During the pandemic, my former team at Convince & Convert was retained by The University of Arizona (my alma mater) to convince students to download and use a bluetooth-enabled contact tracing
app.
Led by my pal Maggie Young, we conducted a ton of research on student
attitudes. We discovered that students cared about health and safety, and cared about not taking Covid back home to elderly relatives.
But the only message that caused them to ACT was when we aligned the incentives. The core theme of our campaign was "if you want to get back to being a college student, and going to class, basketball games, and parties you need to use this app." And it worked.
To persuade, you must make it PERSONAL
Days after I discovered the bathroom sign, I had lunch with the CEO of a company for whom I'd delivered a keynote speech.
He asked me how to get people in his company to care about customer experience if they weren't customer-facing in their roles.
I resisted the temptation to show him the bathroom sign...gauche, at the table. But we did talk about aligned incentives.
Most of us know or believe that better CX yields better financial outcomes, EVENTUALLY.
But getting to eventually can be a time-consuming and potentially expensive march. Which is why whenever you're trying to change a culture or build a customer-focused enterprise, you must align incentives.
You can't tell the team that the most important thing is customer satisfaction and retention, and then bonus people
based solely on net new revenue. Those are misaligned incentives, and will always cause trouble when choices and trade-offs are made.
Which is why it can be powerful and effective when businesses bonus their entire employee base on metrics like Net Promoter Score, and similar.
If you say you care about customer experience, you must measure and reward your people accordingly. If you do so, the incentives will be aligned, and you might be surprised how quickly your customer experience optimization journey unfolds.
