Ten Ways to Socialize Customer Insights

With whom, how, and why

Published: Thursday, August 1, 2019 - 11:02

You’re listening to customers. You’re combining their feedback with those bread crumbs of data that they leave with every transaction and interaction with your brand. You’ve developed customer personas to better understand who they are, what problems they are trying to solve, and what jobs they need to get done. You’ve mapped their journeys to understand their experience today and their expectations for a better experience tomorrow. You have done all of that, right?

And you’re analyzing all of that together to learn everything you can and to tell a better and more robust customer story.

And there you are. Stuck. Now what? What do you do with all of those insights? How do they get consumed and acted upon? And they must get consumed and acted upon—otherwise, it’s all just expensive trivia!

It’s time to socialize the insights in an easily digestible way so that the right people use them to improve the experience for the customer. (I’ve already written about five ways to close the loop on feedback, so I won’t mention those.) Here are 10 simple ways to socialize insights, but be sure to tailor the delivery method and the insights to the audience as well as the expected and desired outcome.

1. Role-based or individual dashboards in your customer relationship management (CRM) system, voice of the customer (VoC) platform, or other data democratization platforms give the right people access to the right data and insights.

2. CX champions can help to get the insights out into their respective departments; they’ll know how to best communicate, socialize, and operationalize with their teams.

3. Get on the agenda of your executive team staff meeting and brief them on your learnings; they won’t necessarily be the ones to act on the feedback, but they’ll need to be aware, and they’ll need to assign resources within their departments to make any changes or to incorporate the feedback into existing processes or initiatives. They will then need to brief their direct reports so that the insights flow into the hands of the people who will use them.

4. During team or department meetings, tell a story about the customer; highlight the insights and how what you learned currently impacts the customer and her ability to complete some job or task.

5. Hold regularly scheduled department, cross-department, or company meetings, brown bag lunches, or town halls to share insights, tell customer stories, answer questions, and brainstorm on how to use the insights.

6. Create a customer room and share information there—not just the foundational elements (e.g., feedback, personas, journey maps) but also the insights, i.e., what does it all mean, for whom, and how should it be operationalized? Ensure that employees can access this room and the information 24/7.

7. Share the insights during onboarding, training, and coaching so that employees understand your customers and know what to expect and what is expected of them (in delivering the experience or in helping to design a better experience).

8. Develop storyboards (or use journey maps) to depict the before and after, to tell the story of the data and of the new, desired outcome or experience.

9. Post feedback and customer comments on posters or monitors around the office. Be sure to provide context for employee clarification and understanding.

10. Develop videos (or a video series on a predictable cadence, so people come to expect them) to explain what you’ve learned, what it means, what needs to be done, and by whom. Share these videos in meetings, on monitors, via email communications, in the customer room, during onboarding, and more.

Share customer personas around the office as well, to give employees a better understanding of who your customers are.

Be sure to develop a communication plan that includes ways to best communicate within your organization. Not all socialization methods work the same in every company; figure out what works best for your company, i.e., what gets them to pay attention and, ultimately and most important, take action.

“What gets talked about in an organization, and how it gets talked about, determine what is or isn’t going to happen.”
—Susan Scott

First published July 16, 2017, on the CX Journey blog.

About The Author

Annette Franz

Annette Franz, CCXP is founder and CEO of CX Journey Inc. She’s got 25 years of experience in both helping companies understand their employees and customers and identifying what drives retention, satisfaction, engagement, and the overall experience – so that, together, we can design a better experience for all constituents. She's an author (she wrote the book on customer understanding!), a speaker, and a customer experience thought leader and influencer. She serves as Vice Chairwoman on the Board of Directors of the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA), is an official member of the Forbes Coaches Council, and is an Advisory Board member for CX@Rutgers.