Hi, welcome back. This is the last week of classes before we finish this course. So, now you're now in a home stretch. This week is filled with lots of interesting tools and techniques, and we still have lots to cover. In this first class, I want to focus on a very useful tool for getting alignment between groups. This alignment problem has emerged as a theme throughout all of the classes in the last few weeks. Alignment activities towards a shared goal, in our case a good customer experience is challenge in organizations of any size and industry. So, the technique I'll show you is one that I've used myself to help me explore ways of working with other teams, and colleagues, and when I teach to my CX, customer experience and user experience design students. So, in the world of design, there is a tool that is used to make the value of a company's products and services more explicit. It's called the Value Proposition Canvas. If you are familiar with VPCs, stick around for this class. I'm going to provide a twist to the traditional use of the VPC. If you aren't familiar with VPCs, take five minutes and review the video that's part of your assigned reading materials. Feel free to continue this class if you haven't seen the video yet, but it will make more sense once you understand the traditional use of VPCs. So, now let's consider this tool in a different way, one which can help you find alignment between teams. So, instead of thinking about VPCs as a way to identify the value proposition of your company's products and services for external clients, use the VPC to consider your team or department's offer of services to departments that you must work with to deliver a great customer experience across all the stages of customer touch points in the customer journey. This means, for the right hand side of the VPC, remap the jobs to be done, the pains, and gains for your colleagues in other departments. It's not for external customers, but for colleagues in other departments. So, think about your CX team as providing the services for your colleagues, your internal colleagues, and consider them as your clients. What do your clients need to accomplish the job, or to avoid pains and enhance gains that are associated with their jobs. If your customer experience service offering is to deliver a great customer experience strategy or flex brand messaging across all the touch points, then you may have a list of services on that left hand side that are things such as, we help redo customer research, we collect research from third parties, we evangelized successful projects, we do prototyping, we conduct workshops et cetera. So, depending on the context of the other department's job, job to be done, any of your team's activities could provide a very useful complement to that team's activities or even enable them to do something they've never been able to do previously. So, a quick example; think about a sales team. Their jobs to be done are typically as simple as sell more products, find more customers, do a great demo, or the pain might be, I don't want to discover unknown customer needs in the middle of a sales call. While your CX activities cannot address everything, you certainly can help them with their knowledge about customers requirements, customer needs. For example, the research you're constantly doing might help them better understand the final end users or consumers perception of value. You might be able to propose designing new workflows to support their demos that they're doing in their customer site. In this way, the VPC becomes a great way to get alignment around the goals and activities to meet the goals of those colleagues. A few important points. When you're using the VPCs, base your understanding of the other departments just to be doing gains and pains. On a good investigation, don't make assumptions about what the team does. Learn about their jobs. Second, last thing you want your team to do is to work for another team, so you're not working for them mostly. You should look for ways to adapt or apply activities you are already doing and figure out how they might be applied to the context of your colleagues department. You should however avoid inventing new activities just to support another team. Your CX team doesn't work for other departments. Third, in some cases when you learn about the other teams and their contexts of jobs to be done at pains and gains, you can reveal emotional political or personal challenges. Try not to feed into such contexts. Focus on activities that can be talked about openly. So, I hope this is useful. Remember, alignment is at the heart of what is needed to align teams around brand messages and customer experience strategy. Besides budget in resources, alignment is one of the greatest challenges that customer experience teams face. So, we'll see you next time.
