My team and I hosted a couple hundred customers, industry folks, and friends a few days ago at our annual XDay experience management conference. As a team, we put months of preparation and sweat equity into it and it turned out great, but that’s a story for another time.
Our morning keynote speaker was a brilliantly creative man, Walter Geer, from the New York City firm VMLY&R. He kicked off the conference and just dazzled everyone in the room.
For many, it was an inspiring call to arms in some ways, to push us from our comfort zone and to challenge us to think about experiences we create, enable, or participate in with and for others. Walt had hundreds of people spellbound, many in tears for the entirety of his talk. For me, however, there was a little bit more.
Walt opened his talk with three very inspiring quotes, all of which were familiar to many of us and yet still served as strong reminders. He flashed those quotes up on the big screen to set the stage for his talk to follow.
His first quote,
“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
It was then I started to get an inkling that this would be an eye-opening experience for me, but it was only starting. He then went on to share a second quote,
“Find Your Why”
– Simon Sinek
By now, I was buckling up for what was to be a wild ride and then the third came up.
“The two most important days in your life are the day you were born and the day you find out why.”
-Mark Twain
I was entranced, and it hit me like a ton of bricks. I learned more about myself in the 45 minutes Walter spoke with us than I have in, perhaps, years. I learned the importance of being mission-oriented. I learned it’s not good enough to have a mission statement or a corporate credo but to ensure it’s wired into each of our DNA and that we live that mission in everything we do, whether at work or outside of our jobs.
I learned how, while I love the work I am lucky enough to do daily in my Customer Experience role, I began seeing my own “why”, and it was an experience I’d not soon forget.
I learned that I love doing customer experience work because I get to enable others to serve the people in their lives while they are living their own best lives. I learned the importance of unleashing the human desire to serve others and to see people rise in those experiences.
I learned it’s about seeing genuine, from-the-heart gratitude when people feel connected and how their genuinely authentic selves come to the surface. In all, I learned that the work I do, and as a team, we do, enables the subtle missionary in each of us that is, perhaps too often, locked away.
This, in effect, was my why.
Walter told stories about how his team and he served others and created amazing experiences for others in doing so. You could hear a pin drop in that room, with hundreds of people in the audience fixated on his every word. The story he told that hit me the hardest was about work they did recently for the State of Tennessee.
He spoke about how each year, as summer fades and autumn comes, many state tourism boards run marketing campaigns to bring visitors to their state, largely to see the beauty of the autumn colors. The crisp blue skies and the golden leaves are a major attraction for many who travel to those destinations to enjoy the beauty of nature.
As a creative guy, Walt showed images of advertisements made by several other states, and indeed, his point was they were all alike. Pictures of golden trees and country roads. He made the point you could not tell the difference between the ad for Massachusetts and the ad for Vermont. They were interchangeable and, therefore, forgettable.
What if, he challenged, you couldn’t see the beauty of nature if you were constrained by colorblindness? How would you ever know that deep blue sky and the rich colorful leaves if it were all sadly monochromatic? What if you never knew just how amazing the fall foliage is?
Walter’s team partnered with the state of Tennessee and installed special binoculars in designated observation areas along some of the most scenic highways the state offered. The binoculars had a special set of lenses in them that enabled a colorblind person to see color, perhaps for the very first time in their lives.
What better way to introduce someone to the true beauty of nature and how magnificent the world is than by having them experience autumn? They filmed people using their binoculars and the raw emotion they showed when they first looked through the viewfinder and saw the beauty unfold before them. Many cried. In truth, watching this film, I cried too.
I imagined what it must have felt like to be on the team that made this possible, to serve good folks who never could have had this experience and now did. I imagined how a modest piece of technology could change a life and how experienced designers and creators were to envision and execute this amazing and purposeful plan.
And, most of all, I imagined myself wanting to raise my own bar in how I serve our amazing customers, partners, and colleagues each day to unlock experiences that could, in some small way, help them to have similar experiences.
I could have listened all day. The emotion on the screen and in the room was palpable and raw. The energy was invigorating and genuinely inspired, and for even just a brief moment in time, I got the sense that I was not the only one in that room on that day in Austin, Texas, who, in a brief flash, found their why.
Too many of us doing experience management work, whether serving customers, colleagues, or even the broader market community, get so mired up in data and charts and dashboards and closed loops that we lose sight of the fact that we do this to help people serve others. We overrotate in many ways on bits and bytes and workflows and APIs.
We miss the fact we are entrenched in our tools and data to enable us, as experience management practitioners and leaders, to become storytellers, and through storytelling, we engage, we inspire, and we help others grow.
It is through powerful narratives about customer successes and even failures we stretch in our service of others and the entire downstream to others whom they, in turn, serve as well.
Whether we practice customer experience work, employee experience work, or somewhere in-between, we should learn from Walter and take a step back and start considering the human experience and how we can best unleash those we serve to, in turn, serve others. It is there where the rubber hits the road and we can be genuinely impactful.
Thank you, Walt, for inspiring so many of us on a rainy Thursday morning in Austin to find our whys and to send us back home at the end of the conference as faithful missionaries in our service to others.
Is there something wrong with your customer experience?
When you complete an honest assessment, the outcome can be beneficial, particularly regarding your Customer Experience program.
Take five minutes and complete an audit for your organization here.
You may discover a gap in measurement, an opportunity to improve a process, the place where an organizational shift needs to take place or an opportunity to win a greater share of your customers’ wallets.
We all want that bigger “return”. In this situation, the worst-case scenario is that you’ll get some information that will help your organization since there is no cost or obligation in completing this audit.
