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The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
RGP Chief Strategy & Experience Officer Jennifer Jones on the human experience of digital transformation
00:29:09
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- [00:00]
A
Hi, I'm Greg Hillstrom, host of the Agile Brand, and here's a question for you. What if the biggest obstacle to delivering a world class customer experience isn't your technology or your strategy, but the very way your teams are structured and enabled to work? Agility requires more than just rapid iteration. It demands a deep understanding of the human elements within your systems. It's about creating an internal environment that can fluidly adapt to and even anticipate the needs of the external customer. Today we're going to talk about the often overlooked foundation of successful business transformation, the human experience. We're going to explore why the employee experience isn't just an HR initiative, but a direct driver of customer outcomes. And how designing systems around the way people actually think, not just how we're organized on a chart, is critical. We'll also get into the practical application of a human centered lens to business processes and why so many large scale changes fail when they don't properly connect the dots between people, processes and technology. Welcome to season eight of the Agile Brand podcast. This season we're going all in on Expert Mode, MarTech, AI and Customer Experience, talking with the people and platforms behind the brands you know and love. Again, I'm your host Greg Kilstrom and I help Fortune 1000 companies make sense of martech, AI and marketing ops. Hit, subscribe or follow to make sure you always get the latest episodes and and leave us a rating so others can find us as well. And make sure you check out our sponsor, TechSystems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services and real world adoption. For more information, go to techsystems.com now let's dive in. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome Jennifer Jones, Chief Strategy and Experience Officer at rgp. Jennifer, welcome to the show.
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B
Oh, I'm excited to be here. Thank you for having me.
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A
Yeah, looking forward to talking about this topic. Definitely top of mind for me. Many days. Before we dive in though, why don't you give a little background on yourself and your role at rgp?
- [02:02]
B
Okay, great. Well, I formerly CMO here and recently kind of just expanded my role into Chief Strategy and Experience Officer, which actually makes sense coming from my background. You know, started in agencies doing full service advertising, creative director and and then moved into founding and building a practice in human centered design, so doing all of the front end disciplines of research, strategy, content design and development for clients and you know, I think my, my role here is just to really focus on the connection of. You know, I always like to call it the, the why and the who to actually figure out the what and the how. And, you know, really bringing kind of full circle my career together in this role. So the advertising part, the digital transformation part, as well as the experience and strategy part of those things.
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A
Yeah, love it. Well, yeah, let's dive in here. And I want to start by talking about that, like I teed up in the intro, the, the strategic link between the employee experience as well as the customer experience. And a lot of leaders still view employee experience and customer experience as separate domains. How do you define the employee experience ecosystem? And you know, what, you know, what's the connection and you know, what's the mechanism which those two are tied?
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B
I mean, they are two sides of the same coin in my opinion. I think if you think about like the most beloved brands, brands that have just like excellent customer experience, it's usually because they are, have a good employee experience as well. And you know, having done a lot of transformational type projects and applying it from a service design perspective, you know, you're, you're not just looking at the end users, you're looking at all of the constituents in the journey. So, you know, if you think about like a call center, for instance, and you think about like, oh, you know, people are, are calling in and they're having poor experiences, you know, like the call center person doesn't know, like, you know, the information they don't know, you know, or, and they're not getting their questions answered. But then if you look at it from the call center side, it's like, maybe they don't have tools that are actually giving them the information. You know, they don't know the first five times somebody is called because it's not in their call log that they're seeing. And so oftentimes a lot of those problems are interconnected. And I think like, you know, to be a brand that actually like competes from a customer experience standpoint, you got to compete from an employee experience standpoint. You need to, you know, create dynamics that are going to make people excited to be there, to build a culture that people like, actually want to be a part of. And that's going to come through in, you know, everything that a client touches, whether it be when they talk to somebody on the phone or when they deal with the salesperson. I mean, all of those feelings are going to come through. And so I think it's like critically important and I think even just like literally. So that's kind of like the experience side of things. But like I mentioned about that call center Example, I mean, most tools, most digital things are so interconnected and if like an, an employee can't actually access the things they need, they're not going to be able to actually service the journeys in the same way. So I think like you, it doesn't ever start and stop. It's one continuous journey.
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A
Yeah, well, and for those, you know, CMOs listening and those marketing leaders listening, and certainly you've, you've played that role as well. Where does marketing's responsibility begin and end in all of this, you know? Cause it's surely not a purely an HR or ops function. Right. So, you know, what's, what's the role of marketing in all of this?
- [05:42]
B
Well, I think, you know, I mean, they should be deeply connected. In fact, like we're working right now, you know, and a lot of marketers do own sort of the intranet or the career site or the employee brand values or the employee brand value framework. And, But I think again, to build a solid, like, successful company, it's like you have to look at it from both sides, like, why would people want to buy from you and why would people want to work for you? And I think unless those are both successful journeys, which are interconnected, then you're not going to have a good brand. And so, you know, from what we do at our organization, it's really voe and voc, like truly understanding, you know, how our employees feel, think here, what our customers feel, think here, and then tying those insights into how we develop that brand. That needs to be true on both sides of the coin.
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A
Yeah, yeah, totally agree. And I mean, makes so much sense. It's, it's amazing. Maybe the organizations that either don't haven't grasped that or haven't appeared to grasp again, because intellectually I don't think it's that, that complex a concept. But at the same time, it's like you, you, we've all been there. We've all seen the employee that's like completely disengaged. And that surely reflects on our experience and our perceptions of the brand. Right. So it's, you know, it's, it, it's always kind of shocking when brands don't take that more seriously. Right.
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B
So I think too often maybe they don't. Like, I don't think people, people. You know, it's funny, I get asked this a lot, especially when I used to, you know, be more in the consulting side and sell directly to clients, and they would say, you know, what is experience? And I think we often kind of forget about that. And whether you're talking about employee or customer, you know, I think people often go to. It's one specific thing like, oh, it's a website or it's a, it's a thing. Right. Like it's a thing and. Or they go to like the visual aspects of, of a brand. You know, it's like.
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A
Right.
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But experience is everything. It's what you touch, feel. See, it's how we talk, it's the values we hold, how those values are actually like performed within company communication in the culture. And I, I don't, I think even the smallest thing is so critical because it's like, you know, those 20 small things, like maybe somebody having a bad interaction, interaction with somebody, or maybe having a weird email or you know, whatever it might be, those small things add up. And I think it really depends. It defines whether somebody stays a loyal customer.
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A
Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about human centered process design in practice. You've talked about designing systems around how people think, not just how companies are organized. I think the classic example is I go back to websites that are organized like the org chart, not how a customer actually wants to interact or get a product or service. Right. So maybe can you walk us through a practical example of applying that human centered lens to redesign business process or something like that?
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B
Yeah, I mean, well, even just you brought up a really good example. I think having worked in a lot of employee experience and customer experience transformations when I did work on the client side of things, too often, like intranets is a good example. I think they often are approached how we're organized versus how does somebody actually think and search for a topic. And so we used to do a lot of taxonomy exercises which were really focused on helping like HR and IT leaders and all the different leaders in an organization really think about like people aren't going to know what that word means. That might be how you're organized or how you call items. But ultimately, you know, how does somebody actually go and search? And you have to think about globally that's going to be different. Those are going to be obviously different considerations. And so in those types of projects, we do a lot of user testing and a lot of basically research to truly understand how people actually search and think about items. That way we can actually create those taxonomies. So that's more of a tactical item. But kind of going back to your larger question, we do a lot of things from a service design perspective, which is in my opinion, kind of taking journey mapping and kind of the typical approach. And you Know, really putting it on steroids. But it's the idea that if you step back and I said this at the top of the session, you know, I think the biggest thing I've seen in my, you know, 28 years of doing this is that most organizations are like rushed to the what in the house. So it's like, you know, what do we need to do? What this, this problem I'm presented with, it's, it's broken. So let's go fix it. So how are we going to fix it? Oh, we're going to go procure technology or we going to do this integration or whatever. Really forgetting about the why they're doing those things or who they're doing them for. And service design, in my opinion is like, when you talk about process transformation is probably the most human centered way to focus that it's really thinking about it from all constituents point of view, so not just the end user. Which obviously journey maps are not necessarily synonymous with just thinking about an end user. But I think a lot of times when people do the those projects, they think, okay, let me just think about end users, which is critically important. But I think if you forget about the constituents that are serving the end users and the owners of those journeys, it kind of goes back to that call center example of like the things that might be broken in that journey for the customer may never be fixed if you don't actually understand the other side of the person servicing those different journeys. And so I think when you go through that process, it's applying all the human centered design principles and methodologies, you know, doing the testing, doing the ride alongs is what I like to call them, or day in the life of, you know, actually going doing diary studies, doing focus groups, doing workshops and truly understanding like how is somebody so from an end user, you know, what are they trying to do, what are the tools, technologies, data processes that they're touching? And then from an internal employee experience standpoint that you know, who is actually involved in servicing that journey, what are the tools they're using, how are they getting data, you know, how are they interacting, you know, ultimately, what can we learn from that? What's working, what's not working? And oftentimes like a broken customer experience is a broken tool and employee journey that when somebody's actually trying to do their work, they don't have the right data points, they don't have the right information to service the customer in the right way.
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I think it's really prevalent and I think it is a lot of what you said. But if you think about and I think it's crazy that this stat really hasn't changed in probably 20 years. But the fact that still transformations, digital transformations 75 to 80 or 70 to 80% fail and if you look at the reasons why, the ones that are actually cataloged, they're all people problems, you know, lack of executive buy in, lack of understanding the, you know, the change management and the aptitude of changing bringing people along that journey, basically not understanding who you're changing for. So the users involved, I mean it's all people problems. And I think that people that organizations and people that are part of transformations to your point, often underestimate the people problem. They think like we have this problem so this technology can solve it or this thing can solve it. And I think maybe it can. But oftentimes, like, if you ignore like the main thing and you don't make that the main thing, then I think that technology is gonna be a more powerful potential inhibitor of change. Meaning now you've just paid a lot of money and maybe you've got this robust tool, but you still have the same problems. Persistent. In fact. We worked with a Fortune 100 technology client and they were doing a finance transformation project and they were really going through a large sea change in finance transformation. And generally most of it was going okay or well. And they still had two constituents that were really struggling, that were putting in all the help desk tickets, frustrated with the change. And so they were like, what are we doing wrong? You know, like what is, what is the problem here? And so they hired us just to look at the people centered journey for these two constituents. And I think what we learned from that is that the process that they had gone through and the, and the systems and the tools that they had designed still ignored some of the really big issues that those particular can, you know, like customers of this journey were struggling with. And so as we then went through and sat with them and did workshops with these Personas and said, okay, walk us through. I mean it was like, it was a little bit like doy, you know, kind of thing, but, but the same turn of the coin. It was really, it was really evident that until you really sit in the chair of whoever that is, you're not going to understand those little minutiae of like, so they fill out this form, they never got an email confirmation and you know, like, things like that. So they were sort of like, well, did I do the right thing? Like you know, stuff like that. So it's like I feel like people like underestimate the, the people involved and overestimate the technology and data to support the issue.
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Yeah, well, and so for the, for those orgs that are successful, you know, the, the admittedly low percent, but you know, those orgs that are successful and really have adopted a more human centric design approach. Again, I'm sure, you know, details are different from org2org, but you know, what are some of the themes or overall changes that occur in day to day operations to enable that more human centric design?
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Well, I think there's two things. I think they're the muscle of change and the, the people focus of change is important. And I think some Organizations have done a good job of developing that and really understanding, you know, like, hey, I need to take a human centered design approach. I still think there, there's a lot of people that go through the motions of that, but then when they get the data, they still don't believe the truth of the data or they're like, oh, wow, you know, like there's, there's a reason for that or there's a reason for this. And it's like, sure, of course there's, there's, there's the realities of everything. But I think, like, you know, I think feedback and the reality of like a user sitting down or a constituent sitting down and saying, hey, here are the things I'm struggling with within this journey or within this particular problem is so valuable, you know, and it's like, and honestly, if we're open to that change, I think we can, can really, really improve our business just in general, because it's also, it creates like a, a muscle of authenticity and believability that people actually, like, want to hear the feedback and make changes against it.
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A
Yeah, well, yeah, and that, that all goes to, you know, making the, the transformation stick as well. Right? Is, you know, it's, it's one thing to. Well, yeah, I mean, let's talk a little bit about that. I mean, you mentioned the, you know, the 70 to 80% failure rate, you know, for those that are successful, you know, beyond just, hey, we're done and you know, we pop the champagne or whatever and, you know, what are, what are leading indicators that it's actually working and going to hold as well, you know, as opposed to just a project being done? You know, are there, you know, I think metrics. Yeah.
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B
The biggest leading indicator that your project won't succeed long term is to think it, it will ever be done. I hate to say that, but good point. I think, I think that everyone does go into kind of transformation initiatives that it's like, it's, it's done. Like, hey, we're going to hit target date and it's done and then we can stop spending money on this. But number one, digital is never done. Like, it is a living, breathing thing. And I think, especially when I used to do a lot of digital transformation, I think there's kind of two unfortunate factors that most technology to get to the level of what they show you in a demo requires so much investment, both time, money and implementation that I don't know that is ever really like, evident in sort of the sales process. So that's number one and Then number two, I guess really relating to number one is that I think oftentimes people spend money and are like hopeful that like, you know, okay, cool, I'll get, I'll get this awesome technology, I'm going to implement it. But then it's like, oh, to do that I would have had to buy these other three modules and then I would also have. And that's going to take me another year and then I'm going to have to keep doing this. And so I think we underestimate like the level of just long term capacity that these things take. Number one. And then number two, I think that the, generally speaking, because we treat them like projects, we treat them like, here's the requirements and once we fix these requirements, there's going to be no more problems. So I think it all comes back to number one. Right? And I think that to be successful, it's like, think about this like a living, breathing thing. Be open to the fact that you're going to need to go back to the well and continuing. You're going to have to have continuous listening, you're going to have to have continuous feedback. And this is going to have to have continuous, probably like development implementation hours that are constantly improving it versus it just being sort of living. That's why also a lot of technology and organizations go so stagnant because they didn't plan for later continued evolution of the, of the, of the stuff. I don't know.
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Yeah, well, and I mean, you know, I do think there's a, there's a cognitive load aspect to that too of the, you know, the continuous change and improvement. But I mean, is that, is that the mindset shift that is required to do? You know, because I completely agree with you. Like, I think once you start on that path, you're never done. It's, it's not even just that there's more problems to solve, there's also new opportunities. Like once you get to the top of the hill, you see things that you never saw before. Right? So there's new opportunities that you never thought were possible. So like what, what's the mindset shift to embrace again, not only solving the problems, but also embracing the new opportunities that, that organizations are going to need.
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Well, kind of just hitting on that. You made me think about this and I don't know if this will like hit, hit, but you know, it's like relationships, like could you imagine getting in a relationship and assuming that that moment, it's never going to change, you know, pretty much recipe for disaster because people Evolve, situations evolve, things happen outside of our, you know, realm of possibility. And I think that's no different than companies. Right? Like, you go through decline, you go through growth, which obviously require different rigor, different approach, different go to market, you have different people, you have different use cases, you have different needs. And so it's a little, it's a while to even think, but we all do it, including myself. Even when I've procured technology for my team, it's like we all, I think, get into the mindset of like, okay, we're going to get this done and it'll be done. But it's kind of wild to think like that because it's like your company is living and breathing, so it's always going to evolve and the use cases are going to. Even if nothing else changed.
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Right, Right. Yeah, I think not to get too psychological. Like, I think we do all crave some kind of consistency in our lives. Right. So it's like, but, you know, I mean, hey, this is the Agile Brand podcast. You know, I've, I've, I've come to terms with the fact that I think
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B
we should put it into the definition, be agile, right?
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A
Yes, right, exactly. Well, Jennifer, it's been great talking with you and thanks for sharing your insights. A couple last questions as we wrap up here. First one, you know, if we were having this interview a year from today, what is one thing that we would definitely be talking about,
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B
I would say, and something that I think is going to become more in focus is the human aspect of AI. In fact, I plan to do kind of a primary research study on that. But I think that, you know, similar, if you, if you rewind back 20 years ago with experience technologies or early parts of digital transformation, people are struggling with AI in the same way, you know, their data is still, you know, not great and the things that are, the under technologies are still not well integrated. So all the things that help make that better for an organization still still struggle with what they did 20 years ago. And then I think you have the human aspect of that of like, you know, what does that mean for people's careers and how we're going to integrate with technology and how we're going to make this work. And so I think that's going to be an ongoing conversation and one to be explored for, you know, how do you have a change mindset in your company towards AI, but not just like, hey, adopt it, but like, how do we actually truly integrate it with people, workers too?
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Yeah, yeah, love that. And last question for you what do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
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Oh, that's a great question. I would say, what do I do to stay agile? My role? Well, I'm always learning. I think that, I think the one thing that I love about the job that I chose, like just generally, whether I was, you know, in my past roles or now, is that it's always been, you know, human centered design. And so I think that you're always talking to people and so, you know, hearing people's feedback and opinion. Even if it's about like a project I'm working on, like for a company versus even about something that we're doing here, you always learn something, you know, and I think like that can just be like the greatest ability for growth is just to hear kind of like, okay, okay, they did these things or this happened or whatever. And then how does that apply to other things that I'm doing that I can apply it to and like learn from? So I don't know. I think that is the coolest part of my job because it also helps me stay agile and stay like fresh because I have to constantly do research, constantly learn why things fail and then try to make them better. And so that helped me kind of apply that to other areas of the world.
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A
Yeah, love it. Well, again, I'd like to thank Jennifer Jones, Chief Strategy and Experience Officer at RGP for joining the show. You can learn more about Jennifer and RGP by following the links in the show notes. This episode is brought to you by Tech Systems. They're leaders in full stack tech services, talent solutions and helping companies put it all in action. You can learn more@techsystems.com that's teksystems.com and thanks again for listening to the Agile Brand podcast. If you liked the episode, hit subscribe and drop a rating so others can find the show too. And if you're interested in consulting, advisory work, or if you need a speaker for your next event, feel free to reach out. Just visit GregKilstrom.com that's G-R-E G K-I H L S T R O M.com the Agile brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay curious and stay agile.
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The Agile brand.