454: Make CX Strategy Stick With Interactive Learning

Speaker A: Hello, I'm, uh, Martin Gill and this is the cxcast. Welcome back to the CX cast. I am here once again with my increasingly favourite person. Don't Tell Angelina, Joanna de Quincenier, who I had the pleasure of seeing last week in Amsterdam. Anyway, so welcome back, Joanna.

Speaker B: Thank you. Thank you. Glad to be back again.

Speaker A: Now, you are my favorite person because you like games and you like creating games. I'm a big game player. You like creating games for our clients. You've been creating immersive experiences. We've talked about that quite a bit. We're gonna dive into what you've been doing for the last few months and what you put on show in Amsterdam.

Speaker B: Yes, this is my favorite topic.

Speaker A: It's gonna involve flamingos and an auction. And the pictures are probably gonna be online by now. We're not gonna bore you with tales of like, we went to a cool thing. We'll talk a. We did last week. But what we want to talk about is we've been doing these immersive experiences now for what, two years? We've done quite a few of them. Angelina was on an episode quite recently. Because Angelina is launching the same thing on our US Events, we want to talk more about lessons learned. What have we learned from doing them? Um, what have we learned from going to Escape Rooms and being part of that whole thing as well? And how can you take what we've learned and actually apply it into your own business? To roll out your CX strategy to influence stakeholders and kind of create the kind of buzz that we see, the impact they have on people? Because people love them, don't they? We get smiles and they do.

Speaker B: It's such a joy. It's a lot of work, but it's such a joy to put these immersive experiences on. And it's for a number of things. Yeah, it's the level of interaction that you see people, the engagement, the fun, those sort of small epiphanies that you see people have when they're actually doing things. And I think what we've noticed in our events, it also has an added advantage that we didn't entirely anticipate or kind of plan for, but I think is great, which is it actually bonds people much more strongly than maybe some of the other things they're participating in in a conference. Once they've actually done an immersive experience together, we often see people then sort of hanging out with the group that they did the immersive experience with. Because there's something about spending 50 minutes with a Group of people solving problems and doing things and learning things by doing. That I think creates a stronger bond, which I love seeing.

Speaker A: Yeah. And learning by doing is like one of the key messages that uh, I've been trying to champion through this whole thing. Because this isn't about just doing things differently for the sake of it. It's about sparking different learning experiences to get fact techniques, cultural ways of thinking about things embedded in people in a different way.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker A: Also, I will put a plug for if you're a team leader, if you want to do a team day. We went to an escape room in Amsterdam after the ZX Summit as a team and it was a great experience, a real team building experience. Being locked in a bank vault with your team because you've bungled an art heist. You know, we'll be talking about that one for a while, so I could recommend it. If you're a team leader looking for something cool to do, go to an escape room. But that aside, before I got all excited about what we did, what are we talking about? How do you define an interactive experience?

Speaker B: Yeah. So besides building these things ourselves, we have a research stream that we are. Right. We've actually done a lot of research on this topic. There's two new reports going to be coming out soon about immersive experiences which I encourage you to look out for. So we define immersive experiences as they're interactive, hands on, gamified experiences that turn abstracts, whether it's customer, business or technology complexity into something that people can see, they can feel and they can reason about together. And the result is it drives alignment, confidence, action and it can really change mindsets. Right. So, um, it's a bit of a bulky definition, but it's, you know, it's all about that hands on, gamified, turning abstract things into seen, felt, reasoned about, together things. And the results are really powerful around alignment, confidence, action and really changing mindsets.

Speaker A: The way we kind of came into this initially was we were trying to show the connection between Persona, journey, map, journey, atlas, prioritization, because often people treat these as separate assets. We were trying to show the connective tissue between them. But that's not the only use case really, is it? I guess you could use it for any kind of strategy rollout, uh, or somewhere where you want to make something tangible.

Speaker B: Absolutely. So in the latest one that we did, we actually used it to drive prioritization decisions around investment strategies. Right. So quite different. We had a journey. We still started with a journey, but we had teams of people we had, in fact, two teams competing against each other that had to select an investment strategy for that journey and then set that strategy and then bid for enablers or resources to help them deliver that strategy in an actual auction, which we staged for them. And so very different use case to really bring home this idea that of course, journeys don't fail because they lack ideas. They often fail because we fail to say no to certain things, because we don't set a clear strategy, and because we don't follow through once we've set that strategy. But, you know, in the research that we've done, I've seen lots of different examples of, of how companies use immersive experiences from customer carousels. Right. That drive kind of repeatable CX learning that is tied directly to delivery to future labs, for instance, that take complex systems and technologies, AI, of course, and make them graspable. We've seen a number of companies build journey labs and walkthroughs, for instance, to align teams around specific pieces of work. There's scenario simulators to help practice decisions under realistic pressure, for instance. Right. In a risk environment.

Speaker A: So like cybersecurity breaches and war games and those kind of things.

Speaker B: Exactly, exactly. So there's so many different formats out there. And it's really what I love about it is, of course, if you use your imagination, you take something, you take a complex topic or concept, and then you basically think about, okay, how do I bring this to life? How do I have people really experience this in a way that either makes it graspable or helps them kind of really experience what it is to make those decisions under pressure? Or, you know, in some cases it's, you know, we can also use it to minimize change and innovation risk. Right. That's what a lot of innovation labs, for instance, do where they run pilots before they scale things. Right. So there's so many different uses to immersive experiences.

Speaker A: So this is much wider than a CX air quotes, a CX thing. This is really about any kind of immersive, interactive learning experience where we want to try and shift people's attitudes or mindsets or teach them something.

Speaker B: Exactly, exactly.

Speaker A: You've mentioned a few different kinds of ways firms are using them. What are some of the common characteristics you found across the different types? I mean, obviously we're analysts, we're going to go looking for what's repeatable. So what have you found there that we can learn from?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Ooh.

Speaker B: And that's exactly one of them. Repeatable. So we found a number of characteristics to IMMERSIVE experiences. They tend to be experiential. They're purposeful, they're participatory, they're repeatable, and they're measurable. So what do we mean with that? So experiential? You know, you take something complex, you make it tangible. Right. You know, I'll give you an example. For instance, Dutch, ah, company kpn. They created an escape room experience and they had participants physically fix the Internet by laying cables and connecting components. So turning apps abstract infrastructure into something that people could understand and remember and explain to others. In fact, they had children do this so that they could kind of like go home and tell their parents about it. So that when KPN came around and started digging up their streets to lay their cables, people wouldn't be. At least they wouldn't be as frustrated. They would connect it to the outcome that they were trying to achieve. So they're experiential.

Speaker A: So that's where we've talked and Angelina talked about this, and I've certainly mentioned it. That's where things like wear a hat, wear a costume, pick up a prop. You had the massive flamingo represented. It was huge, believe me. Represented a sabbatical holiday. They're things that jog your memory in a different kind of way or get you into a role and make you work differently.

Speaker B: Exactly, exactly. Because one of the most important things that you need to do in an immersive experience is kind of drop people out of the sort of meeting mode. Right. This is not a meeting, it's not even a workshop. It's something totally different. So you've got to give them something that helps them kind of get out of that mode and really immerse themselves into something new. Right. So indeed we had, for the one we did recently in, in Amsterdam, we had a pink flamingo, we had a piggy bank, and we had a world map, all three symbolizing a journey of somebody who was saving money for a sabbatical with their family. A really special trip. And you kind of need those, you know, so people walk into the room, they see a flamingo, and immediately they think, m what? Why is there a flamingo here with sort of confetti, like around it? And why is there a world map? And you know, you ask them questions, you ask them as well, where would you go if you went on a sabbatical and have them sort of come up with their sort of dream destination? So there have to be mechanisms to kind of get people out of, particularly if you're doing this in your organization. And people are sitting, doing their work or in a meeting, and you pull them into an immersive experience. Something's got to shift that mindset for them so that they fully immerse themselves in what's happening.

Speaker A: And when we did, we did the podcast episode with Tim, who's an escape room designer, and he talked about this idea of the Magic Circle, where you step out of your normal reality and into this new world. And we definitely got that. And the one we did was, uh, we talked about, like, the bank heist thing. They made us pick a team name, like a Ocean's Eleven kind of team name. They sent us into a car park, which is super weird. Then we had to blag our way into the building. So you kind of set up to be like, this is not your normal world. Something different is happening here that might sound very, like, gamey. And we're, like, doing a kind of crazy art ice thing. The principle really translates across into the world of work, I think.

Speaker B: Absolutely. And in fact. So Magic Circle is one of the staging and delivery techniques, if you like. So in the report that we've published, there's a number of them that we've identified. And Magic Circle is a really important one to sort of shift that mindset. So it is borrowed from games and theater, you're right. But it's really. The function is to separate immersive work from daily routines. And in fact, it's something that you can also use at a smaller scale. Right. I've used it in workshops where I have people, maybe they're brainstorming about something or thinking of a new way of doing something. And I ask them to write down all the reservations that they might have about what's going to be discussed on a piece of paper and put it into a box and have them sort of place it in the box and remove it from the room to signal. I acknowledge you've got reservations, but we're just going to take those and we're going to remove them from the room so that we can free our minds to now think a little bit more divergently so you can use the same mechanism a little bit less theatrically than we do in immersive experiences with Pink Flamingos in a normal meeting as well. So it's a really useful one.

Speaker A: Yeah. And the physical location, I think, with the building we had last week really helped. So you could stage people from one room to another, set them up in one room m, then take them into another room where there were some different props. So think about the Physicality of things as well.

Speaker B: Absolutely. Yeah. Which is another thing that is really important. Sort of like having people actually, you know, whether it's placing cards, moving things, so people themselves moving from one place to the other. So kind of like the flow. Right. A clear progression, moving from room to room. But also the physicality. Right. Which really helps with memory. You know, having them actually assembling things, throwing balls, you know, uh, moving tokens, whatever it might be, bidding on things. Right. At an auction. All of that is really critical to making something like this work.

Speaker A: Well, so your second thing is purposeful, which seems pretty obvious, but I think it's very easy to miss. Like, what are you actually trying to teach people? And what's the purpose of this thing?

Speaker B: Yeah. And that requires really thinking about the design. Right. You know, what's the cadence, what's the flow? Who's participating? How do we facilitate it? So you have to be both purposeful in terms of what do you want people to walk away with? Right. And you should have a really clear statement about what you want people to walk away with after they've participated. But it's also about the purposefulness of how you design the cadence, the flow, the, you know, who's participating and the facilitation so that people can really get the most out of the experience. When we went to the escape room, the person who sort of greeted us at the door and sort of, you know, had us come in, you know, she did not break out of her character until the very last moment when we finished the escape room. Right. So all of that has to be designed purposefully so that you really get the most out of it.

Speaker A: So it's really starting with that learning outcome. What are you trying to teach? And then you layer in that participatory bit about how do you engage the entire audience and don't have somebody sitting in the corner going, oh, bauhumberg. This is.

Speaker B: Yeah. So participation is an important one as well. Like, you know, think about it. What are people doing before they join? Right. Like, are they coming from, like, you know, a series of meetings and kind of into an immersive room? Is it part of an event where people are already in a little bit of a different learning mindset? Right. Makes it easier to actually have an immersive experience. It's different when you insert it into somebody's day Right. In the midst of their work. Right. You probably need to work harder to break them out of that daily mindset. So you need to think carefully about how you create that participation. There's a great example that we came across from CHG Healthcare. They actually created a Journey Lab and they tied it to a 500 person leadership event and they placed it next to the cafeteria. So they made participation very organic as opposed to scheduled. So people have to go and eat. At some point they would sort of walk past the Journey lab and they would be sort of curious and they would go in and they would participate. And you know, it turns these sort of passive walkthrough into a real sort of shared experience. So participatory characteristic is an important one to think about and it requires you to also think about context.

Speaker A: So then your last two were repeatable and measurable.

Speaker B: Yeah. So repeatable. You know, if you are putting a lot of effort into building an immersive experience, then, um, you know, in some cases, sometimes it's a one off thing. But there's many formats out there that are repeatable. Right. So it's a future lab, for instance, that gets refreshed content twice a year, for instance. Or maybe it's a carousel that runs every month. Right. So thinking about the cadence and the repeatability, but certainly if you've put a lot of effort into it, I would definitely encourage thinking about like, who else might benefit from this. Can we roll this out to a bigger group of stakeholders? Right. So you know, when we do it in our events, you know, we run nine sessions of the same immersive experience and then that way we make it a repeatable experience for a, uh, significant amount of participants in our events, for instance. So that's what repeatable is getting at.

Speaker A: But I guess I could also, if you think about location, we've seen examples of roadshows for big international companies going around the world, replicating this in different locations. So you're going to have a massive pink flamingo prop. You've got to get that thing on a plane with you to Jakarta or whatever. Then you've got some problems. So think about what it's going to be like and where you're going to stage it.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely, yeah. Ah, we've experienced that where we've had to sort of send lots of very strange props to a different location.

Speaker A: There's a story in there which we will not tell on the podcast.

Speaker B: No, simple wins a lot of the time. So any way that you can sort of think about like, how can I repeat this? Where do we want to run this again? How do we want to improve it over time? Who do we want to bring into the experience to maybe sort of improve it over Time. But indeed, yeah, we have to be pulling practical about how we make it movable.

Speaker A: But I think that's where techniques like the thing you did this time around with the auction and the auction lot, and it was literally printed out things on bits of card that's highly portable, you can print them locally thinking about it, and they're still very tangible because you got to hold up an auction paddle, you got to bid for lots. So measurable is the final one. Again, seems obvious. Seems like the kind of thing many people are going to forget and not be able to measure the impact.

Speaker B: Yeah, so it is an obvious one. But a lot of people measure things like attendance, right? That's the obvious one. Like how many people attended, how many people participated. But what we see is that sort of really effective immersive experiences measure what changes afterward, not attendance alone. So for instance, cyber simulations will focus on decision quality and confidence at key moments. Right. So they measure things like severity rate ratings and escalation choices and confidence scores. So it's really about capturing that decision quality after. Right. And comparing them over time and across exercises. So the measures should reveal whether teams are getting better at making those trade offs under pressure. Right. In the case of a cyber simulation. So you want to be tracking decisions, confidence improvement, not just attendance. That's the main message with measurability.

Speaker A: So this goes back to the purpose. If your purpose is to improve the, uh, cyber defense posture of your organization and improve decision making, that's what you want to measure. Not how many people have I banged through this process.

Speaker B: Exactly.

Speaker A: So you talked about a few different kind of delivery styles and formats, but I know you touched on a few others in the report. So what else is out there as inspiration? What else did you find?

Speaker B: So I mentioned the customer carousels. Right. I think that's maybe one that people don't immediately sort of think of as an immersive experience, but it's a very helpful one. Right. So these are carousels that are high cadence, they can be monthly or bimonthly, and they are very sort of tightly scoped sessions where teams can observe or can run short live customer sessions focused on specific delivery questions that are tied to existing or about to be launched products or services. Right. So that's, I think, an example that maybe people think about a little bit less. Uh, frequently you have, for instance, the, I think journey labs and walkthroughs, maybe people are a little bit more familiar with. I mentioned the CHG example of the sort of the journey they created, almost like a journey museum but they had so many cool elements. They had a physical transit map that represented kind of the full journey and the journey atlas, highlighting where work overlapped at key choke points and where handoffs occurred and where teams unintentionally duplicated efforts. They had participants move between stations representing different parts of the journey. They had QR codes that linked to detailed digital journeys and artifacts. They even had like a wall of computers that allowed teams to explore journeys in real time and like a pinball style video that showed the many paths that customers could take and how small decisions compounded into complexity and where journey insights sort of like, you know, stalled within sort of the organizational system. You also have, I think one that I think is very effective that we also see more of is executive briefing and decision rooms that drive really high stakes alignment, for instance. Those are ones that could be incredibly effective. We sometimes run the immersive experience for more executive audiences for that exact reason. So that's an interesting one. I also mentioned briefly the innovation labs and pilots. I think that is certainly one especially with a lot of AI experimentation going on. I think, um, one that is very interesting. It gives you the opportunity to pilot things sort of at a smaller scale before you kind of really scale it, to make sure that it really works, to make sure that it's secure or to make sure that it's not gimmicky and it really ties to your brand. So those are some of the examples that are maybe less frequently mentioned, but that I think are incredibly valuable.

Speaker A: So that's potentially putting things in front of customers, not just employees, because a lot of what we've been talking about is influencing employee behavior. But I think you're starting to talk about focus groups or like thinking about how you potentially do product development in a different way.

Speaker B: Yeah. And it's, you know, it's almost like a mashup of those two things. Right. So it is putting things in front of customers. And in fact, you know, for some of the examples that I came across around FutureLabs.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: They often bring partners into those as well. Right. So it's not just stakeholders. They're bringing customers in some cases and partners into those environments. So that's a good example of one that kind of layers different types of stakeholders coming in for innovation Labs. And again, the same thing, you might also bring students, universities. Right. Other partners within the ecosystem that are also thinking around some of those topics into an immersive experience like that. It's both aimed at customers, obviously a lot of these are aimed at internal change and alignment. And building confidence. There's a big opportunity here, certainly for B2B companies to also bring in, in a really significant way, the partners they work alongside and some of the adjacent organizations that are feeding into some of the thinking that they're doing around important topics.

Speaker A: We talked about gamification as well. So point scoring, leaderboards, all those kind of things. I think there's a couple of things that came out in some of the previous episodes we've done about catering to different player types. So, like, some people like to win, some people like just to participate. But one of the biggest things I got out of the one did was we failed. Right. But they created a story at the end where actually we won, we escaped. So the kind of making sure people don't fail, making sure people don't leave it feeling bad if you're gamifying things. Having some kind of, like when you talk about this in journeys end on a high, end on a high note, I think is like super important in all this.

Speaker B: That's a really important element when it comes to the flow and the cadence. And this is something we thought very carefully about when we designed the late latest immersive experience for our event in Amsterdam. We did have two teams competing against each other and they represented two different countries that were making different investment strategies. And we gave them two very different market circumstances. And they didn't win or they didn't lose because their country was less exciting, or their country had market circumstances that were harder. They really won based on the fact that they stuck to their strategy and they ended up up buying the right resources to deliver on their strategy. So there was a logic to who was going to win. It was still enjoyable for everyone. And everyone got to participate in the auction, which, you know, in and of it. So you have like a high before you announce the winner. Right. So the auction was sort of like the really fun bit of the immersive experience and people are bidding against each other. So that's sort of like a high in the actual experience. And then after that you announce the winner and you have to give and explain the logic behind how you've decided who's actually winning. We did have a couple of situations in which teams tied because they really.

Speaker A: Yeah, literally, the one that I watched, we had to die.

Speaker B: They both stuck to the strategy and that was the objective. That's what they were winning, essentially. So I think you have to be clear in expectation setting. You have to be clear in your rationale as to why one team won over the other. And there have Been to be enough highs and enough fun in the experience overall for everyone participating so that everyone gets something out of it. You know, the really competitive people maybe want to come back and redo it because they want to win next time or they won. There's been something in it for everyone. So you kind of have to design for those different player types and think carefully about that cadence. And I think the reflection around why a certain team won, particularly if it's business related. Immersive experience needs to be really clear. You need to give people an opportunity to also weigh in and maybe also ask questions. We had a couple of teams that then, what if I chosen this? And can you explain the rationale a little bit better? And so you have to allow room for that.

Speaker A: I think my key takeaway from all of this is this is so much more complex than it looks like on the surface. It's really easy. Or it's so much more subtle. Maybe it's really easy to look at these things and go, well, I can design a game. That's not hard. But actually there's so much psychology goes into this. There's so much conditions to get across all the things you talked about. So you've done a load more research on this. Where can people find more insights and more techniques about how to replicate these kind of things?

Speaker B: It's really exciting is actually we've started working with some clients who are building their own immersive experiences. And so we're sort of helping them to do that. And it's really cool to see companies go off and do that with their own brands and their own topics. But yeah, so there's two reports that will be coming out quite soon on immersive experiences. One is about sort of the characteristics and what we've been talking about today. It's got a diagram in that research which sort of talks about all of these different delivery and sort of staging techniques, which I think, I hope is useful for anyone thinking about building these immersive experiences. And there's a second report that talks about the different formats that we've been sort of discussing throughout the this podcast. So look out for those two reports. If you're not a Forrester client, then obviously there's this podcast. You can also reach out to me on LinkedIn.

Speaker A: I'm sure we can get some blog content as well.

Speaker B: Yeah. And for Forrester clients, reach out, book a guidance session. I'm very, very happy to be your sort of thought partner in helping you create your own immersive experience.

Speaker A: And if you come to one of our CX events next year. Hopefully we'll be repeating these kind of processes. We'll be like building more and more ideas into them. And I'll close as well and say, well, hey, thank you Joanna, for sharing. And thank you for like, putting the experience on and entertaining people and educating people. But also back to where I started. If you're a team leader, if you've got a team and you want to just do something different for an away day, I would recommend an escape room. And thank you to our, uh, amazing producers, Eleanor, Hannah and Frank, without whom none of this would happen. If you want to get in touch, email us@cxcastorrester.com as always, you can find us on forester.com or on your favorite podcast platform. Don't forget to like and subscribe. And tune in next time for more CX insights.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: Sam.