This is the Nielsen Norman Group UX Podcast.
I'm Therese Fessenden.
In today's episode, I got a chance to interview Kim Salazar.
Kim is a Senior UX Specialist at NNG, and one of her areas of expertise is omnichannel
customer experiences.
We got into some of her research and discussed a number of topics.
First what omnichannel experiences are, the relationship between customer experience versus
user experience, and how truly valuing CX means creating a fundamental shift, not just
in how we view our work, but also in how that work is done.
So with that, I'm excited to welcome to our show, Kim Salazar.
Just to kick things off, you do a considerable amount of research into omnichannel experiences.
What does an omnichannel experience, what does that mean to you, and what has your research
been like?
Yeah.
Well, everybody knows nowadays that we're not just designing website experiences anymore.
That went by the wayside years ago, and we know that people interact with organizations
on many different channels.
That means websites, of course, mobile applications, tablet applications, kiosks, email, text messages,
all of these different ways which are called channels to interact with organizations, which
leads us to that term omnichannel.
That prefix omni is actually Latin for all, so it's like all of the channels in which
people can interact.
So the experience that users have as they move across all these channels in order to
complete an activity with the organization, that's what's called the omnichannel experience.
So for example, if you were to interact with an e-commerce website, you might start that
customer journey on your smartphone, for example.
Maybe you clicked on an ad through social media that brought you into their website.
Maybe you come back later and buy on your desktop.
You receive an email confirmation, perhaps, then you get that product that you ordered.
Maybe you decide to return it.
It's not working for you, so you have to log back on on another channel, and then maybe
when it is received by the retailer, you get a text.
So that single goal, ordering that product and sending it back, that is a customer journey,
and it takes place on all different types of channels and ways for us to interact with
organizations.
That makes sense, and it's also a bit intimidating to think about how one might unify all of
these different channels.
And also, how do you even research that type of cross-channel experience?
Do you watch people use one of the channels, or do you typically stick around for a longer
period of time?
What do you typically do?
Well, it's not quite as straightforward as the typical user research that we might do
in a lab setting, where we're probably mostly interested in a single digital interaction,
and we bring people in and watch them use it.
Of course, we have to think beyond this and try to understand the entire journey.
There's a couple of ways that you can go about understanding that through research.
One of those ways is to do more observational type activities in the field, maybe picking
out different sections of a journey to go and observe in people's real life context,
maybe in a location where your business has a physical experience, and trying to get a
more organic understanding of how people utilize the various channels in their everyday life.
One other way that I really like to understand customer journeys is through a research methodology
called diary studies.
This methodology is great because it's really what it sounds like, it's a way to try to
keep an ongoing diary of how the experience unfolds from one interaction to the next until
they reach the end.
Basically, you just try to recruit people that are already in a position to do that
customer journey.
Maybe you talk to sales, or find leads, or get access to people that are maybe at the
very early stages of the journey you're interested in, and then ask those people to report their
experiences with you at every step of the way, tell you what they're doing, tell you
how that experience unfolded, how they feel about it, what they're thinking about it.
If you do this, you're collecting a chronological list of their experience over time.
If you look at 8, 10, 12 people going through that experience, you can start to generalize
what the narrative is, what the common narrative is, to understand at a high level how are
people feeling and how are they experiencing this journey over time.
Now that you mention all those different research methods, I remember this might have been a
pre-COVID, well, definitely was a pre-COVID research project, but I think I remember you
going to a retail store and carrying a GoPro with you and following people as they shopped.
I don't know if you want to share a little bit about how that study went or what was
kind of challenging.
That was one of the funniest projects I did, and I remember thinking, gosh, my job is really
weird.
It was for a client that was an online retailer, and they were trying to understand how customers
shopped in the physical space.
I did some screening for people about their shopping behaviors and tried to recruit people
that were in a position to go and do maybe a larger shopping trip.
I essentially just met these people in the store, and I would walk around behind them
with a clipboard, and I would try to have this little GoPro camera attached to the clipboard.
I was essentially following them around as they shopped.
I tried to be out of the way and not disturb them, and I encouraged them to approach their
shopping experience as if I wasn't even there.
And then at the end, after they would check out, then we sat down and I was able to interview
them a little bit and understand what they were thinking at different parts of their
shopping trip.
And then, of course, I had all that data to go back through and evaluate and analyze and
put together with what they were telling me they were thinking.
And I did this for about 10 people.
It was really, really interesting.
I love telling some of the stories about the behaviors that I was observing during that
trip.
That's so cool.
Yeah, you're right.
It's kind of weird, but it's also really interesting and fascinating.
That's a really cool study.
And I'm imagining that studying these types of journeys where you're really following
someone for a long period, not necessarily an individual person, but following a customer's
journey for a duration of time that often goes well beyond a single interaction.
So I kind of want to pick your brain because in a previous episode, side note for all listening,
check out the very first episode where I interview Dr. Jacob Nielsen about what UX is.
And we sort of started broaching the topic of CX.
So I'm curious about how you view CX as it relates to some of these really long-term
journeys and how is it different from UX or is it different from UX at all?
Good question.
So this can be a bit confusing.
There's no lack of terminology in our field.
It's really just a matter of different words for similar concepts.
The difference between CX and UX is meant really to communicate the scope of the experience.
Although UX originally, when it was coined by Don Norman, one of our founders, it was
intended to describe any type of experience that a user or a customer could have with
an organization or brand, no matter how big or small it was.
But over time, as UX evolved and matured, the focus of it really came to mean more single
interaction, digital experiences, really focusing on interface design and such.
So UX has kind of taken a more targeted meaning.
And now, in contrast to that, the word CX is what is commonly used to refer to the broader
scopes of experience.
So the journey, like we were talking about, not just one interaction, but a whole set
of related interactions that take place as part of a single goal.
And even larger than that, a lot of times customers are going to have a lot of journeys
over time.
So if I've been a customer of the same mobile phone provider for 10 years, I even have larger
than a journey experience, I have a customer experience as a whole.
It's that brand experience you have with a company over time.
So it seems like it's a collection of journeys, not just a single user journey, even higher
level than that, if you were to kind of zoom out, or at least in our journey mapping class,
we often talk about the scope and how you have your paper plane scope, which is super
low level.
You can kind of see everyone's desks or whatever.
And then you go up to a 747 airplane and you're not going to see notes.
You're not even going to see buildings.
You kind of zoom out to that very, very high level where you can see many, many more interactions
within journeys and many, many more journeys as a result.
There's more to having a great customer experience than having great interaction experiences.
It's beyond just having good UX at that interaction or that digital level.
But when they all come together and people are moving through those channel experiences
as they complete their activities, the accumulative experience is really important.
So is it consistent?
How much effort is required for someone to go from the website to the physical space
if that's a required transition?
So it's designing that journey experience as a whole and making sure the different interactions
fit together really well.
And then if you go larger than that, we want to make sure that our journey experiences
are consistent with other journey experiences through our organization, no matter what somebody's
doing to interact with us.
Yeah, for sure.
So CX would basically be this collection of journeys, which themselves are the result
of lots of actions, collective actions from many, many different people in an organization.
So I imagine, especially as you get into the highest levels of the customer life cycle,
that this can involve thousands of people in an organization easily.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So yeah.
How do we think about CX then, kind of these really, really high level overarching narratives?
And how can we think of it in a way that helps us be accountable and also not lose our minds
thinking about the thousands of people who are individually contributing to this?
What would be your advice for understanding where we play a role in CX and influencing
CX?
Yeah.
So even when we just define what CX is and we say the sky is really the limit, the scope
of this is really large, it can be overwhelming.
As you can imagine, giving customers a great experience as they interact across channels
and over time, it requires employees to coordinate with each other in new ways.
Unfortunately, a lot of organizations right now aren't really built in a way that allows
coordination across departments and teams.
So this creates a lot of fragmentation in our customer experiences.
Everybody has probably worked at a company where different silos of responsibility existed,
where maybe sales and marketing are off in their own little land and then we've got product
teams and we've got customer support and everybody's focused on their own section of the experience.
That starts to become a challenge when we're talking about everything needing to be connected
and designed in a cohesive way across all these different interactions with us.
So I've been researching this problem and I wrote a report recently that's on our website.
It's called Operationalizing CX and then we also have a class called CX Transformation.
Both of these are meant to walk people through and give companies a guide as to how to approach
CX transformation, which is essentially the process of trying to position the organization
in a way that it's capable of collaborating and creating cohesive customer journeys.
So both the class and the report are highlighting a framework that we've developed to improve
the delivery of these omni-channel customer experiences.
So just to give you a little more detail on that framework, it really breaks down the
different areas within the organization where change needs to happen.
So starting with the overall vision of what we're trying to deliver our customers, making
sure that customers are at the center of that and there's a strategy put in place by leadership
to make the internal operational changes to be able to deliver on that vision.
There's going to be changes in the employee structures, maybe bringing on new roles, connecting
different teams in new ways to aid in that cross-functional collaboration.
We'll have operational changes.
It's all about embedding CX in the way we work.
So part of that is going to be changing the way work is prioritized and how it moves through
teams.
And then of course technology is the final one.
A lot of customer experience nowadays, especially when we're trying to connect things across
channels and devices, requires the organization to have a really mature technical infrastructure
to support that.
We also give specifics about the types of changes that need to take place across these
different areas in the organization.
So for example, investing in culture change initiatives, trying to help all the employees
within the organization understand the value of CX, include things like the development
of those new operational procedures, and then the investment into maybe integrating the
disparate backend systems that exist in organizations and creating a single source of customer data,
which then opens the door for some of the critical experience improvements that need
to be made.
So just to sum it all up, you asked me, how do we make sure we don't lose our minds?
We do lose our minds.
I take it.
No, I'm just kidding.
Yeah.
I think that the focus is, focus on kind of laying the foundation to create the right
ecosystem and standards for collaboration and make sure that the various channel owners
and the people that have ownership over different phases of the journey are working together
and creating a single experience rather than working in more siloed ways in which we're
creating more individual patchwork of channel experiences, which is sort of the old way
of thinking.
Yeah.
And it is not easy.
Certainly does not sound like it's something that can be done overnight.
And I know that at least in a number of the conferences that we've been at, there are
regularly folks who come up to us and kind of ask, how do I create a more human centered
organization and how do I do this tomorrow?
And it's often something that's not necessarily achievable in a really short amount of time
because workplace culture is really far deeper than we can see in day-to-day work.
So I guess when we're thinking about who's responsible ultimately for making our company
culture more human centered, or who's responsible for maintaining this CX, who would you say
is responsible?
Would it be employees?
Would it be maybe middle level managers to kind of start closing the gaps and helping
to basically knock down those silos or knock down the walls between those siloed departments?
Or is this really more of like an executive thing or is this even higher than that?
And who do you think ultimately should bear this responsibility?
That's a good question.
It can feel...
If you're just an individual contributor at an organization, maybe you're focused on design
or research of focused experiences at your organization, it can be really hard to feel
like you have influence over this grand ecosystem that's required to deliver good customer experience.
The answer is that at the end of the day, once the company has matured, it really should
be everyone's responsibility.
Everyone should have ownership over the customer experience.
The culture should shift in a way that CX is valued among everybody, and then all employees
should have an understanding of what influence their individual jobs have on a customer journey.
With that said, it has to start with a mandate from leadership.
There's no way to transform an organization around customer experience from the bottom-up.
It really has to come from the executive level leadership, and that might include the board,
those people that have stake in the business, because the changes that have to take place
are huge operational changes.
We have to shift the way we work.
We have to shift our culture, like you were saying.
The decisions that have to be made to make that happen, they come from the top.
Your C-level executive stakeholders have to be the ones that decide to take on this challenge
and make investments and changes to, like you say, resolve some of these issues that
exist, like the siloed working structures and the disparate data structures.
That requires investment and a solid strategy.
Leadership has to decide to value customer experience and make the investments necessary
to connect employees and connect technology in order for us to be able to deliver good
customer experiences.
Yeah.
I really wish there was a wonderful way to just wave a wand as a lower-level employee.
I know at least in lots of other very large organizations, it can be very frustrating
to be at that tier and feel a little bit powerless against all of it, but I do think there's
hope.
I certainly have seen lots of great improvements over the years in lots of different organizations,
including really large ones.
I guess to address that, do you have any advice for some of these junior employees who want
to start a CX transformation in some way in their organizations?
So the first steps, no matter what type of organization you're in, whether it's large
or small, the first step is always to begin the process of building understanding among
stakeholders and in leadership roles and building buy-in with managers and C-level executives.
There's a ton of ways to do this.
We discuss them in detail and in the report and in our course, but really all of this
advice boils down to helping our decision makers discover that there's a lot of business
value to be had through CX transformation.
There's tons of research in the field right now showing that companies that are focused
on CX and that operationalize it into the way they work are outperforming those laggards.
So they're showing higher returns on investment, they're just outperforming on all the top
level business metrics like revenue and churn and even stock performance.
So focusing on helping people understand that there's business value behind this.
It's not just about doing nice things for the customers or trying to improve how our
customers feel, it's a business investment.
And also just know it's a long game.
You kind of alluded to this earlier.
This is not something that can happen overnight, so have patience.
What I would say is don't go to your managers or your executives and say, we need to do
a CX transformation.
That won't work.
You have to try to help them understand the value through proving the business value behind
it.
I interviewed somebody from my research, actually, this gal.
She's a former executive for Zappos and usertesting.com.
She told me that UX people should not be like the troll under the bridge where the troll
under the bridge comes out and says, hey, we need to do this CX transformation and we
need to make this change.
That message is always dead on arrival.
What's more helpful is proving return on investment showing at a small scale how CX improvements
to journeys and optimizing journey experiences result in more revenue through more conversions
or less operational costs because we're not receiving as many questions from customers
and show if we expand this conversation and if we make the choice to invest in this and
operationalize it in our company, we're going to see that business value at full scale.
Yeah.
I love the troll under the bridge analogy.
It's so good.
I know.
I was just like, oh my God, I've been there too.
I've been that troll because I didn't understand how to communicate with stakeholders.
But a lot of firms are reactive where they're going to come and they see that they have
customer journeys that have pain points and they'll see opportunities in those journeys
and take on projects to resolve those.
But through CX transformation, it flips that on its head a little bit and we focus less
on reacting to experiences that are problematic and you focus on building a foundation within
your organization that fosters collaboration and journey design from the beginning so that
we're making organic experiences that are really high quality in an organic way rather
than fixing things after the fact.
And being proactive can be extremely beneficial for one, you don't have to react as often,
which is a huge benefit, but also it can just leave a much better impression in the long
run.
So not just meeting the standard, but often exceeding the standard as well.
Yeah, exactly.
That's great advice.
And for managers, would you give any additional advice to those folks who maybe have a little
bit more power over making that transformation happen?
Yeah.
So a manager is in kind of a unique position where they have a little bit of influence
over a larger scope of the organization.
So of course, they're going to also want to focus on trying to educate and build buy-in,
but if they have some influence over certain teams or different departments, they might
be able to try to institute some of these changes within that scope that they have influence
over so that maybe we're not transforming the entire organization to be CX focused and
operationalizing CX into the way the whole organization works, but maybe we can do a
transformation within one line of business or one section or phase of the customer journey.
And that's a good way to get the ball rolling.
And if you can show success in that, then that just elevates the conversation and it
helps again to build that credibility behind the recommendations that you're pushing.
Seems like the message is start small, which I find is often a common piece of advice in
UX, but also in CX.
And I agree, I think having that case study just makes your position for that transformation
that much stronger because now you have evidence and evidence is really going to be much more
powerful than being the troll under the bridge and demanding that something happens.
Exactly.
Kim, it is time already.
This has been really, really fun.
If anyone wants to follow you on social media or check out any of your work, where could
you point people to?
Well, I'm on Twitter.
My handle is at Kimmy, K-I-M-M-Y-A-F.
And just follow our newsletter.
Our articles are always released weekly, so there's going to be our new research about
this topic from me here and there, and then of course topics from our various colleagues
as well.
All right.
Well, thanks, Therese.
Oh, thank you.
And have a great rest of your day.
Thank you.
Bye.
Thanks for listening to this episode of the NNG-UX Podcast.
To learn more about the resources, reports, or courses cited in this episode, check out
the show notes on whichever podcast platform you're listening from.
On the topic of podcast platforms, if you like this show and want to support our work,
please hit subscribe.
We also have a weekly email newsletter where you can get updates about our latest research
and any info on upcoming UX certification events.
To learn more about that, go to nngroup.com.
That's N-N-G-R-O-U-P.com.
Thank you so much for your support.
Until next time, and remember, keep it simple.