Change Your Scenery and Understand What's Going On in Your CEX

If you have ever moved house or changed workplaces you'll know how much more sensitive you are to your surroundings. You become heightened and sensitised to new experiences and stimuli around you.

Such experiences provide you with rich and colourful inputs that rapidly help you become aware of your new surroundings and how to adapt to your new setting.

We can take this phenomenon and apply it to our business world by deliberately changing our environment. It's a quick and easy way to begin shifting our mindset.

If you work in a business where you rarely get out of your office then this will really help you understand what's going on in your business.

I'll give you an example and then you can apply it to your own situation. For the sake of the example let's imagine you work in the training department for a large fashion brand and your own stores and franchises across the country.

Here are the steps to follow.

Step 1

You visit several of your stores and ask a junior staff member give you a tour of their store. Use the opportunity to ask questions of your tour guide and tease out some real-life stories about the way the store is working, where there are issues with customers etc.

Step 2

As you are guided around the store, look around and observe what you see taking place, interact with other staff and customers. You can either come prepared with specific questions about issues you want to learn about or just go with the flow and be guided by what you experience and investigate further. Take photos with your phone as a visual record of your observations.

Step 3

As you gain more insights ake sure to note these down along with your observations. Then take a few minutes for each one and assess how they may impact your work, offerings, or customer experience delivery. Then when you are back at your office if what you have found warrants it, pull together a summary document and share your insights with your team. Include the photos you took provide visual impact.

When to Use It

• When you want better insight into how your current service levels are impacting the customer experience.
• Your team needs to gain empathy and clearer perspectives from customers or front-line
  staff.
• You want to quickly get an overview of the general challenges your customers currently face.
• You want to test your initial assumptions on a product or service you are offering and how well it's doing.
• You want to quickly gather an overview of the customer experience.

 Timing

3 - 8 hours per visit

Resources Required

Simply your time, notebook and camera or smart phone