In today’s drive for efficient, functional outcomes, it’s all too easy to lose sight of the human journey behind every interaction and that’s where true value lies.
When business developers look to create an experience for a customer, employee, or a partner, to interact with their organization it’s typically focused on a function. What needs to be done? Change an address, cancel an order, find status of a claim? While all involved want a fulfilled outcome, I bet we’d also agree enjoying that experience is equally important yet often overlooked unless having the business focus of retention and loyalty. While experiences can be quantified, categorized, and sentiment inferred, that’s not the same as understanding and empathizing with someone’s journey, a series of events over varying intervals of time.
This over-functional focus happened recently when I was rebuilding an IVR with a team of data scientists who are masters of data, but don’t understand customer experience. They are tasked with optimizing containment (keeping people in self-service), a typical task in large contact centers worth millions of dollars to keep callers away from expensive agents. While they had a background in Natural Language Processing (NLP) with documents, conversational analytics and design was new to them. The focus quickly became the parts and pieces to support the functional aspect of containment. They were focused on getting just the right utterances versus understanding the friction from the perspective of an end-to-end experience. This functional type of focus leads to misguided questions which lead you to misinformed conclusions; creating an inaccurate map. A philosopher once said that the menu is not the meal in a warning not to mistake an abstract for what’s real. Which in our context asks, are you focusing on an abstraction or the experience itself? Paper tastes horrible. Let’s see if we can point to the experience itself more closely.
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” – Maya Angelou. When creating an experience, it’s best to understand you are creating a feeling. Feelings arise from the relationship of objects or events that are experiencing. That may be confusing at first so let’s explain through analogy. There is a story where a Zen teacher has a student touch a melon to their tongue and asks what they experienced. The student responded with sweetness. The teacher was showing in an oversimplified way the relationship between melon + tongue = the sweet experience. From object (melon) to object (tongue) arose an experience. For just a moment, you forget yourself and the melon and the whole world is sweet. You can take this further with a dining example, you may know the various levels of experiences from fast food to a Michelin star. In fine dining, they put a lot of effort into thinking of everything used; space, rhythm, sounds, smells, and even touch in concert to evoke particular feelings. Whether that is value and speed or where you get the sense your table is the only one in the restaurant.
So what does this mean to us who are the purveyors of relationships and journeys? It’s actually overly simple to start, you go walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. There is no replacement for intimately knowing the experiences of others and making them your own. My first meeting on the tail of COVID was with Kentucky’s DMV. When building a design, I asked them if I could spend a day and half with agents and supervisors. By sitting with them while they worked, I was able to learn about their problems, how they worked-around them, technology limitations, people/process limitations, and took several notes. By taking the time to personally know what they experienced, I was able to design and build solutions that naturally fit the relationship of an agent and supervisor to the problem. By making better agent experiences, we increased first call resolution for the customer. By working backwards from the experience your customer, employee, or partner wants (maybe needs), you can use an endless number of technical tools to deliver it. Many fall into the trap of building without doing this exercise only to find the ladder is against the wrong wall.
In today’s drive for efficient, functional outcomes, it’s all too easy to lose sight of the human journey behind every interaction and that’s where true value lies. By treating experiences not as abstract data points but as moments that shape how people feel, we move beyond misguided metrics and build solutions that resonate. Whether it’s sitting alongside an agent at the DMV or tasting that perfectly ripe melon, empathy isn’t a luxury… It’s the starting point for innovation. So before sketching your next workflow or drafting another specification, step into your users’ shoes, observe their world firsthand, and let their stories guide you to design experiences that leave a lasting impression. Take that first step today: walk a mile in someone else’s journey and transform the way you build.