Telling Stories To Communicate Data

Our society loves numbers. We love to create metrics, track progress, create more metrics, rinse and repeat. However, we see so many customer experience professionals failing to bring their customer insights to life. We’re not suggesting you get rid of your Loyalty, NPS, or CSAT scores, but rather think about the number (pun intended) of numbers and metrics you’re tracking and sharing across your organization.

We are challenging you to think about ways to bring customers to life in your organizations. What are the stories behind the numbers? What are your customers experiencing? What impact does your organization have on their lives and careers and who are they?

As human beings, we are wired to connect with people. We have more empathy and understanding when there is a face or name we can connect with.

“Stories are how we learn best. We absorb numbers and facts and details, but we keep them all glued into our heads with stories.” -Chris Brogan

So how can we accomplish this in the big data world we live in? How can we track the numbers that are important but maintain the stories that are behind them?

  • Utilize customer personas to bring customers to life in your organization. It’s unlikely all employees can have a personal connection with every customer, but you can help them relate to your customers by creating relatable profiles with common attributes. For example, call center employees are the front-line support for many organizations, but many of them don’t understand the customers they are helping and supporting on a daily basis. Display personas with relatable details to help create empathy for the customers they are interacting with.
  • Create customer empathy. Likewise, consider journey mapping or empathy mapping exercises with your employees. Help them to understand what customers are thinking, feeling, and doing throughout their journey with you.
  • Avoid analysis paralysis. Overthinking and overanalyzing information easily leads to “data-dump” situations, where we can lose the user of the information in all the details. Keep it simple. Set clear goals and objectives at the outset of your research. Exploration is always encouraged, but don’t stray so far you lose sight of your original goals.
  • Share customer testimonials. As customer experience professionals, we have the privilege of easy access to customer testimonials. Share those stories with your colleagues. Bring customers to life by publicizing their experiences and sharing successes your organization has with them.
  • Focus on action. When sharing research data with your organization, focus on the key insights that will help you to drive change and action. Focus your presentations on action planning and “what’s next.” What are you getting out of the data? Is it a “nice to know” or are you able to make key strategic decisions with it?

We’d love to talk to you more about telling compelling stories with your organizational data. Call us at 317.465.1990 or fill out our contact form to learn more!