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Avant CX Culture Transformation
Role: Director of Product Design
My Team: Team of 5 designers (direct reports, and FT contractors)
Collaborators: Company executives from Marketing, Product, and Operations; product managers; customer-lifecycle manager; customer-service managers; summer interns
Goals
When I was recruited to Avant the company had a key strategic goal to evolve its company culture toward customer-centricity. Having come from a strong mission-focused culture, I was given a principal task to help guide Avant’s customer transformation. My goals were:
Create empathy for customers by establishing a research practice and widely sharing the results
Break down organizational silos by promoting a shared responsibility for customer success
Normalize conversations about customer needs in leadership decision-making settings
User Research: Understanding Customers
Surprising to me upon arriving, it seemed that employees in the organization HQ had little exposure to customers, limited to NPS surveys and the occasional past focus group. I set out to quickly establish a habit of user/customer research.
Segmentation
The first question was “Who is our customer?” I discovered there had been past efforts to answer this in different departments. However, each had taken separate approaches and their results were not widely shared with each other.
As more information was shared with me, I began aggregating everything that was already known about our customers into a single Figma board. This format’s infinite canvas allowed information to be grouped side-by-side rather than linearly in a 150+ page slide deck. This allowed for macro analysis of overlapping data points and the making of connections that yielded greater insight. We also created a list of further questions to validate in future research.
Jobs to Be Done Interviews
I’m a big fan of Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) Theory for product development. We celebrated having 1M+ customers but acknowledged we didn’t know much about why they were “hiring” Avant’s credit card, loan, or banking products. I suggested using JTBD interviews to uncover the forces and counter-forces causing customers to choose or reject our product. After gaining execuctive and legal approval, I began conducting interviews. I also trained my team on the theory and method.
Our team took careful notes. Following my lead, we workshopped the most common observations into a set of customer jobs along functional, emotional, and social dimensions.
Deeper insights have emerged with every subsequent round of interviews. To scale visibility into these efforts and empathy across the organization, I presented findings in company town halls with highlight reels to showcase the customers’ voice and face.
Conducting JTBD customer interviews
Customer Journey Maps:
Mapping the Existing Experiences
My counterpart in customer-lifecycle marketing had kicked off an initiative to map the customer journey for each of Avant’s products. I offered to help as the effort aligned with my goals of evangelizing user experience to key company stakeholders. The core team was me, the marketing customer-lifecycle manager, her summer intern, and my summer intern.
Workshop with product subject-matter experts
More Customer Interviews
A cross-functional workshop was performed to identify company assumptions at each customer stage. I combined these with direct observations from discovery interviews mentioned above and qualitative feedback from marketing surveys and online reviews to establish a picture of the overall customer journey.
The final result was three large-format maps (one for each Avant product: credit card, banking, and loan). I depicted a journey line that best represented each product’s buying, onboarding, servicing, and loyalty stages. Our interns helped fill in what customers were doing, thinking, and feeling at each identified step along the journey. We used verbatim quotes from our research to lend credibility to documented pain points and motivators.
The final project phase was socializing our findings with respective product teams and company leaders. We found them complimentary of the depicted maps. The end-to-end journey had never been mapped this way and led to a new level of clarity about how various departments interacted across the customer experience. Since unveiling, the maps have been referenced by several company leaders. The team is also prepping a version to be used in new employee onboarding.
Building a Customer-Centered Culture
Leadership Roundtable
Customer experience isn’t the job of a single department. Everybody in an organization must internalize the belief that their work has an impact to the end customer regardless of their role.
To nurture that belief, I was called into an select team of myself, three C-suite executives, and the CEO. This group, which we named the Journey Tiger Team initially met regularly to crystallize a set of customer experience (CX) guiding principles to evangelize across the company.
What we came up with:
Empathy: Our customers should feel like we understand their financial situation. Every interaction should feel authentic and build trust with our customers. This is the core of customer-centricity and building lasting relationships with our customers.
Transparency: Our customers should feel like we respect their personal data, time, and money. Every interaction should be honest and help our customers solve problems, achieve goals, and move forward.
Simplicity: Our customers should feel like we are providing solutions, not adding to their problems. Every interaction should be intuitive, not complex, relentlessly removing unnecessary steps and stress in their experience.
Even though we continue to preach these principles regularly we knew our efforts were catching on when other departments began referencing our principles unprompted in their team meetings and in company town-hall presentations.
Breaking Down Silos
We all own the experience.
Based on a successful experience at a former company, I knew that for the company to become customer-focused we’d need to start sharing data between departments and get used to regularly discussing customer needs. I suggested launching a monthly cross-departmental committee of top leaders from every team.
In this monthly meeting, each team would have time to share what their department was doing to improve customer experience or research that was guiding their decisions. I also lead discussions on topics such as “How do we bring more empathy into every customer interaction and touchpoint?” Whether it was data science, customer operations, marketing, or product, it quickly became clear each team already had initiatives to move our CX forward; however, these efforts were not being widely shared and many remained unaware of them.
My goal was to open the eyes of key leaders and get them to share notes—and responsibility—for the overall customer experience. It’s working. In the short time, I’ve run these weekly meetings I hear more teams collaborating on the overall user journey. Some skeptics are starting to ask me for help using customer research to validate their ideas.
Transforming company culture is a long game but we’re seeing signs of positive momentum.
