 In this video, you're going to learn how you can use the Hero Campus to better understand your target customer so you can make better decisions and actually design and deliver services that create value for them. Let the show begin. Hi, I'm Mark and welcome to the Service Design Show. This show is all about helping you design organizations that put people at the heart of their business. An important way to actually do that is by understanding who you're designing for, who is your target customer. There are many tools and methods in the service design field that help you to do that. A quite unknown tool is the Hero Campus and that's what we're going to look at today. Now I'm going to make this as realistic as possible so I'm going to eat my own dark food and apply the Hero Campus to a service that I'm delivering and that is the online course on customer journey mapping that I run, which is called the Perfect Map. Now a question that a lot of people have is do you start with a product or service and then find the ideal customer or do you have an ideal customer, ideal target group and then dig into their unmet needs and desires and create a product or service based on that? Well, both approaches can work. In my case, the Perfect Map, the online course that I run was a result of identifying needs that were unmet in the community. Now the course has been running for a while and I want to make the experience even more enjoyable, helpful, made the course even more helpful. So in order to do that, I've interviewed 20 potential students, a mix of potential students and people who have actually gone through the course to understand who they are and what they need so I can mold and adjust the course better. And that last part, the interviews are actually super important. So before you print out the Hero Campus or any other campus and start filling it out with your team, do research, go out, talk to customers, get out of the office, do interviews, do field research, just make sure that you're not just doing things based on assumptions, but actually on data. That's one of the most important things in our field. So having said that, let's jump into my screen and let's create that Hero Campus. Here's my screen and the page I have open is actually the page that explains what the Hero Campus is. The Hero Campus is created by Luke Shimer and it's actually already quite old, three years old and in this article, which I'll link to down below, he explains why he created the Hero Campus, how it works and also how it relates to something that you might know as a Hero Hero's journey. I'm not going to tell you all about that. You can read the article, but the thing I want to show you here is that you can scroll down on this page, down, down, down, down and you have the option to download the campus, download the Hero Campus. Let's click that. You'll get the PDF. I already did that and what we're going to do is so that I can show you how this works, is I'm going to go into Miro, one of the online whiteboarding tools that I use. I've reviewed it previously for customer journey mapping, but now we're going to use it to create a Hero Campus. The end result, what we're going to create is going to look something like this. This is a Hero Campus that we're going to create and I'm going to walk you through this step by step how to do this. Let's go back to my Miro dashboard. I'll link to Miro down below in the show notes. If you are interested, they have free membership so you can start playing around and actually do the same things that I'm doing over here. Let's create a blank board and let's give this board a title. We're going to call this board, in my case, the perfect map, Hero, Hero Campus, right. There we go. Now, the first thing I want to do in Miro and what I really like about it is just upload the campus. So I've already got it on my desktop. Here it is, Hero Campus and it imports the PDF pretty nicely in Miro. Now the next thing you're going to want to do is to actually lock this so you can't move it around anymore, but we can put stuff onto the Hero Campus and this is great because Miro allows you to collaborate with your team members, work simultaneously on the Hero Campus, share this. Usually I prefer to do stuff offline first and then online, but just to show you and guide you through this process, we're going to do this in Miro and it works really well. So the first thing you'll notice when I zoom in, there are two fields over here. It's called the Hero role and the segment. In the Hero role, we're going to take a text thing and what is the role of my Hero? Based on the interviews I've done, I've seen that a lot of people taking the course have a role that is called a customer experience manager or something that is really similar to that. Let's use a font, I think there is a marker font. Let's see, permanent marker, let's give it just a more vibrant color, yes. All right, so our hero is usually referred to by the title as customer experience manager. It can be different things in your situation, it will be something different in your situation and the segment is just to help you identify which segment they are in. In my case, I'm going to focus on the corporate environment. I could have said here, public sector or IT or whatever makes sense in your case. So our hero for the perfect map for my example is going to be a customer experience manager who works in a corporate environment. The next thing we're going to do is start filling out the boxes. HeroCamp has seven areas where we want to write something about our hero and the first one is objectives, problems, unresolved needs, responsibilities, not should. So what are the objectives of my customer experience manager? We're going to use a sticky note for that and I've already got the text so I'm just going to paste it over here, make the font a little bit different again and just make this a little bit bigger so we can read it actually. So one of their objectives is how do we increase our internal influence as a customer experience team? People should start listening to us, not the other way around. That's what they are trying to achieve, one of the things they are trying to achieve. Of course, you can have more objectives. I wouldn't advise to having too many, like try really to focus on what is the most important objective for them. I'm going to keep it for this example at just one. Now let's look at the obstacles. What are the limiting beliefs, weaknesses, enemies, their environments, blockers? Basically, what is standing in the way of actually achieving their objectives? We're going to add a few things over here because I don't want to keep you up too long. I'm going to do one and then I'm going to speed up the video to do the rest. So one of their obstacles, as I also like to do this in quotes when I have done interviews and this is what people literally say, this could be an obstacle. These people around me have no clue about the value of customer experience. The experience manager, my hero, hears and sees people saying, this is a big obstacle for them to achieve their objective. Now I'm going to paste a few more and speed up the video to do that. So now I've added a few more obstacles. Let's look at one or two. For instance, there is always pressure from ongoing projects. They don't have the time. The other departments don't take the time to deeply understand the work, what we do. And in the end, it's always sales, marketing or IT people that have the final say. No matter what we say as a customer experience team, we aren't in the lead. These are some of the obstacles that they encounter. Now I'd like to show you one interesting feature of Miro that could be really useful. And that is the feature of adding tags. We could use tags, for instance, to indicate if something is a pain again, an obstacle. So let's say this obstacle has to do with mindset. And we now get an attack over here. And for instance, this obstacle has to do with time. Now, when you start labeling things, it would become really easy for you to later identify all the quotes or the opposites that you've placed that relate to mindset. And maybe if we say that we have pains and gains, let's say that this is a gain, let's say that this is influence, that this is something that they desire. Let's make that green, because that's what they desire, create. So the nice thing with tags is that you can actually make an overview later. It will be really easy to see which patterns emerge. Now a rookie mistake that I would like to help you to prevent is that you don't limit the quotes here in any area to just things related to your product and service. So I shouldn't only add quotes related to customer journey mapping. I want to understand my hero in the most holistic way. So if it has to do with your career, if it has to do with your peers, the best thing you can do is to take this as holistic as possible. Just remember to find the most important things and don't limit yourself to your own product or service. That would be, you would miss a lot. So let's move on to the next area, questions. So questions for my customer experience manager, things that have to be answered for them to proceed is a really relevant one. I can use the shortcut and to create a opposite. A really common one is does this or my organization really believe in the value of customer experience? Or are we just doing a small experiment over here? This is what I hear a lot like, is the CEO really invested in customer experience or are they saying it just because they've read it somewhere? So that's one of the things. And the other one, a question is, let's me add it here. What can I do to increase the sense of urgency for a better customer experience? So increasing the sense of urgency. What can I do? How can I help my people, the people around me understand that this is really valuable and that we should act now and not wait till next year? So these are the questions that I've heard the customer experience manager say. The next thing we're going to look at is relationships. So influencers, they look up to or five of the closest people. What I've heard my heroes say is that they often have like a mentor or an expert around them could be their team manager who has a vision about why this is important. This is a really important person for them often because they are their allies. Other things I've heard people say is let's add two more. Agencies, they hire because they bring in fresh knowledge. They get it. They are well, I don't want to arrow arrow over here. Agencies often are allies and usually you'll hear something like I have a friend working on a different at a different corporate friend from university and day. They also embrace customer experience. So yeah, we can at least have a professional conversation about that. Usually I've heard that my customer experience manager is quite lonely. There are not a lot of people in this organization who get it. So they are really looking for allies, friends inside and outside of the organization. So we could add a few more relationships here. If you really want to dig into this, a different tool that we might review later. And if we have it's probably linked over here somewhere would be the stakeholder map to really get in depth into their relationships, but we'll keep it for this at this moment. So the next thing we're going to look at is threats. Now, what are threats? Well, on this hero campus, it says it is the likes, dislikes, strengths, signature threats, special abilities. This is for me where the hero campus really gets interesting because it allows us allows our superhero to come alive because we can think of what are their super powers and everybody has a superpower. So one of the super powers of my heroes is that they can get people they can get people from different departments in the room. Yes, this is what I wanted to do. This is what I hear often. I can get multiple stakeholders, multiple teams working together on the same topic. I've found a few more. The next one I've heard a lot is. There we go. I always ask questions to understand what's in it for the customer. So it's for me, it's not the devil's advocate, but the customer advocate. And they are always thinking about the customer in any conversation. They are always advocating for the customer. That's really a super skill, a superhero skill. And there's one more I've discovered and that is the skill of they know how to blend in with the corporate culture, for instance, in terms of clothing. So these are usually people that have a different mindset, but are still able to operate within a corporate culture. They understand how to be different, but not in a way that alienates them from the rest of their organization. And I think that's super, super valuable. So let's look at the final two emotions and behaviors. Let's start with emotions. Emotions are triggers for actions, fears and desires. And we already talked a little bit about that in the objectives. And how they want to feel. Emotions are a super, super important part of this campus. And not the most important thing, but at least something that you should really spend a lot of time understanding. I'm going to add a few over here that are characteristic for my hero. A question they have is, will this hurt or benefit my career if I actually pursue customer experience within this organization? Is this credible? Who else has done this? So they are really aware that they are doing something that is risky and they are weighing their chances. I'll add a few more, speed this up and then walk over them. OK, a few more, a few more emotions. It's so frustrating that we have all these legacy systems and processes holding us back from doing what is right for the customer. That's what they feel. I have no clue why we are investing our time in this new project. It's obvious that the customer wants something else. It's just a prestige and status thing. I think when you do interviews with users, you really quickly get these kind of signals. Where is the pain and what makes them happy? Try to capture as many of those as you can and add them to emotions. Now, let's look at the final thing, behaviors. What do they do? Where do they go? And I'm going to add a few questions here rather than answer. So here are a few questions that you could think about in relationship to behaviors. What kind of conferences do they visit? What LinkedIn groups are a part of or which people do they follow? What websites do they visit and read? Which books and which schools, courses have they taken? There can be a lot of things that you could say here. And this requires a little bit more digging. I haven't found or haven't asked in the interviews a lot about this, so I don't have a lot of information. But this can really be helpful for you to understand where you can find these people. Like for me, customer experience managers aren't the target group, per se, for the service design show. So I would be really interested. Where do they hang out and why do they hang out there? So answering these questions will probably be the next step and help me to better understand. My hero. So let's zoom out. What is it that we have over here? We have our filled in hero canvas in Miro. OK, great. We've got a hero canvas. Now what? This all has been preparation, like I said, to actually take action because the last thing that the worst thing you could do is create a hero canvas just to create a hero canvas. You're going to use the hero canvas to actually improve your service. In my case, the online course. So how can I use this information to improve my service? Well, for instance, one of the things that I found over here is that these people have little time. There's never time to do anything. Well, if I'm asking them to take a course on customer journey mapping, it might be smart to have really short videos that they can go over rather than lessons of 30 minutes. Another thing is when I start to write copy for them, when I start to write instructions, I can imagine what what tone should I take? For instance, there are career prestige and credibility has been something that's really important for them. The information that I provide should be really credible. Maybe I should even give a certificate or a credit people who have gone through the course. And the final thing I've seen in this hero canvas is that people feel lonely, they are usually pioneers, evangelists, and they are insecure. They are often not sure if the thing that they are doing is the right thing. So connecting my hero to other heroes would probably add a lot of value when they can have conversations on a professional level. Currently, that's not really part of the course. I'm just providing the lessons, instructions and helping people step by step, how to create better maps. But probably when I would link them and create a community of customer experience managers who want to create customer journey maps, based on this hero canvas, that would be really useful. That would be really helpful for them. What's really important about the hero canvas and these kind of user profiles, personas, whatever you want to call them in general, that this is not a static document. The whole goal is to actually continue the conversation with your customers and keep updating this, make this relevant, make this more in depth, make this even more informative. So don't print it and hang it on your wall and let it stick there for another month or two and then it disappears. Make this into a working document, embed this in your design process. That's super, super important. I'm going to link to this map down below in the show notes so you can click on it and then view what I've done here. Maybe some things have already changed over time as I'll update and change the hero canvas, but you can open it and play around and see what I've added. If you've got any questions about the hero canvas, let me know down below. Have you used the hero canvas? It's not super known within the service design field. So leave a yes down there. I've talked a lot about interviews, getting this information because this is all based on actual conversations with potential customers and actual customers. Now, how do you do good interviews? That's super important. Otherwise, you won't have the information over here. Well, in this video, I explain how to do how to get the most value out of user interviews. So if you're interested in that, make sure you check out that video and I'll see you over here.