8. Thinking Beyond Interactions: Omnichannel Experiences and CX (feat. Kim Salazar, Sr. UX Specialist at NN/g)
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This is the Nielsen Norman Group UX Podcast. I'm Therese Fessenden. In today's episode, I got a chance to interview Kim Salazar. Kim is a Senior UX Specialist at NNG, and one of her areas of expertise is omnichannel customer experiences. We got into some of her research and discussed a number of topics. First, what omnichannel experiences are, the relationship between customer experience versus user experience,

And how truly valuing CX means creating a fundamental shift, not just in how we view our work, but also in how that work is done. So with that, I'm excited to welcome to our show, Kim Salazar. Just to kind of kick things off, you do a considerable amount of research into omni-channel experiences.

What does an omni-channel experience, what does that mean to you? And what has your research been like? Yeah. Well, everybody knows nowadays that we're not just designing website experiences anymore. That went by the wayside years ago. And we know that people interact with organizations on many different channels. So that means web

of course, mobile applications, tablet applications, kiosks, email, text messages, all of these different ways which are called channels to interact with organizations, which leads us to that term omni-channel. That prefix omni is actually Latin for all. So it's like all the channels in which people can interact. So that's

The experience that users have as they move across all these channels in order to complete an activity with the organization, that's what's called the omni-channel experience. So for example, if you were to interact with an e-commerce website, you might start that customer journey on your smartphone, for example. Maybe you clicked on an ad through social media that brought you into their website.

Maybe you come back later and buy on your desktop. You receive an email confirmation, perhaps, then you get that product that you ordered. Maybe you decide to return it. It's not working for you. So you have to log back on, on another channel. And then maybe when it is received by the retailer, you get a text. So that single goal, ordering that product and sending it back,

That is a customer journey and it takes place on all different types of channels and ways for us to interact with organizations. That makes sense. And it's also a bit intimidating to think about how one might unify organizations.

All of these different channels. And also, you know, how do you even research like that type of cross channel experience? Do you kind of watch people use one of the channels or do you typically like stick around for a longer period of time? What do you what do you typically do? Well, it's not quite as straightforward as the typical channel.

user research that we might do in a lab setting where we're probably mostly interested in a single digital interaction and we bring people in and watch them use it.

Of course, we have to think beyond this and try to understand the entire journey. There's a couple of ways that you can go about understanding that through research. One of those ways is to do more observational type activities in the field, maybe picking out different sections of a journey.

to go and observe in people's real life context, maybe in a location where your business has a physical experience and trying to get a more organic understanding of how people utilize the various channels in their everyday life. One other way that I really like to understand customer journeys is through a research methodology called diary studies.

And this methodology is great because it's really what it sounds like. It's a way to try to keep kind of an ongoing diary of how the experience unfolds from one interaction to the next until they reach the end. But basically, you just try to recruit people that are already in a position to do that customer journey. So maybe you talk to sales or find leads online.

or get access to people that are maybe at the very early stages of the journey you're interested in. And then ask those people to report their experiences with you at every step of the way. Tell you what they're doing, tell you how that experience unfolded, how they feel about it, what they're thinking about it. And if you do this, you're collecting information

you know, a chronological list of their experience over time. And if you look at, you know, eight, 10, 12 people going through that experience, you can kind of start to generalize what the narrative is, what the common narrative is to understand at a high level, how are people feeling and how are they experiencing this journey over time? Yeah. Now that you mention all those different research methods, um,

I remember this might have been a pre-COVID, well, definitely was a pre-COVID research project. But I think I remember you going to a retail store and carrying like a GoPro with you and following people as they shopped. I don't know if you want to share a little bit about how that study went or what was kind of

Challenging. That was one of the funniest projects I did. And I remember thinking, gosh, my job is really weird. It was for a client that was an online retailer and they were trying to understand how customers shopped in the physical space.

Um, so I did some screening for people about their shopping behaviors and, and tried to recruit people that were in a position to go and do maybe a larger shopping trip. Um, and I, I essentially just met these people in the store and I would walk around behind them with a clipboard and I would try to have this little GoPro camera attached to the clipboard. So

I was essentially following them around as they shopped. I tried to be out of the way and not disturb them. And I encouraged them to approach their shopping experience as if I wasn't even there. And then at the end, after they would check out

Then we sat down and I was able to interview them a little bit and understand what they were thinking at different parts of their shopping trip. And then, of course, I had all that data to go back through and evaluate and analyze and put together with what they were telling me they were thinking. And I did this for about 10 people. It was really, really interesting. I love telling some of the stories about the behaviors that I was observing during that trip.

That's so cool. Yeah, you're right. Our job is kind of weird, but it's also really interesting and fascinating. It is. That's a really cool study. And I'm imagining that studying these types of journeys where you're really following someone for a long period, not necessarily an individual person, but following a customer's journey for a duration of time that often goes well beyond a single interaction. Yeah.

So I kind of want to pick your brain because in a previous episode, side note for all listening, check out the very first episode where I interview Dr. Jacob Nielsen about what UX is. And we sort of started broaching the topic earlier.

of CX. So I'm curious about how you view CX as it relates to some of these really long-term journeys and how is it different from UX or is it different from UX at all? Good question. So this can be a bit confusing. There's no lack of terminology in our field. It's really just a matter of

different words for similar concepts, the difference between CX and UX is meant really to communicate the scope of the experience. Although UX originally, when it was coined by Don Norman, one of our founders, it was intended to describe the

any type of experience that a user or a customer could have with an organization or brand, no matter how big or small it was. But over time, as UX evolved and matured, the focus of it really came to mean that

more single interaction digital experiences, really focusing on interface design and such. So UX has kind of taken a more targeted meaning.

And now, in contrast to that, the word CX is what is commonly used to refer to the broader scopes of experience. So the journey, like we were talking about, not just one interaction, but a whole set of related interactions that take place as part of a single goal.

And even larger than that, you know, a lot of times customers are going to have a lot of journeys over time. So if I've been a customer of the same brand,

mobile phone provider for 10 years. I even have larger than a journey experience. I have a customer experience as a whole. It's that brand experience you have with a company over time. So it seems like it's a collection of journeys, like not just a single user journey, kind of even higher level than that, if you were to kind of like zoom out or...

I know at least in our journey mapping class, we often talk about the scope and how you have like your paper plane scope, which is like super low level. You can kind of see everyone's desks or whatever. And then you go up to like a 747 airplane and you're not going to see notes. You're not even going to see buildings. Like you kind of zoom out to that very, very high level where you can see many, many more interactions within journeys and many, many more journeys as a result. Okay. There's more to having a great,

customer experience than having great interaction experiences. It's beyond just having good UX at that interaction or that digital level. But when they all come together and people are moving through those channel experiences as they complete their activities, the accumulative experience is really important. So is it consistent with

how much effort is required for someone to go from, you know, their, the website to the physical space, if that's a required transition. So it's designing that journey experience as a whole and making sure the different interactions fit together really well. And then if you go larger than that,

We want to make sure that our journey experiences are consistent with other journey experiences through our organization, no matter what somebody's doing to interact with us. Yeah, for sure. So CX would basically be this collection of

of journeys, which themselves are the result of, you know, lots of actions, collective actions from many, many different people in an organization. So I imagine, especially as you get into the highest levels of like the customer lifecycle, that this can involve thousands of people in an organization easily. Exactly. Yeah. So yeah, how do we think about CX then, you know, kind of these really, really high level overarching goals?

narratives and how can we think of it in a way that helps us, you know, be accountable and also not lose our minds thinking about the thousands of people who are individually contributing to this. What would be your advice for understanding where, where we play a role in CX and influencing CX? Yeah. So even when we just define what CX is and we say the sky is really the limit, the scope of this is really large. It can be overwhelming. Um,

As you can imagine, giving customers a great experience as they interact across channels and over time, it requires employees to coordinate with each other in new ways. Unfortunately, a lot of organizations right now aren't really built in a way that allows coordination across departments and teams. So this creates a lot of fragmentation in our customer experiences. You know, everybody has probably worked at a company where

different silos of responsibility existed where maybe sales and marketing are off in their own little land. And then we've got product teams and we've got customer support and everybody's sort of focused on their own section of the experience. That starts to become a challenge when we're talking about everything needing to be connected and designed in a cohesive way across all these different interactions with us.

So I've been researching this problem and I wrote a report recently that's on our website. It's called Operationalizing CX. And then we also have a class called CX Transformation. Both of these are meant to...

people through and give companies a guide as to how to approach CX transformation, which is essentially the process of trying to position the organization in a way that it's capable of collaborating and creating cohesive customer journeys. So both the class and the report are

highlighting a framework that we've developed to improve the delivery of these omni-channel customer experiences. So just to give you a little more detail on that framework, it really breaks down the different areas within the organization where change needs to happen. So starting with the overall vision of what we're trying to deliver our customers, making sure that customers are at the center of that and there's a strategy that

put in place by leadership to make the internal operational changes to be able to deliver on that vision. There's going to be changes in the employee structures, maybe bringing on new roles,

connecting different teams in new ways to aid in that cross-functional collaboration. We'll have operational changes. It's all about embedding CX in the way we work. So part of that is going to be changing the way work is prioritized and how it moves through teams. And then, of course, technology is the final one. A lot of

customer experience nowadays, especially when we're trying to connect things across channels and devices requires the organization to have a really mature technical infrastructure to support that. We also give specifics about the types of changes that need to take place across these different areas in the organization. So for example,

Investing in culture change initiatives, trying to help all the employees within the organization understand the value of CX. It'll include things like the development of those new operational procedures and then the investment into maybe integrating CX.

the disparate backend systems that exist in organizations and in creating a single source of customer data, which then opens the door for some of the critical experience improvements that need to be made. So just to sum it all up, you asked me, how do we make sure we don't lose our minds? We do lose our minds. I take it. No, I'm just kidding. I think that the focus is, you know,

focus on kind of laying the foundation to create the right ecosystem and standards for collaboration and make sure that the various channel owners and the people that have ownership over different phases of the journey are working together and creating a single experience rather than um

working in more siloed ways in which we're creating more individual patchwork of channel experiences, which is sort of the old way of thinking. Yeah. And it is not easy. Certainly does not sound like it's something that can be done overnight. And I know that at least in a number of the conferences that we've been at, there are regularly folks who come up to us and kind of ask, how do I...

create a more human-centered organization. And how do I do this tomorrow? It's often something that's not necessarily achievable in a really short amount of time because workplace culture is really far deeper than we can see in day-to-day work.

So I guess when we're thinking about who's responsible ultimately for making our company culture more human-centered or who's responsible for maintaining this CX, who would you say is responsible? Would it be...

employees? Would it be maybe middle level managers to kind of start closing the gaps and helping to basically knock down those silos or knock down the walls between those siloed departments? Or is this really more of like an executive thing? Or is this even higher than that? And who do you think ultimately should bear this responsibility? That's a good question. It can feel if you're just an individual contributor at an organization, maybe you're

focused on design or research of focused experiences at your organization, it can be really hard to feel like you have influence over this grand ecosystem that's required to deliver good customer experience. The answer is that at the end of the day, once the

the company has matured. It really should be everyone's responsibility. Everyone should have ownership over the customer experience. The culture should shift in a way that CX is valued among everybody. And then all employees should have an understanding of what influence their individual jobs have on a customer journey. With that said,

It has to start with a mandate from leadership. There's no way to transform an organization around customer experience from the bottom up. It really has to come from the executive level leadership, and that might include the board, those people that have stake in the business community.

Because the changes that have to take place are huge operational changes. We have to shift the way we work. We have to shift our culture, like you were saying. And the decisions that have to be made to make that happen, they come from the top. So your C-level executive stakeholders have to be the ones that decide to take on this

this challenge and make investments and changes to, like you say, resolve some of these issues that exist, like the siloed working structures and the disparate data structures. So that requires investment and a solid strategy approach.

And leadership has to decide to value customer experience and make the investments necessary to connect employees and connect technology in order for us to be able to deliver good customer experiences. Yeah, I really wish there was a wonderful way to just wave a wand as like a lower level employee. I know at least...

you know, and lots of other very large organizations, it can be very frustrating to kind of be at that tier and kind of feel a little bit powerless against all of it. But I do think there's hope. I mean, I certainly have seen lots of great improvements,

over the years in lots of different organizations, including really large ones. So I guess to address that, do you have any advice for some of these junior employees who want to start a CX transformation in some way in their organizations? So the first steps, no matter what type of organization you're in, whether it's large or small, the first step is always to begin the process of building

understanding among stakeholders and in leadership roles and building buy-in with managers and C-level executives. There's a ton of ways to do this. We discuss them in detail and in the report in our course, but really all of this advice boils down to helping our decision makers discover that there's a lot of business value to be had in

through CX transformation. There's tons of research in the field right now showing that companies that are focused on CX and that operationalize it into the way they work are outperforming those laggards. So they're showing higher returns on investment. They're showing, um,

They're just outperforming on all the top level business metrics like revenue and churn and even stock performance. So focusing on helping people understand that there's business value behind this. It's not just about...

doing nice things for the customers or trying to improve how our customers feel. It's a business investment. And also just know it's a long game. You kind of alluded to this earlier. This is not something that can happen overnight. So have patience. What I would say is don't

Go to your managers or your executives and say, we need to do a CX transformation. That won't work. You have to try to help them understand the value through proving the business value behind it.

I interviewed somebody from my research, actually, this gal. She's a former executive for Zappos and usertesting.com. She told me that UX people should not be like the troll under the bridge, where the troll under the bridge comes out and says, hey, we need to do this CX transformation and we need to make this change. That message is always dead on arrival. What's more helpful is...

proving return on investment, showing, you know, at a small scale, how CX improvements to journeys and optimizing journey experiences result in more revenue through more conversions or less operational costs because we're not receiving as many questions from customers and show, you know, if we expand this conversation and if we

uh, make the choice to invest in this and operationalize it in our company, we're going to see that business value at full scale. Yeah. I love the troll under the bridge analogy. It's so good. I know. I was just like, Oh my God, I've been there too. I've, I've been that troll. Cause I didn't understand how to, how to communicate with stakeholders, but, um,

A lot of firms are reactive where they're going to come and they see that they have customer journeys that have pain points and they'll see opportunities in those journeys and take on projects to resolve those. But through CX Transformation, it sort of flips that on its head a little bit and we focus less on reacting to experiences that are problematic and

And you focus on building a foundation within your organization that fosters collaboration and journey design from the beginning so that we're making organic experiences that are really high quality in an organic way rather than, you know, fixing things after the fact.

And being proactive can be extremely beneficial for one, you don't have to react as often, which is a huge benefit, but also it can just leave a much better impression in the long run. So not just meeting the standard, but often exceeding the standard as well. Yeah, exactly. That's great advice. And for managers, yeah.

Would you give any additional advice to those folks who maybe have a little bit more power over making that transformation happen? Yeah. So a manager is in kind of a unique position where they have a little bit of influence over a larger scope of the organization. So of course, they're going to also want to focus on trying to educate and build buy-in. But if they have some

influence over, you know, certain teams or different departments, they might be able to try to institute some of these changes within that scope that they have influence over. So that, you know, maybe we're not transforming the entire organization to be CX focused and operationalizing CX into the way the whole organization works, but maybe we can

do a transformation within one line of business or one, you know, section or phase of the customer journey. And that's, and that's a good way to get the ball rolling. And, and if you can show success in that, then that just elevates the conversation. And it helps again, to build,

that credibility behind the recommendations that you're, that you're pushing. It seems like the message is start small, which I find is, is often a common piece of advice in, in UX, but also in CX. And, um,

I agree. I think having that case study just makes your position for that transformation that much stronger because now you have evidence and evidence is really going to be much more powerful than being the troll under the bridge and demanding that something happens. Exactly. Kim, it is time already. This has been really, really fun. If anyone wants to follow you on social media or check out any of your work, where could you point people to?

Well, I'm on Twitter. My handle is at Kimmy, K-I-M-M-Y-A-F.

And just follow our newsletter. Our articles are always released weekly. So there's going to be our new research about this topic from me here and there. And then, of course, topics from our various colleagues as well. All right. Well, thanks, Therese. Thank you. And have a great rest of your day. Thank you.

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