Often, teams feeling this pressure immediately jump to a tech fix. But a digital transformation isn’t enough. A more holistic solution requires businesses shifting to a customer-experience mindset, putting the customer first in all interactions and engagements – not only the digital ones.
The complexity of these transformations can make it challenging to know where to begin or what to do next. That’s where the right Experience Workshop, focused on the problem you need to solve, can inform and accelerate the whole process of transforming your customer or employee experience.
One of the biggest advantages of any well-run Experience Workshop is not only gathering information around your focus area, but also building consensus and momentum. Here are four Experience Workshops – each with its own unique benefits and outcomes – tailored to get teams rolling toward an improved Customer or Employee Experience.
1) Design Thinking Workshop (Area of Focus: Problem Reframing)
Who is it for?
A design thinking workshop is ideal if you aren’t sure where to even start with your CX transformation, or if you simply need to get “unstuck.” These workshops are incredibly effective for developing calculated solutions when a team needs to step back and rethink how they address the challenge at hand, especially those challenges that would benefit from a client-first mentality.
What is it?
Design thinking offers a problem-solving mechanism that revolves around empathy, experimentation, and iteration to create innovative solutions.
During this collaborative workshop, team members explore new ways of reframing problems and generating solutions-centered ideas that are focused on improving the consumer experience from a holistic perspective.
Using tools from the design trade, teams work together in a constructive and structured way that leads to definitive and actionable ideas. Within each workshop participants are guided through the phases of empathizing, defining, ideating, prototyping, and testing ideas around a better customer experience.
How will your team benefit?
After participating in a Design Thinking Workshop, team members go back to the office with a new set of tools they can use to solve not only CX challenges, but any issue that requires a new perspective.
2) Day-In-the-Life Workshop (Area of Focus: Employee Experience Mapping)
Who is it for?
Day-in-the-life workshops are ideal for companies seeking to improve employee engagement, understand current employee experience issues, improve empathy, and enhance employee effectiveness and satisfaction.
This workshop is particularly valuable for teams who know they have an employee-experience challenge but are struggling to identify exactly what that challenge is.
What is it?
A day-in-the-life workshop provides insights into the daily work of your employees by helping participants step into their shoes. In so doing, your team will discover how existing tools and processes support or hinder employees as they perform their jobs.
These workshops identify areas where employees encounter obstacles or lack support, fostering an understanding of – and enabling the opportunity to resolve – the challenges they face.
How will your team benefit?
Participants leave this workshop with increased empathy for their people and how challenging their jobs can be. More applicably, participants walk away with an understanding of which new or established practices are causing these challenges, as well as a clear path forward for how and where to make improvements.
3) Service Blueprinting Workshop (Area of Focus: Current State CX Deep Dive)
Who is it for?
Service blueprinting workshops help teams identify what is causing pain and challenges within an organization’s current customer experience.
While most any company would benefit from a CX deep dive, this workshop is specifically designed to help when an organization is struggling to determine which issues to tackle first, especially when the company has historically had a hard time working across business lines.
What is it?
A service blueprinting workshop brings together experts from multiple teams to develop an end-to-end view of the customer experience, and more specifically, all the rules, processes, technologies, and teams that contribute to this experience.
Through this workshop, organizations break down silos between teams and work together to identify challenges.
How will your team benefit?
Participants gain detailed insight into how all teams impact (often inadvertently) the current customer experience. This holistic and collective view of how each team influences the CX enables participants to build alignment on which issues to solve and in which priority.
4) Co-Creation Workshop (Area of Focus: Ideation Session)
Who is it for?
Co-creation workshops are for either teams who have a specific challenge they want to solve but aren’t sure how to go about it, or teams who have some clearly valuable research results or insights but aren’t sure what to do with them.
What is it?
These ideation sessions help teams leverage the expertise and outsider perspective of our problem solvers, strategists, trends experts, and designers to help workshop participants think more broadly and creatively about the question at hand.
In addition to developing multiple potential solutions during these workshops, participants also walk away with a better understanding of how to ideate, push boundaries, and narrow down a long list of possibilities to the most promising ideas.
These workshops can include the mocking up of ideas, testing those ideas, and gaining initial user feedback.
How will your team benefit?
At the end of a co-creation workshop, teams walk away with a portfolio of ideas to pursue and alignment on a clear vision for a path forward.
Accelerate Your CX Transformation with Workshops
Exceptional customer experience is essential for business success, but it often requires a transformative shift in thinking, culture, and approach. Workshops provide clarity, motivation, and a solid plan to propel your CX Transformation.
If you’re ready to embark on your CX Transformation journey or have any questions about these workshops, reach out to our team. We can dig deeper with you to ensure you engage with the workshop and facilitators who will most effectively help you reach your goal. We’re here to support and guide you every step of the way.
Together, let’s transform your customer experience and elevate your business to new levels of success. Let’s talk.