shows that 55% of consumers are willing to pay more for a guaranteed good experience. 1

Customer frustration leads to the following: 13% tell 15 or more people if they’re unhappy. But 72% of consumers will share a positive experience with 6 or more people.2

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Why is this important?

Why should I spend time and money on this? From a team member’s point of view…

Companies that excel at customer experience have “1.5 times as many engaged employees as do customer experience laggards.” 3

Only 31.5% of US workforce considers itself engaged in work. 4

Success is defined by each person

differently, based on a combination of

personal values and goals.

Think carefully about what success means to you – take care not to merely absorb the definition of success of others around you, but what YOU think success looks and feels like.

Turn to someone near you and share your definition of success.

7 Minute Activity: Spend 2 minutes thinking on your

definition of success.

Share your definition of success with a

neighbor.

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What if I’m not sure or hazy on how I define

success? You’re not alone. Which means at least someone else

on your team is likely to feel the same way.

Time for true self-reflection is at a premium.

– Time for empathy-building can be non-existent.

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The answer is…

Use research-based evaluations like StrengthsFinder as a launching point

– Focus on building strengths into mastery

• Proficient at -> Master of

• Doesn’t do well -> Does okay

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What else?

Give team members space to figure out what their definition of success is and how this job/company/role can help with that

Build empathy within and amongst internal teams

Encourage teams members to bring “whole selves” to work

Encourage lifelong learning through a project-based skills “meet-up”

For all the “Others” on your cross-functional teams (and for each other)

Building Empathy

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Formal

Team-building workshops

– Don’t groan, they can be fun, I swear

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Formal

StrengthsFinder Bingo

– Try to guess your teammates top 5 strengths via bingo board

– Learn about self and teammates

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Formal

For in-person groups

– Surrealist Parlor Games

– Scavenger Hunt field trips

All in-person or all-remote

• Comfort, Risk, Danger exercise

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Informal

Check in with yourself:

– Am I telling myself a story about this person? (making judgements based on assumptions)

– What are the actual facts of the situation (not judgements or stories) – confirm with the other person that you both agree on the facts and ask for their POV

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Informal

Check in with others:

– “Can you say more about your [decision, response, direction]?”

– “Have you been in a situation like this before?” – tease out a related personal story to give you context of this person’s POV while putting them at ease

Not just the self you think we want to see

Bring your whole self to work

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Encourage the rebels

Nonconformity “promotes innovation, improves performance, and can enhance a person’s standing more than conformity can.”5

– Observers judged the following as having higher status than counterparts:

• Keynote speaker in red sneakers

• CEO on Wall Street in a hoodie and jeans

• Presenter that uses own PPT template, rather than her company’s

Teach and learn new skills

Start a lifelong learning meetup

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Teach and learn from each other

Meet every other week or once per month

– Could be a “lunch n’ learn” series of brown-bag lunchtime meetings

– Each team member commits to teaching a skill – work-related or not – to the group for a percentage of the meetups

– Each team member commits to learning a number of new skills from team mates

– You may need to teach team mates how to build a learning project

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Teach and learn from each other

Teach your teams about building their own Passions and Skills Net

• Encourages self-reflection

• Can help build confidence

• Can show unexpected gaps or strengths in knowledge

• These can feed your lunch n’ learn meetups for topics

In conclusion…

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Conclusion

More engaged team members

= more successful team members

= better experience for customer

Empathy, lifelong learning, controlled rebellion, and finding your own definition of success will help get us there.

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Appendix

Files for StrengthsFinder Bingo