Unknown: No La Shaira Fullwood: Can you all still see my screen? Yeah. Great. So if you're unfamiliar with our wonderful zoom features, of course, wherever your taskbar is the bottom of your screen, top side, it happens. Mute is that wonderful little microphone that we have at the bottom, and you all look very well versed to that. Of course, the video icon here is
for you to start and or stop your video. Down here we have participants, which all of you are. So you can click that to see how many of us there are. There's chat, a little thought bubble right there. If you need to chat with us, I have also
turned on the live transcript, I believe, I hope you can all see it. And as we said, we are now recording. Awesome, some virtual quick tips for you. If you are a Mac person, which I love Mac people, I love my Mac command tab for you to switch tabs if you need to. And also if you want to see your screen side by side, you can click the link we have here or we can put that in the chat for you if necessary. And of course, if you're on a Windows, beautiful computer, here's your alt tab to switch between open apps, and of course ctrl alt tab just to switch between everything on your screen. And of course you have
the Windows logo key that you can press left or right arrow to arrange it windows side by side. And now I'm going to turn this wonderful program over to our wonderful Queen City bites rep. And that would be Miss Christina Vela. So here we go. Cristina Veale: Thanks, la. Yeah, hey, everyone. My name is Cristina Veal. I'm one of the co-organizers for Queen City Bytes. We are a meetup that is really dedicated to helping
folks break into the technology space. So we work with the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library. And again want to say thank you for putting us on. Typically, we like to do a lot of in person events at the library space. Since the pandemic, we have been 100% virtual, but we do hope to be back in person here.
Hopefully in the next coming months. So stay tuned for online and in person meetups, we would love to facilitate you. And if you ever have questions or suggestions on what meetups we should teach, moving forward, don't hesitate to reach out to us. We've got our meetup page where you can just email all the organizers so we appreciate all that feedback. It's my pleasure to welcome CJ Toscano. He is a Principal Experience Designer
and Strategist with Slalom consulting. CJ has a history of leading transformational efforts for Fortune 100 companies across multiple industries with a focus on omni channel experiences as an advocate of human centered design practices. CJ is a design generalist who enjoys data, empathy and technology to create effortless and meaningful experiences. And with that, I will go ahead and pass it off to CJ to give our presentation. CJ Toscano: All right. Thank you, Christina for that warm
introduction. I'm going to see if I could share the right screen here one moment. All right. Y'all see what I'm sharing here? Great. We're off to a wonderful start. So yeah, pretty intimate group today. So if you have any questions, maybe Christina law, you can kind of help you people in, let me know. So keep this pretty, pretty informal. But yeah, so
meaningful omni channel experiences. So these are experiences that we all have. So I'm going to go into some definitions, a little bit of background and history are going to cover a little bit about me to add some context. And then some processes and tools that we use at slalom and in the customer experience and service design space. So we'll be unpacking some of those definitions if you're not sure where those things are. So just a little bit about me this is
kind of what makes up CJ. So these are all things that I have some kind of interest in they get interested in these things get me out of bed in the morning. These things motivate me as a person and I tried to find ways to incorporate this even into my work as some people who are on the line at work with me now. And I work for slalom consulting. So we are a premium
consulting company are based around Did you Will transformation. And we have several practices at slalom, we're based in South End at the rail yard really nice office down here. And I work for the experienced design practice I'm a principal there and well experienced design is, is really a few different interdisciplinary things such as product design, customer experience service design, and what we call design ops. So like how do all these different designers work together in an efficient way, we are hiring, forever watching this live or recorded. So feel free to reach out to me, I have at the bottom right my my Twitter account, you can ping me on I'm also available for coffee or chat through LinkedIn, however you want to connect to me happy to talk. So at risk of being self serving, I just wanted to
provide a little bit of background on my experience, because I think it's pertinent to customer experience and service design. And we're all on a journey. And that's going to be a theme throughout this conversation today. And my journey started with media production. So you're probably asking yourself, as a lot of my colleagues did, like how did this guy that's like making videos and had a sociology degree, get to be a designer? And what is design mean? And it makes a lot of sense, when you start to unpack. This was not by
by design, my career path. It's just kind of something I fell into. So I started going from graduating college with sociology and media production, to start doing education design. So all of the Online Learning Tools living in a COVID world, what does that design look like for those courses was the strategy behind them. And then I started getting into customer
experience and product design. So that was with a b2c e commerce platform and retailer, you might nose rack room shoes and off Broadway Shoe Warehouse. So I was doing a lot of work with them with their product team. And also their omni channel team boss's senior omni channel director. And we'll kind of unpack what that means in a minute. And then that went on to experience design, which kind of puts all of these different aspects and skills together to do things like service design, and digital transformation across various industries and organizations that we work with at slalom. So yeah, everything's
a journey. So we're all on a journey together, you have your own individual journeys. And these kinds of have this path, right, there's a beginning, there's a middle, there's an end, there's rising and falling action, you know, throughout our daily lives. And this is also true for products and services.
And customers are the protagonists in that story that we're trying to tell. And really, as designers, we're telling stories, and we're kind of setting up the boundaries. And you know, the plot of how this is gonna play out. Or so we think it's a little bit different once we get into omni channel. And we think about, you know, designing digital experiences, and when we talk about them, it's never, it's kind of like watching a movie, right? We're never talking about a frame and a movie, we're usually talking about how we felt after we left the movie. What did we like about that? You know, what is a
very emotional experience. So we're experiencing things in motion. So when we try to think about designing experiences, we have to think about things moving in motion, and how do we how did we feel when we left? That experience? And ultimately, how I like to describe customer experience in service design, is what does it feel like to interact with the brand. So when we talk with clients, they never talk about, hey, we want to improve how it feels like to interact with our brand. They'll say things like, hey, we want to increase revenue, decrease cost, we want to get better adoption to our platform. So a lot of our role is really educating through a lens of empathy. And that's
putting ourselves in the shoes of users. But really more so people, right? Because no matter what kind of business you have, if you're even if you're creating digital products or using them or studying them as part of your role, or maintaining them, or accessing them, if you're managing a data platform, for example, these are all people that are managing these tools, using them interacting with them. And this is usually the response that I get, you know, when we first started talking about this empathetic perspective, like that's not related to business You know, so but the tide is changing. And we know that because our customers, our
clients are now talking about customer experience, and having an experience led, as we call approach to business, which is really smart, because that's how their customers think. And that's how they're able to engage them. And we've, there's plenty of statistics out there. But one of the things that I like to talk with clients about is even b2b customers. So this is business to business customers, they have a high level of emotional investment, they're making emotional decisions. So if you're not under truly understanding what those emotions are, and able to design experiences around them, you're not going to be positioning yourself as a market leader. Back in the day, things were simple, you know, you would
go into a store, for example, a record store, you'd be able to browse yourself, you'd examine your product, you'd make a purchasing decision. And then you would go up to a counter probably, you know, talk and transact with someone, bag it up, and leave. And then you experience that product at home. But then this guy came along, and decided to kind of change that whole way that we, you know, think about trade and commerce and buy, buy things, browse, share ideas about these different products and services, then this guy came along and disrupted it even more. So now we're totally connected, right? So that totally changes that experience and dynamic of how you're engaging these brands. You know, I went from very
personal, very hyperlocal to global. And then it also started with personalization started getting other options like all the technology is included, like geo tracking, geolocation. Now today, we're seeing all these different hybrid experiences. So this is like mixed reality, right? So this woman is going through this virtual trade, changing room, and then whatever this is, and then who knows what the future holds, you know, we're looking at NF T's you might be buying things in the metaverse. All of these are designed experiences, whether they're intentional or not. And that's going to matter what type of customer experience you have. So one, this guy, Bill Buxton,
he invented the multi touch tablet, so your, your smartphone, tablets, they're using. He's a really smart guy, but he's an engineer, he doesn't have anything related to anything related to design, or experience. But he has a really great perspective on what customer experience means for technologists. And that is that if you put anything out there in
the world, that is a product, a service or an application, it has to work, it has to bring value, it has to flow, right. And I think at the top level, you know, business mind, this makes sense. But it also, and if and if that it does all those things, you still should not make it, it still hasn't passed your criteria for a good experience. Unless it also works with everything else in the environment that you already have. It complements everything else. And it reduces the
complexity of all of those other things ended increases their value. So I have to say that that's not common. But that's the goal. And that's the bar like stuff has to work together. And what he's talking about is this ecosystem of experiences.
All of these, what we call it touch points, which could be people or technology, multiple technologies that interact with each other have to be considered for that process. So when I was at record of an Off Broadway shoes, you know, that's a pretty simple, relatively experience, that you're selling shoes on the surface. But when you think about all the different ways that you can interact with the brand suddenly becomes really complex. So you have different technologies that you could use,
we call these like channels that you can engage the brand with, within knows they have to respect and complement each other. And it has to be a fluid cohesive experience, right? So you're gonna be able to do a lot of different things on your desktop, your smartphone is heavily enabled now. We try to have mobile first designs because we know that's the easiest, fastest way to engage a customer. So he's gonna be on them but now you have internet of things you have smartwatches and do you want to consider those in your experience? Is that going to be annoying? If you start to promoting your product on a smartwatch and these other consumer devices like tablets, the list goes on. And this isn't to mention what it's like in store are you able to use your smartphone in store your Internet of Things device and store it to ad nauseam so just to understand what we mean when we say omni channel, is that back in the record store day, you'd have a single channel that you would interact with. So it's this bi directional relationship with this physical storefront. And there's also
multi channel saying that, hey, you could choose which channel you want to interact with. So you can go to the store, or you go through an app, or you can go through a website, for example, but you can't mix and match, then there's cross channel, where you're, you are able to do certain things across different channels with mixed results. So I can buy online, and I could return in store, only if it's the same store in a certain area. So it's still restrictive. What all organizations are really talking and thinking about today, is omni channel. So omni channel in its truest sense, is the customer is dictating how, when, and how and when they're able to interact with the brand, and what way what frequency that they want.
So and it's not interacting with the channel, it's interacting with that brand, right? So it doesn't matter if I choose to interact with a store, or a mailing program, for example, like traditional methods, or by phone, I can accomplish all of my goals, all of my user stories or tasks in any way that I choose. And that's why it's so important. Because you're building an ecosystem that really complements the customer and how they want to do business. So for for this talk, I was trying to frame this in digital experiences, right? Because that's what people are familiar with. And there's a lot
that goes into creating a digital experience, right? digital experience is only one part of that broader customer experience. There's a lot that's considered there, you know, you go from this abstract conceptual place of understanding what the users who the users are, and who the audience is, what their needs and goals are, what type of functions should be there, how are they going to get around and navigate, what the UI patterns and details are going to be like throughout that experience to be consistent, what kind of content they want to drive. And then typically what people think about is this surface of this visual design aesthetic. So what does that communicating to me.
And just drawing a distinction between what a user experiences and what customer experiences is that they're parts of a whole. So they're in user experience, you might consider things like, hey, I want this to be usable and accessible to all audiences want to cast a wide net. So I have more customers being able to interact with my brand, and buy things or accomplish whatever goal they need. If you're government agency, for example, I need to make sure that information architecture is clear and flows have a content, visual design strategy. And interaction design. It's intuitive. With customer
experience that's inclusive of that digital product experience, we have a whole host of other things to consider. So that's what is the customer service like? So and, you know, b2c business to consumer retail environment, it's what does it feel like when I interact with someone in the store fitting in a fitting room? Or if I'm checking out or I need help, and I have to call support? I have to go through chat for support? What is the marketing and brand communicating to me? What are all the vast variety of touch points and ways that I can engage them? What are the processes and policies of this company? Is all customer facing? External? How are they fulfilling promises to me? So are they delivering the product that I had expected the service I expected? And what is this relationship look like? With a company? Or is it managed? Am I able to kind of navigate my way through this relationship? Is there a loyalty program that rewards me do I feel valued? So these are a whole host? This is not all inclusive, all host of considerations that go into service design. So we're doing UX design, we're designing towards the user experience. But with service design, we're designing this broader experience is all encompassing of all of those things that defines what what it feels like to interact with that brand. Let me know if I'm losing anybody. So I'm sure a lot of you have seen this before. And I still use this with clients today,
just as a gentle reminders that we've got to start with that customer experience and work backwards towards the technology. So a lot of times again, with our clients, we talk about being experienced forward And we want to make sure that we're designing towards this end experience. That makes sense. Even if we're designing a product that accomplishes specific tasks or goals, if it doesn't have that end experience and feeling, and you feel good about that, then we really need to reconsider our approach. So this is what everyone's here for, is, what is that recipe for meaningful omni channel experiences. And there's a whole host, I could do several talks on each one of these. But it's really about understanding your customers, right. And these are, these are humans. So we try to,
we try to understand them and frame them in personas. So like, here's who the makeup and demographics of this person, here's what their needs are preferences and interests, co creation. So working with the business, working with design teams, developers, and having that kind of holistic take on what a meaningful omni channel experiences landing on how are we going to measure that we're successful? Is this resonating with customers and what they want to do that in a variety of ways, design and concept, that experience, prioritize the efforts, everything that's going to go in there, and prove it. So validate those concepts with real customers, come up with a pilot plan, and then learn iterate, scale, learn, iterate, never ends. So in this iterative process, you're constantly
learning from customers, you're adapting your approach. And again, just remembering that people are the constant is people that create, use, maintain, support and fulfill these experiences, whether it's someone you're transacting with the teams that are building the software, the analysts that are reviewing everything, and those that are actually fulfilling and providing that customer service, or product. We talk about understanding your customer, it's, it's knowing your customer through a variety of lenses sometimes call this like a 360 view of your customer. So we could do qualitative studies, which normally consists of customer interviews, asking them kind of, like an interview guide, have questions, we do observations and heuristic analysis. So actually going to locations and observing people how they use a tool or a product or service, whether or not it's as intended, we want to understand how they'd like to use it, and then optimize for that. Looking at voice of customers, this is sometimes framed as voc but this is really customer feedback. Mature organizations have whole
departments that are dedicated to voice a customer, this can be feedback on products, it can be explicit. So they're telling you exactly how they feel. It could be implicit or indirect feedback from the customer. There's also behavior analytics. So there's
ways with qualitative studies and voice of customer where engaging customers directly or reviewing their feedback with behavior analytics is really what they're doing in digital products, for example, so we can see through Google Analytics or Adobe, what they're actually doing when they're falling off the platform, for example. And there's quantitative studies, which are typically surveys. So we're sending out surveys to massive groups of people to validate what we've learned from these anecdotes and the interviews that we've had. We also look into marketing technology. This is another form of behavior analytics. So how, how successful are these campaigns and engaging customers along this journey? So a marketing campaign might be to solicit a customer to sign up for a service? And are they opening the emails? Are they are they not? Are they opening the email, but not clicking forward through the call to action, that kind of thing. And a huge, huge
opportunity to is around customer support. Sometimes this is customer care. And what they tell us is really what they're contacting the organization about and understanding the reason why they're contacting them. And we call like a
disposition. So was this resolved, escalated deferred, or was this did the customer resolve it on their own? So all of these things holistically together really paint a picture of what's most important to the customer, what they value the most, where they're having the most friction with, and a sentiment analysis of really the highs and lows of the experience. So we want to bring up those lows elevate the lows and make more memorable highs. We document the approach and the personas, we come up with principles for our design, saying that, hey, these are high level goals of how we're going to be approaching our design and this, these are anchors that we could refer back to, to make sure that our approach is validated. The personas kind of are a distillation of all of that research that kind of give us a validated look that's informed by research of who these people are, and what's important to them. You have to measure success. It's, if a book about failures doesn't sell is as a success. I don't know, what
are your KPIs? So what we typically do is kind of bucket three different three different measures of success. So there's your primary ones, your secondary and tertiary, and your primary ones are really big buckets. And it should be pretty obvious to business leaders like revenue and costs, am I making money? Or am I losing money as a cost center? For me? There's other secondary metrics we could look at to see if we're successful, like, Hey, we're not selling as much, but are we selling more units? Is this a faster experience for our customers. And then tertiary is kind of the least important, but notable. And these can be drivers of those other primary
and secondary numbers. So hey, if we're having more app downloads, and if people are completing their profiles, that has more valuable information, that's a more of a captive audience. And that could be important for these other goals that we have. And these would be defined, again, in that co creative, collaborative way, with clients and leaders to say, hey, what's really most important for you nail down what you want your business to succeed in, or your organization to succeed in, and then we'll back in everything else to make sure that it's supporting those goals.
Then we map the customer experience, current state and design the future state. So you've may have seen journey maps, we also call these service blueprints. And what the journey map does is it maps out all of the different phases of the customer journey. So I discover a brand I consider and make a buying decision I transact, I get my promise fulfilled, whether it's a product or service. And then there's like a
nurture and growth stage, right? So like, what, what comes after that? Are you going to be sending me discounts? Or is there a loyalty program or what? So with the service blueprint, we tried to factor in backstage, so all of this things that happen to a customer, or the actions that they go through is what we call front stage. So all of the things that they're doing, or thinking about interacting with the emotions they experience is all front stage, then there's backstage. So that's all the people, the mechanics, the technology, the systems that support and enable that experience for the customer. So that's like customer service, marketing, what have you. And then on the left, we have all these other
items that we want to account for. So what are the goals that each one of these stages that you want the business and the customer to accomplish? What are some of those key milestones or activities? What are some pain points and opportunities that we've seen surface at each of these phases? And what is the level of effort of the customer to accomplish a goal? Is it high, medium or low effort? Is there a way we can improve that, and then what data is being exchanged. So what the service blueprint does, it's a giant document. But it really gives us
a guide at an a heat map of how we can improve the experience at each customer stage. So it's a coherent journey throughout their experience. And what we have here in the middle is this kind of line of interaction or sometimes call a line of visibility. So that's that handshake from the customers what they can see, and what they can touch and engage in interact with. Everything else is behind the curtain minutes, but all
backstage. This is one I found online of the future state service blueprint. This one's pretty minimal compared to some of the ones I've created that are pretty robust, and you have to kind of scroll giant documents will take up a room if you were printed out. But this does a good job of showing a lot
of those different elements and how what the customer is interacting with across each of these stages. What that interaction line looks like and what is Starbucks doing on behalf of the customer. We also do is create a linear narrative based on a persona so we call these experience narratives. So whenever you create one of these service blueprints executives really don't go through these, right? These are for operations people, these are for customer service support people that, again, deliver that experience and enable that experience to use as a guide to improve their process and operations, and designers to design an experience that complements us. This is more so to get everybody aligned on, hey, let's put this all together in a story. And going back to what we were
talking about at the beginning. Everything's a journey. It's all in storytelling, what story are we telling us a customer, or as a designer, and what we do is we have co creation sessions, where we have clients that go in with us, and they'll tell us, we do these timed exercises called the Krazy. Eight, with detail out what this experience might look like in their perspective. And we massage that into something more formal, that comes into that linear flow based on a specific customer persona. So customers can do a lot of things, they can interact with a lot of touch points. But in this kind of happy path way. We're saying, hey, from discovery, to nurture, and grow to the end of this experience, we're going to show you what this might look like from this one customer's point of view. What we like to
do is, again, reiterate at this point in the stage, here's what the goal is for them. Here's kind of the story. This is kind of for a drive thru experience. And then what are the recommendations related to this step in that experience, and what are some of those key performance indicators that we anticipate that we're going to be able to drive. And again, at the end, we're going to test all this to validate it, we're going to launch the product, learn and repeat, and it never ends.
So I think that's pretty much all the content that I had for the talk. But service design is really interesting. And it's an emerging field. And there's a few key books out there. And in a ton of resources. If you want to reach out to me, I could send
you some more. But these are the Bibles for learning about how to design omni channel experiences and some key exercises that you'd want to use of design some engagements and contracts off these. Starting with service design thinking is more of the philosophy of service design, and the principles of it. Service Design doing is more practical application. And this
is service design methods is really like a textbook that you could extract activities from kind of like a teacher's handbook, if you will I Unknown: think that's it. Am I doing on time? Perfect timing. Cristina Veale: Awesome. Thanks so much, CJ. Yeah, that was great. A great overview. And essentially, what we'd like to do now is open up the floor for any questions that users may have. I'll go first in terms of asking the first question. In your interactions with clients, how do you typically build that empathy? When you're talking with stakeholders? CJ Toscano: Build an empathy with stakeholders. Cristina Veale: Yeah. So how do you build that empathy for the
user when speaking to stakeholders? CJ Toscano: Yeah, I think, I think a couple of things. One of them is that we could just look at customer feedback. I think a lot of that is going to happen whenever we're coming out of like insight review sessions. So we've done some research and say, Hey, here's what your customers are saying, you know, are you aware of this? And do you care? So it depends on what the goals are of the organization at one client where I shared some pretty scathing customer client feedback. And they're like, Yeah, we know. So they had different goals that they wanted to accomplish. And as long as they can make kind of
an educated decision, you know, that they're aware of like the sell their customers feel, what their sentiments are like, hey, they're going to leave your organization. Then, you know, that's fine, sir. Business. Unknown: Cool. Thank you. Feel free also. Oh, yep, go ahead. Okay, so I have a question. This is exactly what we're going through at my current job. We have an omni channel project. And one of our well what I feel as a struggle that you went over is our app that we use at pilots We we are promoting. So we have
a mobile app. But then we also have our it's called FTP fuel Pricing Platform app. And that's where our users mainly, like go through our application or FTP app. But then we have our own me channel with our mobile app. And that's where we do like, our brands and what you said with demographics, say, coke, for example, we're or energy drinks, for example, we have a promotion on promoting energy drinks, because a lot of our customers are truck drivers. Right? So we basically have two different targets there. My struggle is with our FPP app with our users,
which are different than our like, customers using the mobile app. How can we promote? How can we promote that way? With like, a more internal, I guess you can say, internal user app? With how can we promote our brand and our sales? And just improve our customer experience there? CJ Toscano: I don't know. Yeah, I think I think it'd be helpful. So like, even understanding like, who the customers are, and who the product is for, like having a session to kind of like align on who this product is for would be helpful. And I think like, if they're, if personas were developed for them, we could kind of be inclusive to, you know, to their needs, that I'm not sure. Unknown: So I did, and it reminded me that we have demos quarterly, which we should have a more but, um, and it's not your typical like scrum demo you're talking about, it's like an actual demo to all of our users. But it's not meaningful
is not meaningful at all, from what I've seen. And I think that's one of the main points here is like, we have to exactly the main reason here being meaningful with it to get them engaged. And so maybe that's something I can relate to them. I took a ton of notes, because this is exactly what we're dealing with. contacting you all again, offline. CJ Toscano: That's fair. Yeah. Yeah. Anytime, you know, there's, there's kind of like a dissonance there with what your customer needs are. And this is something that should never stop, like, whenever we like launch a service or a product.
It's never like we're done. There needs to be, you know, product teams, for example, that are constantly examining this. So analysts that are like asking these questions. And then
there's, you know, researchers as well are usually part of these teams. So I'd be curious to reach out in your organization, and say, like, Hey, who's, who is like doing customer research? And like, how often is that happening? Here's some, here's some gaps that I'm curious about, or want to learn more about. And constantly update those personas. And those those artifacts, right? Because that's kind of your guide at who are your customers? And how to engage them? What's important to them? Unknown: Yeah, that's a good point. Because you mean, we think that we technically have two types of customers, we have like our face to face customers, which is really helpful for a mobile app to bring them in. But then our user with the application is more virtual. And that's where the customer experience, meaning fullness needs to come in. And so, okay,
CJ Toscano: yeah. And so that point like so you'd have, it sounds like maybe two personas. And then there would be a journey map for each one. And like, this person really is going to be using these different touch points, like they're going to be more virtual, they're not going to be in person. And that will change what their needs are, and what's
important to those customers and how you're going to engage them. Question. Cristina Veale: Any more questions? Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time, CJ, this has been very informative. We'll share the recording and the presentation and all that when the meetup is over. And also
check out the library resources that Kurt and team dropped. Looks like they've got a couple of books recommended that CJ recommended actually through the library, which is awesome. So feel free to check those out. And yeah, thank you so much for your time, everyone. Unknown: Thanks for having me. Thank you. La Shaira Fullwood: We will be dropping a survey link into the chat if you would take time, some time, whenever you have done to provide feedback for us so we wouldn't know what else From the Library and Queen City bytes that you would love for us to provide to the public. And even if you want to do one, two,
we're welcome to that. Thank you all for coming in. We appreciate it. Thank you queen city bikes. Thank you, CJ, and thank you, all of you helped you have a wonderful day. Thanks. Thank you
2022-05-15