 In this episode, we'll be talking about finding the right strategy to build a sustainable customer-centric culture. We'll talk about how do you choose to serve design projects you should be working on that make the most impact, and finally, what is needed to align the whole organization around one customer journey. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, this is Priscilla Williams and welcome to the Service Design Show. Hi, I'm Mark and welcome to the Service Design Show. This show is all about helping you do more work that makes you proud by designing and delivering services that have a positive impact on people and are good for business. My guest in this episode is Priscilla Williams. Priscilla studied service design at the Polytechnico de Milano, and since then has gained a lot of experience introducing service design and design thinking to fintech startups. She's also super active in the Mexico-Mexico city service design community, organizing the service design jams, the drinks, and also being part of the Mexico Service Design Network chapter. So this episode with Priscilla is really about how do you move from doing one of service design projects to really building a customer slash human centered culture and organization where everybody is working to fulfill the customer needs. If this is your first time here on this channel, welcome and don't forget to subscribe because I bring a new video that helps to level up your service design skills at least once a week. Also make sure you click that bell icon to be notified when these new videos come out. So that's it for the introduction and now let's quickly jump into the interview with Priscilla. Welcome to the show Priscilla. Hi Mark, how are you? I'm good. You have a lovely sunny weather there in Mexico. We have a little bit of gray day here in New York. Yes, the weather here is amazing. For the people who are listening to podcasts, you need to check the video. It's jealous making. Priscilla, for the people who don't know you who you are, we've been in touch for quite some time, but maybe not everybody knows you. Could you give like a 30 second introduction? Okay, perfect. I studied service design like 10 years ago. After that, I studied strategic design and management at Parsons. Now I'm helping financial institutions to have a better service design to improve their customer experience and basically that's it. I'm also working a lot to make the service design community here in Mexico stronger. I organize the service design teams with my friend Adriana Jeda and we organize the service design jam. You're quite active in the service design community. That's awesome. Helping to grow and facilitate the community. Priscilla, you said you studied service design in Milan, but do you actually remember the very first time you heard about the term service design? Yes, I actually was there when I was in Italy. I had to choose a class that was in English because at the time I didn't speak any Italian and service design was the only class that was in English. So that's why I chose it randomly and it's a happy coincidence because that's what I do. But it was a really interesting class that changed my mindset totally. I studied product design initially and it showed me more about service blueprints. And the customer experience and journey maps and a lot of methodologies and thinking actually that was really interesting. And since that class I knew that that's what I wanted to work. That's an amazing story. I haven't heard this story yet. Like you stumbled upon service design just because the course was in English. Exactly. I mean like studying product design and UX and everything. You have the same mindset or the same thinking where you have to study your user and then you have to understand what he wants, what he needs, etc. But you have to apply it in a different manner. And I think that service design is a really always big way of applying all of that thinking. Yeah, absolutely. We share and borrow a lot from other disciplines as well. Priscilla, you gave me three really interesting startups because you have quite an interesting background and your work history is quite interesting. I think a lot of people will enjoy this episode. So are you ready to start with doing some interview jazz? Yes. All right. Let's see how it goes. Let's do it. Now the first topic will be, let's see, I've got it over here. Three words that aren't really service design-ish. Change management strategy. Do you have a question starter that goes along with this one? Yeah. How can we develop a change management strategy to make the organization more customer-centric and more service design-centric? Hmm. Well, how do we do that? And what do you mean with a customer now with a change management strategy? What is your- I don't even know if that makes sense in English. It doesn't Spanish. However, in my last job I was working a lot to change, to switch the mindset and to make all the collaborators in the company more customer-centric and also to things in terms of service design. Over that, I study a lot of what Boston Consulting was saying, Matt Kinsey was saying, Bain was saying, and basically all of them are talking about four different axes of action. So they are talking about giving education to the people, implementing leadership methodologies and that to communicate all the things that you want and also what's the other one? I'm a little bit lost. Yeah, you'll remember it. Do you have a cheat note? No. Do some processes. All right. So we have to thought about all of these four and to see how we could use these four axes of action to create that mindset. But also in terms of service design, we need to thought about experiences. So we add a five axes of action and in that fifth axes of action, we thought about employee experience to make the customer experience better because we thought that if we make everything easier for the employees, then that will affect how they interact with their customers and also if we make their life easier while the life of the customers will be easier too. So those were the five pillars that we were thinking on. And also we thought about like, how can we make this change management? So the first phase was to make an assessment of how the organization was thinking in terms of customers intensity. I'm going to interrupt you for a moment because I'm really interested. You were talking about we did this. We did this assessment. Who is we? Did you have a customer experience team, a service design team? Yeah, we have a small team. It was four people and we were well in the organization, there was like maybe a seven people team just thinking about customer experience strategy fully. And I was the leader of the change management project, but we were four people working on it. We were like, each one of us were working a different access of action. Some of them were thinking fully of how can we improve the employee experience. Some of them were thinking about how improving the customer experience fully. And I was thinking about how can we make this whole strategy a whole thing and change the whole organization. Okay. So you did the assessment and then what did you do after that? Well, that's the part where we are working on right now. We were working on for making the assessment. We did a survey and we send it to all the employees to know how if they felt that they have the autonomy to take decisions to satisfy the customer. We ask them if they know design thinking methodologies to, you know, to make their projects with this human-centered design mindset. And we also ask them how do they think, what do they need to change to be more customer-centered basically. So we send it to all the bank employees and, you know, like we have different areas such as legal compliance, branches, et cetera. But we send them to all to see how each area was and what strategy did we need to make in order to make that area better. So after doing that survey, the next step was going to be making a workshop with the top management to also see their perspective of how their area was. And after that assessment, we were going to, you know, like to cross the information from the survey and also the information from the workshop to see what strategies should we do and what changes should we make in order to make each area of the bank better and to give the tools that each area needed. Because for example, maybe the area of business development was already working with design thinking methodologies, so they knew exactly how to put the client in the center. But maybe the ones that were working in the legal area weren't working with legal design mindset, you know, and they are making these huge contracts that no one reads and no one understands. So we wanted to change all of these little things in each area. And one of the challenges that I often see when you, usually we as service designers see sort of the bigger picture, we understand that it's about culture, it's about employee experience, it's about new KPIs, but usually it's really hard to actually change something because for instance, with your example of legal, we don't have the mandate over that team. We don't have the resources and possibilities to actually change something in that department, in the marketing department, in the IT department. Did you experience the same challenges? Yes, we experienced that. And that's why we decided that having all of them working in those workshops with us were going to help us to make the buy-in from them. And also, I think that what helped us the most was the top management was already on board. You know, they were on board with us and they knew that this was a priority to make best customer experiences and that's something that we as a whole organization must do together. Otherwise, there's no cohesion or there's no omnichannel strategy. There's nothing. So we knew that that was something that we had to do together. And of course there were challenges because not all of them understand it as well. But I think that when they understood what we wanted to achieve, they wanted to participate on that and they wanted to be part of our best customer experience. Yeah, so the key, and we won't talk about this right now, but the key is that you got top-level, senior-level buy-in and it was basically an assignment from them to do this, right? Yes, exactly. I think that the two key factors is to have the top management buy-in but also to co-collaborate with everyone and include everyone in everything that we were doing because that way they knew what we were doing. We created momentum among them and they were all excited and they were all willing to be part of this change, this transformation. Okay. Super interesting. So let's move on into the second question and I've got it over here. Drum roll, please. Again, not a really designer-ish topic from the first thing. Choose and prioritize. Do you have a question starter? Choose and prioritize. Hmm, why? Why is it important to choose and prioritize our projects to have the best customer experience that we can offer? Okay, so why is that important and I will immediately ask how do we choose and prioritize? So maybe you can answer these two questions. Yeah, well, it's very important for us to understand which battles we want to fight because not every fight has a direct impact on the customer experience or the employee experience. So we have to understand what are these... We have to identify which criteria should we follow to identify those important projects that we want to work on. Maybe the first one could be a direct impact on the NPS. Maybe another one could be the volumetry of the claims that we're having in certain product or certain service. Maybe another one could be the volumetry of the products that the clients have. So all of that give us hints of what are the most impactful projects. And understanding those aspects will help us to choose the projects that we want to work on. And for that we have to have really clear in our minds what we want them to improve. So once that we understand which projects should we work on, what we used to do is to put a certain score. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If it's going to increase our NPS, then maybe our score for that is going to be five. If it's going to decrease our claims, maybe for that is a score of three. So we used to put like little like little scores in all our projects and then that way we used to prioritize. But then also after having that score, we used to discuss them a lot to be clear that that was a project that we wanted to work on and to be sure that that was going to make a true change in our customer experience or even in our service because there are so many aspects that we have to work on while we are trying to make our service better that if we try to solve every little thing we might get lost in the way. So we have to be really strategic about which projects or which aspects are urgent, which aspects are important and which aspects will make our experience memorable or at great experience. So who was giving you these, let's call them KPIs, who was saying, okay, if you focus on or we want to improve the NPS or we need to improve the lower the number of complaints. Where did you get those KPIs from? Because I think that is super important. Well, actually like we weren't talking a lot just to know what were their... First, we need to understand what's the strategy of the business because we need to push towards the same direction otherwise no one is going to hear what we're saying. So we have to be really aligned with them but also we were like talking with a lot of different people to understand what were their worries. For example, maybe in the business the aspect of decreasing the claims is not a priority but then if we talk with the guy that was leaving all the claims department we saw that that was something to worry about. So we were talking with a lot of people to have a whole perspective of what was happening in the business and in the service and everything to see which aspects we couldn't lose sight. And like after we chose that we were talking with the top management also to make sure that our decisions were right and we weren't like... Yeah, I think this is so crucial what you're telling here and I think this is a huge challenge for a lot of service designers is that we don't get to have these conversations with the business or we forget to have these conversations with the business and you're telling like from the start you were talking to the people in order to be in line with the business and it makes so much sense but I don't show why it is hard. Maybe you can be even more specific who in the business were you talking to like team leaders, senior managers which positions do these people have in your experience? Okay, the bank has a really complex structure but we wanted to make sure to talk to always talk with the head of certain area so for example we always talk with the people of the business development area because they knew all the information about the products we always talk about also with the people of the call center because also they have a lot of knowledge of the customers and what they're talking about and what are the customer worries we were also always talking with the guys that were leading the claims department because they also know what is wearing the clients we were also always talking with the engineering people to know which processes were like making things difficult we were also talking about talking with the people of human resources to understand what are the employees talking about and what are their worries so my point is that we try to talk with a lot of different people to have a really holistic point of view because sometimes if we only have one part of the information we can get lost in that part of the information or we are sidelined so we wanted to have as much information as possible sometimes it can be difficult because we can get lost in the information but we wanted to have a really holistic perspective to be sure what information should we choose to decide so I don't know if I... Yeah, it makes a lot of sense and I think this is again I'm going to stress that this is so important for any service design make sure I would summarize this like make sure you talk to people who are responsible for profits and losses like the people who spend money and the people who earn money that's basically if you need to talk to those people and these are the people that at the end of each quarter sort of need to show results talk to them one final question regarding this topic and that is so now you were able to choose and prioritize were you also in the position that you had to make I don't know, assumptions or business cases up front so where people are asking you okay, if this is going to impact MPS how much will it impact MPS or if this is going to lower the number of claims how much or did it... or were you saved from these discussions? Yes, well, when you're working in a bank the business case is always important because they're always paying attention to the money and I think that's something that is transversal to all of industries maybe so yes, we were always talking about making a business case and sometimes it's difficult because it's just some random projections that you should make to see how the MPS will be improved or how much it's going to cost to improve that MPS so I wasn't making that myself it's not my expertise I was more designing the experience or choosing the right projects to improve that experience and I wasn't paying a lot of attention to the business case but I know that is something that was really important to make my point clear and also to make my point matter to the people that were making decisions because as you mentioned before the people that are deciding well, that are like like everyone is counting the money like the profit and the losses so it's important to tell their language to be taking into account Yeah, absolutely agree Priscilla, let's move on to topic number three I'm just sort of rushing through this because you have so many interesting things to say we're moving from choose and prioritize into something that we might already know journey centric not customer centric not human centric not people centric but journey centric just pick one, improvise let's see what happens how can we make a journey centric strategy okay so so basically yeah, yeah, go ahead yeah, basically my last project in the band was actually choosing these journeys that were really important and we should focus on we wanted to cheat instead of making projects we wanted to follow up some journeys to make sure that those journeys were to make sure that those journeys were giving good experiences so we try to understand which journeys were critical to our customers we also use the same criteria that I might have said before journeys that were that were impactful in our MPS that maybe had a really bad MPS or journeys that were like products that were high that a lot of our clients had or maybe journeys that were having a lot of claims so we were trying to understand which journeys were the most important and our objective was to choose more or less than and to be working on them for a full year to improve the experience so a lot of teams in US already use this methodology of choosing back some journeys and be working on them and make some releases on these journeys but the idea was to understand deeply these journeys to understand which touch points were interacting with our clients within these touch points and start making projects within those journeys so the idea was to choose the most the 10 most important journeys and then make the experience on those journeys incredible so our clients could like this bank is amazing one of the questions that I have is I'm thinking a lot about journeys these days and one of the questions I hear often is how do you get people from the organization involved that aren't necessarily in touch with the customer on a daily basis so let's say the people on the backstage, the engineers the people from the legal department already usually they are critical in actually delivering the experience but it's really hard for my experience and also from what I've been hearing to get them actually on board again have you found this challenging and if so were you able to get them on board? I think that I was really lucky and I was working in an organization that was like that already had this mindset so maybe there weren't so much challenges as in some other organizations that I have worked with but to be honest I think that the key is also to include them since the beginning to know them that they are a crucial part of the process so I think that they have to develop this journey with the service design team that leads the journey development and also it's important to communicate to them the importance that they play in each part of the journey and what I like the most is to put real clients to talk with them so they can understand how their activities are key on that journey sometimes a lot of the time actually people think that they know their clients but they don't so when you put like clients to talk with them they change their perspective and they understand that they are doing things wrong and they need to change I think that that has worked a lot to me like I always at least try to make a little videos to summarize what people are saying so I can present to them if I am not able to make them talk with them directly but after putting like them to hear the client they understand that maybe signing this contract that they don't understand is painful and they have to change it already so we also did a lot of workshops to work together because that way we can break silence and make people talk with each other and that also helps because they understand like the whole perspective and not only the little activity that they are doing in one action of the client so that was also something that worked yeah I think that's a really good tip like if you get people that aren't usually interacting with the customers to interact with the customer they usually sort of open up and start to see the value of this work yeah I totally agree we found the same so another question in regards to these journeys and a journey centric strategy and I'm not sure if you have any experience with this but creating a journey mapping a journey for the first time isn't really that hard what is hard is updating it alive and using it as a dashboard where you also in the stage where people were owning the journey and had to update it or how did that work for you yeah the idea was to develop these journeys and have a KPI for each action of the client or each interaction or even each touch point so like we were creating these excel sheets with each action and having a KPA for all of these actions to keep them alive and measure them each month I think that the tough part of that is that you have to to design those KPI sometimes can be really tricky but if you choose them correctly you can follow them and update them and start seeing which part of your design is working as you thought it would work at the beginning and see which parts are critical so who was responsible for updating these journeys every month because that's really interesting well we hadn't gone to that part yet but I think like the way that we were thinking about it is to have like someone especially from the analytics someone with an analytic profile that know about numbers how it's impacting the NTS and whatever and like the whole activity of this person would be like tracking these improvements and how the journeys are behaving with the new improvements that we work on exactly because saying that I really like is what gets measured gets done and as soon as you start measuring stuff no matter if it's not the right things that you should be measuring but at least people will start to focus energy on that so as long as we are not measuring something in service design I think it's really hard to actually build that momentum yes exactly and also I think that measuring aid help us to communicate with other part of the business that can understand and relate more with KPIs sometimes we understand it really easily but people don't and that way we have like a language in common that we can talk about and focus on the right parts of the journey Priscilla you've been answering a lot of my questions our questions but is there something that you'd like to ask us the viewers and the listeners of the show yes well I would love to know what people are doing in their organizations in terms of shifting because I think that that can be tricky and difficult so I would love to hear what you guys are experiencing and doing in order to make your organization more service design centric and that would be awesome how are we brainwashing organizations basically exactly yeah it is sometimes it feels like brainwashing or eventualizing yeah exactly brainwashing let us know down below in the comments people are starting to comment on these videos so I hope or on the podcast if you're listening to the podcast be sure to let us know Priscilla thanks so much for making the time and sharing what's on your mind I think you have a really interesting background like I said with the experience in the financial scene business perspective on service design I think that's super valuable so once again thanks for making the time and sharing what's on your mind thank you Marc for having me and thank you all for hearing me although my terrible English I hope that this is useful to everyone thanks ciao so what is your way to brainwash organizations into becoming more human centered share your tips and tricks experiences down below in the comments and if you enjoyed this episode make sure to share it with somebody who might enjoy it as well you're helping the channel to grow that way and you're making somebody else happy so thanks again for watching and I look forward to seeing you in the next video