From Kate & Rose "About the back of embroidery"
During one summer vacation, my mother decided to keep me busy by teaching me embroidery. She wasn’t a fan of crochet or knitting; this was her handicraft of choice. I really enjoyed it and would take on different projects like embroidering doilies, pillowcases, handkerchiefs, all sorts of things.
My mom taught me that the best test to determine the quality of your embroidery was that the front and back looked just as nice. Ideally, you could have a doily wrong side up and no one would notice.
I’ve seen great embroidery at various museums and it’s true - the back and front are flawless and could be used interchangeably. I personally never made it that far in my expression of this craft, but I came close. (Ok, maybe not THAT close.)
But why do this? According to a blog on the site Kate & Rose:
"When stitching household textiles or a garment, it’s a good idea to make the back is as neat and smooth as possible, almost as much as the front. Since the finished work will be worn, used, handled, and laundered, knots and loose threads on the back could get caught and pulled, ruining your embroidery."
This lesson from embroidery can - and should - be applied to customer experiences. You need to be sure that what’s inside the company (the back) is just as presentable as the customer facing experiences (the front) so it lasts and presents your company in the best light.
If you decide to take this approach to your experiences and business, you may experience 4 benefits:
1. You will make employees feel that they are just as important as customers.
In our never-ending quest to make the customer happy, we sometimes overlook what we are doing internally, allowing broken internal systems to exist. We’ll do cartwheels inside our organizations to hide our crazy processes from our customers.
We sometimes think that if the customer doesn’t see it, then who cares? But that is far from true. We often believe we can hide odd internal process through faux-mation (fake automation where some steps are automated but other steps are offline), conversations, or emails. But we can’t. Customers always see. It’s like they have a spidey-sense.
How employees work to support the product and customers is just as important as how the customers experience a company. When you develop a new experience for a customer, or modify/update an existing one, the process internally to complete the work needs to flow just as smoothly as the outside for what the customer sees. Why shouldn’t employees have a great experience as well? Aren’t they of minimally equal value as a customer? In many ways, you wouldn’t have a company without your employees. Never forget that.
2. You are forced to be transparent and accountable because you can’t hide a mess.
I think all of us have been in a situation where we have had surprise company coming to visit and we throw all of our mess into a room and close the door to hide it. One of my mom’s friends would put her kitchen mess into her oven (god help her if she needed to cook!). In some ways, this is a human response to hide the unseemly. We'll show off our great work and then hide the back because it is a mess. We do this with embroidery as well (in fact, this is why the premise exists!).
What we forget to consider when we hide our mess, is that we are keeping a secret. And when we are keeping a secret, we aren’t being transparent. When we aren't transparent, we can still be accountable, but we are accountable to maintaining an ideal, a perception others have of us, not our customers and their needs. And this is horrible for business, because the business becomes less about solving problems for customers and more about maintaining an image.
Customers will always find a way to see the mess in the same way your houseguest may wander into the mess behind a closed door or accidentally look into the oven or flip over the embroidery piece. During a support call, they could ask probing questions after hearing a confusing answer that doesn’t make any sense, or conflicting answers, or after being passed from department to department. It's in this confusion that our secrets are revealed.
Sadly, we see the employees as complicit co-conspirators to hide an internal process mess in the same way we see our families as complicit to hide the mess in the closed room. They are supposed to help us maintain the illusion, which is what they are being held accountable to do. It is difficult to be accountable to the customer when you are also being accountable to your team and leadership to hide problems.
We can thank the digital world and the transparency and accountability that it brings. Customers can now notice that your company handles issues differently than others, which raises questions. In this case, do you want to be held accountable to resolve your customer's issues, or do you want to be held accountable to holding an ideal of who your company is, or both?
You can achieve the best of both worlds if you approach creating customer experiences as an embroidery piece, focused on the inside and outside processes being just as elegant, simple and clean. That approach will naturally bring transparency and accountability into our work, allowing you to maintain your company's image to the customer and help customers have a great experience. You can't help to be transparent when you wonder how a customer will perceive the inside of an organization if they knew the truth. The embarrassment from their perception, in a way, drives the accountability to do better and be better.
The key tip in this benefit: always remember that customers will always learn the truth when they work with you.
3. You master details through practice because it has a purpose.
For the front and back of an embroidery piece to be picture perfect on each side, you have to have great technique. I noticed that as I practiced embroidery, my technique improved. My mother had great technique after years of practice and it showed in her pieces.
Practice is the key element. Buddhist monks will practice cleaning their own areas because it has a purpose. Exercise is something to practice for purpose and benefit. This is also true for meditation and other types of practice that brings direct personal benefit. "This is because the cleaning practice is not a tool but a purpose in itself. Would you outsource your meditation practice to others?"
What does this mean for customer experience professionals? Well, customer experience is similar to cleaning, exercise, and meditation. We have been led to believe that customer experience improves business, but what if it is more like meditation and has a purpose unto itself? A customer experience strategist facilitates ways for employees to do their jobs better, meaning, provide better service to customers. Its purpose is to build, or improve, relationships. Is this something to outsource, really? It’s something a company really needs to do.
You have to practice creating great customer experiences in a company in order to service your customers better and more actively engage employees and help them contribute value. And like anything, the more you practice, the better you get.
4. You are constantly reminded that business is always between people - employees and customers.
Sometimes we get so busy designing processes, creating content, and constructing the best experiences through systems, that we forget that we are doing all of these activities to help people to work better together. People are at the heart of any company - internally (employees) and externally (customers). The only way a company can succeed is to improve relationships. Customer experience facilitates this activity; its purpose is to build relationships inside and out.
Sharing my favorite artwork that summarizes how business works from the Dallas Entrepreneur Center:
If we keep this in mind when we think about customer experience, we realize that creating a great relationship between employees and customers is key. Without it, we don't have socializing with purpose, or business, happening.
What does this all mean?
When we are creating digital experiences, we are automating what was originally an offline process. Sometimes, our offline processes are clunky, so we need to revisit them to create an optimal employees experience. In the process, we also improve the experience for our customers. Although the result of digital transformation is greater transparency for a transaction and with information, it is also a great opportunity to provide the right tools to help employees and customers "socialize with purpose," build stronger relationships and do more business.
This means improving accountability to the customer and the employee - not just the company's image. The employee plays a key role in improving a customer's experience. First, business is between people, not entities. Second, employees are just as important customers. Without customers, your business doesn't make money. Without employees, no one is contributing value to the organization and getting work done. It's a symbiotic relationship. This is why the embroidery metaphor is so fitting - the front (customers) experience needs to be just as attractive as the back (employees). When this happens, you get a quality organization with quality results.
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