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Steve:
Good customer experience programs will strive to understand their customers, but what comes next?

Emily:
Taking a look at how did those people work through their thinking process in their creative process to get at that solution and say what were sort of the mindsets they were in? What were the steps that they took? What were some of the tools or the methods that they used to arrive at that solution? And how can we most successfully replicate some of those behaviors

Steve:
Utilizing design thinking in your customer experience efforts on this episode of The CX Leader Podcast.

Announcer:
The CX Leader Podcast with Steve Walker is produced by Walker, an experience management firm that helps our clients accelerate their XM success. You can find out more at Walkerinfo.com.

Steve:
Hello, everyone. I'm Steve Walker, host of The CX Leader Podcast and thank you for listening. On The CX Leader Podcast we explore topics and themes to help leaders like you leverage all the benefits of customer experience and help your customers and prospects want to do more business with you. A key element to building any customer experience program is understanding your customers and creating empathy. And there are tools to help with that. Surveys, interviews, journey mapping sessions. But what about the process beyond all of the discovery that happens? What do you actually do with all that understanding? I think our guest today on the podcast will give us some fascinating insights into how that process moves beyond just customer research. Emily Stump is a program manager for experience design at Indiana University Health, and she's going to help us understand how design thinking can be a valuable tool for CX pros. Emily, thanks so much for being a guest on The CX Leader Podcast.

Emily:
Thank you for having me.

Steve:
Well, it's my pleasure, actually. You know, I live in central Indiana and so I am very familiar with IU Health, but maybe for those who don't, and actually I know IU Health has some rather national, if not international fame. But why don't you just give our listeners a little bit of context about the complexity and the in the size and scope of the organization that you are lucky to work for.

Emily:
So like you said, I am very lucky to work for IU Health, we're one of the state's largest health care institutions. We have facilities across the state of Indiana and really just an amazing network of highly skilled physicians and team members who really are deeply dedicated to health care in the state of Indiana. I'm fortunate to be one of several program managers for experience design across the state, helping our teams to improve those patient experiences.

Steve:
Well, again, since I'm a proud Hoosier, I'm just a lot of people may have heard of Riley's Children's Hospital, which is world famous. Lance Armstrong had his cancer treated at IU. And it is both a teaching research and a operating health system. So great background on IU health, but I'm very interested in design thinking. And tell us a little bit about your background and how you got actually into the health care space, because this is going to be really neat, because health care is such an exciting I hesitate to use the word business, but I've kind of come from that world. But the convergence of of customer experience and then design thinking in the health care space to me is just very, very intellectually interesting. So give me a little bit of your background.

Emily:
Sure. So I'm actually from Pennsylvania, so I, in my 20s, developed a chronic condition sort of unexpectedly and wasn't very well prepared. And so my first interactions with health care weren't necessarily positive ones. Eventually, I moved out to Indiana to attend graduate school at the downtown IUPUI campus at the Herron School of Art and Design. They have a master's degree in design thinking and design leadership that has a really big focus on how do we engage community groups or stakeholders who will be impacted by the solutions that we're trying to put in place and make them active participants in the process or allow them the opportunity to be active participants in the process, I should say. And from there I had done an internship with IU Health. Specifically at that time it was with the design and construction department and I was doing wayfinding research. So they were redoing signage systems. And my job as a researcher was to interview people at the hospital about how they were navigating through the hospital from their car to their appointment, maybe back to their car. Maybe it was over several days stay with a family member that was either Methodist or Riley. And I started to see that health care could be really different. There were many individuals who cared very deeply about providing a really great patient experience

Steve:
So that you call that way finder?

Emily:
Wayfinding.

Steve:
Wayfinding. So I've actually been on the main campus there on the, you know, just the near northwest side of downtown Indianapolis. And it is a massive facility with, I don't know, five, six, seven buildings connected with, you know, walks. And the signs are pretty good. So you must have done a pretty good job.

Emily:
I was only one researcher on that project. There was a whole committee working on that. But yeah, to your point, sometimes when we build buildings, they're built up over time. There's signage systems aren't put in place at the same time. And if you don't have a thought to, OK, how are we going to come back in and make this all cohesive, how are patients and their family members and even our team members actually navigating these spaces. They might not make a lot of sense.

Steve:
And the Herron School, again, for those who aren't familiar with it, is really, really comes out of the fine arts.

Emily:
Yeah. So technically, it's a master's of fine arts, but really it's a masters of design program functionally. So that's sort of interesting. And it's a wonderful program. And interestingly, a lot of our graduates out of there year over year have chosen to go into health care related fields.

Steve:
So we often think of our business as being a combination of art and science. But yours is as well. Right? So you kind of come from an art background or from a design art visual or however. But you actually call yourself a researcher. So there's an analytical part to it as well.

Emily:
Yeah. And specifically, I've had to learn a lot about quantitative research, but our background in the program focuses really deeply on qualitative research methods.

Steve:
Right. And they both have their places we've talked about on our program many times. All right. Well, that's really good background. And just for again, for the context for our listeners, maybe you could give us what you mean when we say design thinking. So what's Emily's definition of design thinking?

Emily:
Sure. So my definition of design thinking is a little bit rooted in how I believe Herbert Simon posed it, where we're looking to design more ideal futures and specifically we're looking to leverage some of those creative skill sets that are admired. Sometimes when people look at creative fields or designers or even architects and they're like, wow, how do they come up with this really innovative solution to this problem? I never would have thought of that. Writers do this to a lot of times and they maybe write about future technology that doesn't even exist yet. But design thinking is really taking a look at how did those people work through their thinking process, in their creative process to get at that solution and say what were sort of the mindsets they were in? What were the steps that they took? What were some of the tools or the methods that they use to arrive at that solution? And how can we most successfully replicate some of those behaviors?

Steve:
Well, you know, so when I hear design and some of this would, I think, relate to some of your background, I think like, you know, like interior design or architectural design or to leverage one of my other favorite hobbies, motor sports, like race cars to me or beautiful. And it's because they're functional. They're they're designed to go fast. And that that is kind of what makes them beautiful, just like a, you know, a piece of architecture. You know, it's beautiful, but it's also because it's it's pleasurable to be there and enjoy it. So let's come now more towards the customer experience and how that can fit into that. But generally kind of what's involved and what's the purpose and what's the process that a design thinker goes through when they're approaching a problem. And then we'll try to link that to CX.

Emily:
Know that's that's a perfect lead in so anybody can Google design thinking and you'll probably see a number of visuals that'll sort of outline the process. Typically it's in a wheel, sometimes it's in loops. Lots of consultancies will have their sort of flavor of it. But pretty much if you look at any design thinking process, it has a couple of common phases. They title them different things. Typically, you're going to go through a discovery or an empathizing phase. You're going to go through defining what problem you're actually trying to solve, and then you'll move into ideating solutions and maybe testing and prototyping and those solutions. And then finally, you're probably going to have a phase at the very end that's going to have activities structured around how do you implement those solutions and continue to validate and learn from them.

Steve:
So let me make sure I got this right. Discovery, emphasizing, ideation, prototype, implementation.

Emily:
Pretty much. Yeah. And different groups will frame it and title things a little bit differently. But if you start to compare them across, you'll start to see a lot of commonalities.

Steve:
Our listeners should if they don't, but I think they already do, they love frameworks. So I think that's a great kind of just five point framework for people to start to think. So let's just kind of take through that. Maybe you could give us some examples of the process or how how you might do it and then how it might apply to a CX pro. And then I actually do want to talk a little bit about health care as well, too.

Emily:
Yeah. So when you're thinking about leveraging and design thinking process, it's really not so different than if you were thinking about doing a Six Sigma. So a Six Sigma, you're probably looking at efficiency, right? Reducing waste or trimming cost or moving just things that aren't working the way they should. When you're thinking about leveraging a design thinking process where it's really ideal is, especially in spots where maybe we don't have a lot of historic data. Maybe you're standing up a new product or service line that you just don't have customer data. Maybe it's a new technology, or maybe it's like what happened to us in 2020 where we sort of had an unprecedented series of world events. Suddenly we had to learn to work from home and multiple service industries were impacted in different ways and had to figure out new ways of doing things. That's where design thinking or creative problem solving process can really help. And what's great for a CX professional is that this process is really deeply rooted in honoring and understanding people's lived experiences. So where do customers go? What are they trying to accomplish? What are the systems and platforms and contexts that they're engaging with? And this could look like something like UX testing all the way to participatory qualitative research where you're actually engaging with your customers and maybe immersing yourself in their environments as much as possible, all the way to code designing solutions with your customers. So actually giving them an active role in the development of the solution. And so it can take a couple of different forms depending on what's appropriate for your business and what you're trying to accomplish.

Steve:
So, yeah, this would be where your emphasis on qualitative research, where there may not be, say, academic studies or there may not have already been a quantitative piece.

Emily:
You may not have sales data for something that you've never sold.

Steve:
My guest on the program this week is Emily Stump, a program manager for experience design at IU Health. That's Indiana University Health here in central Indiana. And Emily and I are having a fascinating discussion about how experience design can apply to your CX programs and processes. Emily, can you give me an example from your past of sort of how you would use the framework for redesigning something in a health care experience that maybe a listener could relate to?

Emily:
So it's it's an example that's not maybe entirely specific to a health care experience, but I do think it's accessible for most organizations. So you don't necessarily have to start with your customers. You can also start with your own teams. So one of the most meaningful projects that I've had the chance to work on was actually when we took some of our own internal teams from sales and operations, and we actually had them complete that first phase of sort of the design thinking process, that understanding phase with one of our call center teams. So we actually had them go in and do observational research. So they sat with representatives who were taking active service calls. They watched what they were doing. They listened in. They were just sort of silent observers there taking notes using some of these research frameworks. And what that really accomplished was a deep understanding of exactly what did it take to do that job and how were we making it harder for them to really deliver a high quality experience to our customers. That's something we can lose sight of sometimes is the customer experience we deliver is often only as good as the cert… The tools and the resources. We put it in the hands of our front line team members.

Steve:
Yeah, you see that all the time. Sometimes when you're, you know, it's too easy to like pick on like the travel industry, for example, you know, but, you know, the poor person at the gate at the airport has nothing to do with the problem with the plane or the you know, yet the person that get the brunt of it. And I always feel so sorry for those folks, but that that happens all the time is that the people are well intentioned, but the tools aren't accessible.

Emily:
Yeah. And so what we did was we took individuals who they voluntarily participated in this process. We led them through a short training about how to do observational research and what to look for and how to take some notes that were meaningful. And they did shifts and they signed up for these and we coordinated all of it. And I think it was eye opening for them as well, because many of them had worked with these teams for some time, but they've never actually sat and watched them do the work and watched how many systems they had to access and where they had to go to get information or how many times they had to click between different screens and even just noticing, like, what reference material did they have to have nearby and on hand, what shortcuts or cheat sheets did they have in place? And in some cases, we did follow up the observation with a chance to let them ask questions about things that they noticed, but maybe they weren't sure why they had done that. And at the end of this, not only were we able to provide a series of recommendations for improvement, but you also had four or five people from different functional areas who had a new appreciation about what it took to actually make sure that our customers had a high quality service available to them.

Steve:
This is great because I think most of our listeners probably defer more to survey data typically. But this reminds me, actually, a good friend of mine, a guy named Jim Houdin, he wrote a book called The Bright Spots. He did a lot of work. And this is all published its public with with Taco Bell. And he looked at sort of the high performing Taco Bell drive throughs. And so we went out and… their people went out and watched how they they did it. You know, just from the standpoint of the what what they were seeing in the customer SAT data. In these high performing Taco Bell's, they ran across one where the person who when the person pulled up to the screen, the order taker inside, said, I know the screen is confusing. Take as much time as you need and I'll be ready when you're ready to order. And that just that set the expectations and the experience so much differently that it showed up in all their customer SAT data. And I think it's a wonderful story because they would have never gotten to that through just the pure data analytics they had to actually go out and observe.

Emily:
Yeah. And so that's why when I work with teams, we try to emphasize sometimes when we're going through whether you're formally going through a design thinking process or you're just sort of using parts of it to help build up your customer experience work, too often there's the habit to want to skip that understanding phase, that empathizing with your customer or that very first step. And I would recommend so strongly don't fall into that tendency because that's really your foundation. We tend to hear stories about like, oh, well, we don't have time or there's not the money or well, we already know our customers. We know how they work. We know what they want. Take the time, though, really to validate that, because you raised the point about expectations and really in that empathy building or that understanding the customer step, whatever you call it, it's not so much about building the emotion of empathy. What we're really doing is something that I like to refer back to – John Kopko talks about this a little bit in some of his work. And there's some other psychologists who have researched this. They're called mental models. So essentially, you're the internal frameworks that our brains are using to understand how services or even the world works. When we're doing this empathizing phase to your point and being on the ground, actually seeing it, what we're actually doing isn't so much as building the emotion of empathy. What we're doing is we're adjusting our brains, understanding of our customers experience and goals, how understanding our mental model of how it works. So, for instance, you shared that you love motorcycles. You probably could describe roughly how a motorcycle engine works. Right. Could you draw me a technical diagram? No. So you have a mental model of how a motorcycle engine works. It's probably a little more advanced than most people's understanding of how an engine works, but by no means it is complex and detailed as an engineer's, right, enough to allow you to do the job.

Steve:
Right.

Emily:
So it's our brains way of sort of having a shortcut of how the world works. So in this type of work, we have assumptions coming in to any type of project, whether it's how to solve a problem, what our customers experience looks like. But that empathy or customer understanding phase is so critical because essentially what we're doing is we're testing and validating and constantly adjusting our assumptions. And I would point out that it's even more important to do this with your internal teams, because what's one of the key things about a good, strong team who's synched up and ready to go on a project? Right. They have a commonly built understanding of what they're trying to do and how they're trying to do it. So the more you can pull in your whole team, who's going to be making changes to improve the customer experience into sort of adjusting your mental models together, building that understanding and that empathy together, the more synched up you're going to be and the fewer problems you're going to run into down the road about what are we trying to do, how are we trying to do it?

Steve:
And I imagine just listening to you that this this doesn't only have to happen in the first phase. It can it can be iterative. And then also listening to you, there's a there's a lot of thought about agile techniques or agile systems, which I think would fit in here, too, as well, where you kind of co-develop. And so, yeah, I get it. We do not want to underemphasized this understanding and discovery, and it doesn't necessarily just all happen up front, there's an iteration to it.

Emily:
No, there definitely is, because again, like our mental models are constantly adjusting and we want them to. It's how we continue to make sure we're sort of synching up with the reality of the world in our customers. Right. But iteration is a big part of design thinking. And sometimes that's why this phase can feel a little bit hard for folks to do, because it's messy. It's not very linear. Sometimes you're going to go back and adjust things. And that's why we sort of do this empathizing and understanding the customer before we really nail down what is the problem that we actually want to solve for what's the most appropriate thing that we can impact.

Steve:
So we've talked a lot about qualitative research today. And I know, you know, a lot of our listeners are probably a little more they go back more to the quantitative. But talk a little bit about qualitative, because I think it's it can sometimes be intimidating for folks that don't do it a lot. But it shouldn't be right now.

Emily:
It really shouldn't be. The most qualitative research falls into one of three buckets. There's what people do, what people say and what people make. Most commonly, you're probably familiar with the what people say category. So you would see interviews there. Observation falls into that category of what people do. And then if you want to play around with prototyping, what ideal future would look like? That's where you're sort of starting to get into methods that really focus on what people make. It's good to think about them next or what's most appropriate. But I would also tell other CX professionals who are maybe thinking about expanding their options or what they want to experiment with and sort of understanding their customers, that qualitative research methods don't have to be complex. They can be very low fidelity. You don't need fancy platforms or tools sometimes that could be having somebody illustrate their day or use stickers to keep track or label common activities that they're engaging in. Of course, there's interviews which are used very commonly when we're prepping to build something like a journey map or service blueprint. But there's other ways of gathering this information. You could even use visual images and have people sort of build their own stories using pictures that already exist. So what customers make can get a little bit more fun. It's frankly, my favorite set of methods, because that's where you can bust out the prototyping tools so you can use things like Legos, cardboard, Post-its, tape. So I've worked with teams in the past that have done very low fidelity, prototyping, using frankly, stuff you probably have at home all the way to really high fidelity prototyping so teams can take very different approaches to this depending on what their goals are.

Steve:
All right, Emily, I've reached that point in the program where I ask each of my guests every week to give our pros a take home value. This is your best tip or the one idea that you would like to leave our listeners with that they could take back to the office and actually improve what they're doing in their own CX efforts.

Emily:
So my biggest take home value that I would like to share today is make sure that you know who your internal change stakeholders are as well, and plan out ways to engage them in your qualitative or your understanding your customer process, because they're some of your customers, too, and producing things like a journey map. That's really a great way to inform and share the understandings that you built up while you've gone through this phase of empathizing or understanding your customers. But for other teams internally, that's where the work starts for them. So the more you can engage them and help shift the understanding of your customers, the easier the next phases of making change to improve the customer experience are going to be.

Steve:
There you go. Great tip. Thank you, Emily Stump. Emily Stump is a program manager for experienced design at IU Health. That's Indiana University Health. Emily, thanks again for being a great guest on the podcast.

Emily:
It was my pleasure. Thank you.

Steve:
And one of the things we do here on the podcast is connect pros. And if anybody wanted to connect with you and continue the conversation, I know they could find you on LinkedIn. I did. But any other contact information you might share with us?

Emily:
Just LinkedIn is probably the best.

Steve:
And then also we'll just put this in here, too. But, you know, this is a topic that really begs for visuals. So we may actually have some stuff out on the website for those of you who would be interested in. And maybe we can make sure that your profile is on there, too. So, hey, again. Thanks, Emily. Really, it was a treat to have you on.

Emily:
Thank you so much.

Steve:
And if you want to talk about anything else you heard on this podcast or about how Walker can help your business' customer experience, feel free to email me at a podcast@walkerinfo.com. Be sure to check out our website, cxleaderpodcast.com to subscribe to the show and find all our previous episodes, we organize them by series and topic, we also have our contact information and you can drop us a note, let us know how we're doing or suggest the idea for a future podcast. The CX Leader Podcast is a production of Walker we're an experience management firm that helps companies accelerate their XM success. You can read more about us at walkerinfo.com. Thank you for listening today and we'll see again next time.

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