How Knowledge Management Guides Employee Journey Mapping with Luke Jamieson and Nate Brown

Transcript

Pete Wright:
Hello everybody and welcome to Connected Knowledge from Upland Software on TruStory FM. I’m Pete Wright. We talk a lot on this show about where your teams are. Maybe they’re in the call center? Maybe they’re sitting in a support desk? Maybe they’re in training and development? But what we haven’t done is talk about how they got there and most important where they are going. This week on the show, we’re taking you on the employee journey mapping trip with our own Luke Jamieson, Solutions Consultant for Upland’s Contact Center Productivity solutions, and Nate Brown, Co-Founder for CX Accelerator. They’re going to teach us about the employee journey map and how knowledge management might be the secret sauce for your employee journey mapping success. Luke Jamieson, welcome back. It is so good as always to learn from you today.

Luke Jamieson:
Thanks for having me Pete.

Pete Wright:
Nate Brown it’s glad to have you here, especially sporting that beard. You have a beard of greatness, sir.

Nate Brown:
It’s a little scraggily today, but thank you.

Pete Wright:
Aspirational, aspirational beard. So, we’re kicking things off with employee journey mapping. For those who are not experienced in the art and science of the employee journey map, give me an education. What do I need to know to be able to speak artfully about the employee journey map?

Luke Jamieson:
For so long, we’ve done the customer journey mapping thing. And I think the pandemic did the whole, hey, we need to focus on our employees business. People started to go, oh yeah, well, how do we do that? I think they’ve taken a leaf out of that customer journey mapping and applied it to the employee. And under a different lens, seeing the employee in a different lens, not just through this HR, how do we onboard somebody and then get them through induction and hey, you’re doing your job for the rest of your life. It is really shifted and it’s become a holistic approach to it.

Nate Brown:
Pete, I would just say first, if you’re doing this at all, you are so far beyond the vast majority of organizations that are out there. The fact that you’re thinking about employee journey mapping is so amazing. Well done. Thank you. I mean, thank you for caring enough about the journey of your employees that you actually want to map that out. It’s just awesome. So I mean, give yourself some credit there and don’t let the idea of trying to make this perfect stop you from just getting started and just creating something that is helpful and that will start to connect you to the real life of your employee as they navigate the relationship to you, which I mean is what we’re trying to achieve here in this map, right? It’s just understanding that and bringing them to that definition of success where we’re co-creating together, we’re fulfilling the brand promise together in a great and dynamic way. They’re getting to become the person they want to become, and the brand is moving forward fulfilling its promise. That’s why we would map this stuff.

Luke Jamieson:
I think there’s something very unique about employee journey mapping as well compared to customer journey mapping, and that is your accessibility to their end user. When you’re talking to a customer, sometimes you can have millions and millions of customers and you’re just getting this small sample size or you’re using personas to map these journeys and it’s not always that accurate because Nate and I are two different people. We’ve got the same passions and we’ve got the same ideas and a lot of things, but we are totally different people and probably have different ways of doing things and different dreams. And the employee, you have access to them. You have front row seats to hearing everything from them. And that’s what can make employee journey mapping so rich compared to things like customer journey mapping where you’re filling in a lot of those blanks with proxies.

Pete Wright:
Right, and it’s also incredibly creepy to go to a customer’s house and ask them the questions that are so readily accessible to your employees.

Nate Brown:
Is it?

Pete Wright:
That’s a good point.

Luke Jamieson:
It’d be creepy if my employer came to my house too.

Pete Wright:
It would be creepy if your employer came to your house too. That’s fair. I want to dig a little bit deeper before we dig into some of the specifics on what is included in the employee journey map. What does it look like and who has the organizational responsibility for it? Is this just a kind of a rogue HR function?

Nate Brown:
That’s a big one. I mean as far as the components of the map in my mind. So in the work of customer experience, we talk about having a change coalition to use [inaudible 00:04:41] there. Because different people represent the overall customer journey in different ways. So to say, hey, CX leader, you’re responsible for all this. No, it’s impossible and I’m not. You can’t do that. That’s why so many CX leaders fail is because the scope is too big and only when it’s done collaboratively can you succeed in managing and navigating that customer journey. I do believe this is one area where we need to take a page out of that book and do this in a collaborative way.

So yes, we do need a clear owner, somebody that we can hold accountable to this and it’s going to drive it, is incentivized to drive and has that ownership and that knowledge to drive it. That probably should be HR, depending on the nature of HR inside that organization. But my goodness, they shouldn’t be doing that alone. They shouldn’t strangle it. They shouldn’t control that. They should be inviting others in to navigate this with them and understand and do this in the form of an employee experience change coalition.

Luke Jamieson:
Yeah, I agree. I think that putting it under HR though it gets lost. I think it should sit in there, but there should be a specific role that’s designed to help map people through this, help navigate through this, and guide them. Because I think if you don’t, what ends up happening is you get onboarding, induction, career progression, and exit interviews right.

There’s nothing in between and all of those things have so, they’ve just got so many different layers. When you think about performance management and coaching and all of the things that come with that, where are we getting into the weeds of thinking about what is driving someone intrinsically to actually get up in the morning to do that? What’s driving somebody to work towards this particular KPI? If we’re not mapping it down to that level, it just becomes this academic piece of paper on a wall where we see this end-to-end journey. But what we don’t see is any of the depth between any of those big milestones.

Pete Wright:
I think that you look at the different, I love that you start bringing up the channels, right? Recruitment and onboarding stick out to me especially because I think the last time you were here, Luke, we were talking about customer, people who live in the customer service organization, the customer support call center organization, and that they are heroes. What I think we want to look at with the employee mapping journey is how do we nourish them in a way that does a service or does justice to the critical role that they serve to the brand? What are the pieces that everybody needs to be aware of in their overall arc of their career at the company, in the call center, in the support operation?

So, when you look at, I think the idea of figuring out who owns the overall process, but also how do you train your managers? At what level are you training managers to understand the employee map? Are they embracing it? So, I guess that next question is, who’s doing this right? Are these employee maps being used in a way that does what we want it to do to nourish the most important people to the frontline people for the brand?

Nate Brown:
That’s good.

Luke Jamieson:
I want to take a line that I’ve taken from Nate before and that is what is the definition of CX? I love Nate’s definition, which is that it is find friction and remove it. I think it’s the same. This same approach needs to be taken with the employee journey and that’s where everybody comes in play, right? If it’s about finding friction and removing that, it’s at all different levels. That might be from how do I do my job? What tools do I have to do my job and are you making it easy for me? That’s where knowledge management comes into things like this. We’re giving people the autonomy, the authority, and the confidence to be able to answer questions in contact centers where they may not have had that information, not being able to keep that information stored in their brain. Where do they go to find that? So, when we think about that is part of the employee journey map, right? Is how do I do my job?

Nate Brown:
Yeah. I love and a lot of my thinking in this area has been developed by Denise Leone, one of my favorite CX authors of all time, and she does have a brilliant template for an employee experience map. It’s so simple and helpful, man. It starts with that EX strategy and that should be the fulfillment of the brand promise. I mean, if you’re not bringing people in that you can intrinsically motivate well because they care about what the organization’s actually doing and service to its customers and community, then your map’s not going to go very far in terms of your ability to embrace and motivate these employees. You’ve started in a place where you’re already at a dead end in terms of helping them to navigate a journey where they get to become the person, they want to become in fulfillment to that brand promise. But then it goes into employee stages, which is so good.

Let’s think about what this looks like from an onboarding stage. Luke, you had a great point around that. Yeah, HR is really good at checking that box a lot of the time. Unfortunately, there are a lot of really sad statistics on the current state of onboarding, but that aside, that’s an area where they’ve got ownership and clear control. But what happens in that next stage? How are we intentionally guiding them and thinking about, wow, how are we helping this person to become the person they want to become in fulfillment to our brand promise? What does this stage look like? How are we making sure that they have a best friend at work to have that Gallup Q12 presence there? We’re cultivating great peer-to-peer relationships. We’re giving them opportunities to get their hands dirty in the mission and not just make it peripheral. We’re using our voice of customer engine to help them to understand the impact that they’re having on a daily basis. These would be the things that we would start to really map out in that middle ground, that employee stage in the middle ground that most people just do not think about.

Pete Wright:
That seems like the benefit and the curse of ongoing operations. I say that in heavy air quotes, “ongoing operations.” Operationalizing something in an ongoing manner is sort of the definition of taking it off the plate of concern. It sounds to me if I’m reflecting this right, that what we’re talking about here is not removing that middle piece from the plate of concern, that we are constantly thinking, considering what the lived experience is of a person day-to-day after they’ve been onboarded.

Nate Brown:
So well said, Pete. I mean I really believe the antonym of experience design is survival mode, and that’s what most companies wind up in, is that operational chaos of we just got to fake it till we make it. We just got to get through this quarter. We got to hit the revenue tar… We just got to do this thing. Our employees, hopefully they stay, hopefully they stick around and maybe we can think about and maybe we can invest in them later, and it’s always later. That is the fastest way to train wreck both your employee and your customer experience.

Luke Jamieson:
Absolutely. Absolutely. That idea that you are not having impact, you’ve got no autonomy. They are two of the biggest killers of motivation and very, very quickly people are going to be looking elsewhere.

Pete Wright:
Can you talk to me about where that breaks down? I’ve been in a number of organizations where when you get through, first of all, recruitment is done by somebody else, right? So, we outsource the recruitment. So, they’ve been trained on the brand, but maybe they don’t live it. Onboarding is handed back to HR and line managers, and then something happens. I wonder if you guys have put your finger on what it is that happens when that process of employee attention breaks down in a lot of organizations. Is it because we’re always just looking for the next employee, thank God they’re here, maybe they’ll fix it and I don’t know. But for our listeners who are hearing this, where are they likely to see those points of friction?

Nate Brown:
That’s the moment they’re being tossed over to a manager, probably a mid-level manager who’s a working manager. They probably don’t have time and or have not been equipped to pick up the baton of the life of this employee and to truly own it in a sense that goes beyond annual performance appraisal. To be intentional in investing in this person. This would be like pie in the sky stage two, not even doing that as a good leader themselves, but doing that in context of a cohort of great leaders across the organization who are all being intentional in specific ways. I mean, who does that? Who equips their leaders to that level of maturity and intentionality to where that’s happening? It just is so rare.

Luke Jamieson:
I think it starts, there’s two parts, and I talked about this in our last podcast, Pete—how we frame up particularly things like contact center roles. We frame them up as these stepping stones or these entry level roles. That’s how we pitch them. Then they go through induction, whatever. They get handed over to this manager. The manager is then going, “I just need you to hit these KPIs,” which are some just been rolled down. They’ve got no, no one has any connection to the impact that those KPIs are actually having on the employee, on the business or whatever. You’ve got an employee going, “hey, I just need you to make this stepping stone as short as possible so I can get on with what I really want to do in life.” So, there’s this constant clashing of two different forces—a manager trying to keep somebody to stay usually, and perform based on some KPIs that they’re not even sure have direct impact on anything.
An employee that’s going, I just want to get this done so I can get on with a different part of my career. So, I think that part of that middle ground just needs to be—that’s where it needs to be fought—around purpose. Someone’s purpose for why they’re there, the impact that they have. What meaning does the work that I do actually have on my community, on myself, on my organization? That is the middle ground that needs to be fought. A big part of that is about empowering staff, giving them autonomy to be able make… To feel like they’re having impact.

Pete Wright:
Is this just a thing that happens for call center staff? One of the things that you’re causing me to reflect on is maybe the reason line managers don’t actually know what to do with folks is because they’re not treated with that same respect either?

Nate Brown:
Ouch.

Pete Wright:
Did I say the quiet part out loud, Nate?

Nate Brown:
Have to process that later, Pete. But yeah, that is very true. Certainly I think the contact center gets this worst of all in many ways. I mean, as Luke says this so well, and I’ve loved following Luke for years. But the idea of us stuffing customer service workers into this ticket taker box, it’s unbelievable to me. So, what I’ve loved to be talking about in the last couple of years here, let’s go from a customer service agent to a knowledge curator. I mean, that’s them becoming the person they want to become. I mean, suddenly they’re like a mini marriage officiant. I mean these customer service workers are so good and so talented that they can read in between the lines of the customer. They can speak the language of the customer. They know what they actually need. Not what the customer said, not what they clicked on.
They know what the customer’s actually trying to achieve, and then they know the products and services of the business better than anybody else in the world, better than anybody else in the company. So, they get to bring those two things together—the actual need of the customer together with the real capability of the business. Boom, I’m making this marriage happen in the form of this customer service interaction. But what’s happening there? Knowledge, knowledge is the fruit of that union. When they get to really take ownership of their role as a knowledge curator, they’re making everybody in the organization smarter through all of these customer service interactions. It’s beautiful and wonderful, but when we put the agent in the little box and don’t allow them to speak out and create pathways and avenues to where they’re articulating to the organization, the things that they’re learning from the customer and being that representation of the voice of the customer, it’s just sad. What a wasted opportunity that is.

Pete Wright:
Well, I can’t think of a better opportunity to transition to making sure that our agents are resourced well enough. Let’s talk then about the role of knowledge management and the role that becoming a knowledge centered organization can actually serve in the employee map overall. Are organizations doing this stuff? What role is knowledge management in answering some of these hard questions?

Luke Jamieson:
I think it’s starting to finally sink in that it is its own stream that people need to focus on because this is a massive key in the employee engagement lifecycle. What happens is when we… We have a thirst for knowledge as humans. And so when we then get fed that knowledge and we start to grow that knowledge, we start to care for it and we start to value that and we put this value around it. What organizations are starting to realize is that they need to be able to cultivate that in a certain way. Look, I’ll say it again. People want to have impact on their role and they want to have autonomy, and they are two huge ways of driving employee engagement. Through knowledge management, you can do that because you are giving them the tools to be able to sound confident and to be confident, not just sound confident, be confident. That is a massive part of, you don’t want to go into work every day feeling fear. You want to go in there and know that you are supported. You’ve got that safety net and knowledge management does give you that. When we start to underpin all of those aspects that we’ve talked about—onboarding, induction, hand over to managers, how do we speak to customers, our brand, our everything—and we start to pin that into knowledge management, bring that back to knowledge management, we start to see a holistic approach to it because it’s not just… All of a sudden, it’s not just a whole bunch of articles or smart snippets that are happening. They’re all tied in to this holistic approach to how we do business, which includes things like our values and our mission and our purpose.

Pete Wright:
Can you walk me through, lack for a better phrase, a day in the life? Let’s just say I’m a call center agent at an organization that is working hard to really address my overall arc, my narrative as a protagonist in my career. And I want to know where I’m going to see and feel these concepts at work in my day-to-day. Where am I going to feel that agency in my day-to-day as it is different from somebody who’s going to a call center farm that doesn’t have the outsource call center farm? Can you walk me through that?

Nate Brown:
Yeah. I’ve lived that life. So you come in, you’re logging into a CRM of some kind. You’ve got a backlog, a ticket sitting, they’re waiting on you. And you’re trying to bust out these tickets as fast as possible so that you can start your day as clean as you can. If you don’t already know how to do them, you’re navigating into some kind of SharePoint situation with a bunch of outdated process docs.

Pete Wright:
Oh God, nobody wants a SharePoint situation. Oh my God.

Nate Brown:
I have zero value and I’m not picking on SharePoint. But I think you all get the idea of dead knowledge and how absolutely unhelpful it is. Contrast that with the idea of living knowledge where together everybody around you, and not even around you geographically, you together as a team. You’re getting smarter with every customer service interaction and there’s a living and breathing knowledge component there where you have autonomy over it. As an agent, there’s trust there. There’s freedom there to flag it and fix it, to use KCS methodology term. I mean that’s so rare that the agent has that autonomy to be a knowledge curator in that way.

So, they get trapped looking at the dead knowledge, trying to navigate through. So what do you end up having to do? Ping in a coworker, ping in a coworker. And the same question gets asked every day, multiple times a day, and it’s so silly. There’s a great report from a major CRM company, it was a couple years ago, now they actually pulled it down. Maybe it was too controversial. But the average service worker spends between 30 minutes and two hours every day searching for remedial information. That’s the life of the service worker. That was my life for years. How are you going to live that? You’re going to get burned out so quickly, Pete, versus being able to actually use your time in a high value way.

Luke Jamieson:
This is where knowledge management’s getting really exciting for me and seeing the evolution of it—watching our products evolve to remove the search. So, getting to a point where knowledge is delivering smart snippets to people so that they don’t have to think and do that search. It’s removing that cognitive load, like we talked about last time, and it’s delivering smart snippets where they can pick and choose, say, yep, that’s actually where I would’ve gone to. I’m going to say that. Maybe it’s giving them an empathy statement as well to say, hey, this is a great time to just pause. Don’t forget this isn’t just about transaction. This is about a relationship. Make sure you pause and check that someone’s okay before you give them that piece of information and these smart snippets. What that’s doing is it’s elevating the conversations. It’s bringing them back to being more human. All of a sudden this stops me as an agent feeling like I am just a robot or another number. So for me, I think that that’s the really exciting part to what Nate was just talking about, that next evolution.

Nate Brown:
Love that, Luke.

Pete Wright:
I think it’s really fascinating. I’m going to have to dig for the reference in the book. But I went to a presentation from somebody who is researching the nature of moods and the importance of moods when approaching, especially conflict situations, but it seems to really apply in the call center role. She said “warmth is contagious.” One of the things you see is when you can start your day in a nature of warmth, every single interaction that you have will spread that warmth to the next person. And that thus amplifies your own ability to be empathetic to the next call, to the next interaction that you have. Some of what you’re talking about seems to get exactly to that point that what you’re doing by making service-centered organizations, collaborative, team-based and give them the agency to deliver, find it and fix it, Nate, in your parlance, you’re actually giving them the opportunity to exude that confidence, that warmth, that empathy, that control to every subsequent call.

Nate Brown:
It’s called serotonin Pete. And it’s glorious, a glorious chemical. We try to manage contact centers with dopamine. So often, we’re generating a fight or flight. You better handle that call in two minutes. You better get it right with your tone or you’re going to get marked out on this scorecard. I mean, you better check all these boxes on this interaction. By the way, we’re measuring you on your customer satisfaction score at the end of the week. It’s like, whoa, this is all dopamine. There’s no serotonin where you’re getting to contribute to the collective community of service professionals around you. That’s what generates outcomes and behaviors and starts to get what you’re talking about, Pete, that wonderful energy and that wonderful warmth. That is the most translatable thing to the customer. We have the ability to give that to each other and we don’t.

Luke Jamieson:
Yeah, that whole dopamine thing has a cliff, right? That’s what we’re talking about. You need more and you need more and you need more dopamine for it to have that hit and then when it just is no longer working, goodbye.

Pete Wright:
Okay, everything we’re talking about about is so warm and so good. Now please, gentlemen.

Nate Brown:
You look very warm, Pete, in your nice cardigan.

Pete Wright:
I feel warm. I’m exuding pumpkin spice right now. Gents, please, how do you make that case to the people who have to make the decisions about implementing knowledge management and this kind of approach? Because I kind of feel like I can predict some of the responses. What do you say?

Luke Jamieson:
Look, I think one big part to that is really thinking about the holistic benefit to this, okay. So, it is not just about buying another piece of software. What we are doing is we are shifting the way we work. And we can easily steer this conversation into the return on investment of knowledge management. But the case for that is so strong. But I personally think that that, maybe the listeners probably don’t need to hear that either because there’s plenty of case studies around it. What I think is not often said around the benefit of going down that knowledge management, underpinning knowledge management right across your employee journey map is the fact, it’s the glue that holds all of the pieces together. So if you think about your organization, you’ve got marketing and brand over there, absolutely trying to champion, how do we get cut through? How do we make sure that our employees are living and feeling our brand? We’ve got HR going, how do we make sure that our employees are staying longer and are happier and are giving us a great employee engagement? So, you’ve got sales going, how do we make more sales? Come on, let’s do this. Operation managers thinking, how do we actually get this to be more efficient and effective whilst also, and then our customers going, hey man, I just want you to treat me like a human. Give me the right answer the first time. And give me confidence in the fact that I chose you as my provider. It is the glue that brings all of those pieces together.
For a long time, there’s been this thing. It’s like, well, that’s just what the CRM’s job is, and that’s not what the CRM’s job. The CRM’s job is just to hold that we know you as a customer. It doesn’t tell me that I need to know how to service you and how to align what I’m saying to the brand. When we start thinking about knowledge management in that way, it really is much more a holistic approach to making your business more cohesive versus, hey, this is just another piece of software.

Nate Brown:
I love saying that knowledge is the lifeblood of customer service. It’s either flowing or it’s not, and it’s going to make everybody’s life so good or so miserable depending on the flow of that knowledge, that information coming through. To kind of tie it back a little bit to that employee journey mapping concept, I mean, one of my favorite questions to be asking throughout that, and I do love some stay interviews. Let’s not just interview them at the end of the cycle in those middle stages, let’s be asking them good, rich questions. One of my favorites comes from Jenny Dempsey and Leslie O’Flahavan and I see in my conference years ago. They had a free to help hashtag. It’s just asking that question, are you free to serve? Are you free to help your customers in the way that you would want? So kind of maintaining that through that map and being able to ascertain what is holding you back from being able to serve in the very best way. So often it’s a lack of knowledge and that can exist in different ways. Maybe it’s a lack of training type of knowledge, like skill type knowledge, but usually it’s just like the knowledge that I need to do my job and bringing those things together and connecting those dots. Steve Jobs had some kind of quote of creativity is your ability to connect disparate dots. Let’s give them more dots. Dots take the form of knowledge. So, if you want innovation, we talk about trying to foster innovation from the frontline all the time, but then we put them in a little box. No, you’re not going to innovate there. If you want somebody to innovate, give them more dots, more knowledge so they can see the customer journey, they can see each other’s journey, that employee journey, and be able to speak into that and reduce the friction across that journey to different degrees where it’s appropriate for them to be able to do so. But giving them that freedom and that runway to think that way. It’s just awesome to see it happen.

Pete Wright:
I have a hunch that the data ends up speaking for itself. And I’ll pilfer Mike Schmitz on the Folks podcast right now. He made a comment the other day. He was like, I hate goals. I hate goals because goals are, and again, to use what you guys are talking about, goals are dopamine, right?

Nate Brown:
That’s true.

Pete Wright:
But if you take care of the routines day to day, if you take care of the tools and routines, the score will take care of itself on the other end. The score takes care of itself. I feel like that’s the model that we’re talking about. But because I wonder if people are listening to this show wondering how to make that case, do you have strategies or results on agent productivity and retention and job satisfaction that speak to this model that now people are starting to pay more attention to? Agent agency, are they sticking around? Are they happier? Do they want to serve?

Nate Brown:
I think it starts with the efficiency portion. You can think about in two buckets. There’s the efficiency part, that idea of people are wasting two hours to 30 minutes every day searching for knowledge. So, think about the productivity gain there. Think about the way that good knowledge feeds self-service capabilities and how this feels over into the customer experience directly itself. Another huge, tremendous efficiency gain. But then you have the idea over here of more advocacy. It’s the right thing to do. And it helps people to work in a more engaged way. It does generate loyalty. So, I’ve generally started with some type of calculation starting with efficiency. But then layering on, it’s almost like the cherry I put on top because usually it’s hard to measure this idea. We’re going to increase engagement and reduce attrition by this much. But even if you can make a good case for a small percentage, I mean that represents a huge number when it comes to value. You already have your efficiency number because you’ve looked through the workflows and you’ve been able to see, wow, if we can just open up, unlock 30 minutes of efficiency for all these different resources through better knowledge curation, you can put a number on that. Then you put the cherry on top with advocacy. That’s how I’ve done it.

Luke Jamieson:
Look, I think it’s a matter of providing guidelines. So I’ll give you an analogy. When I was at school, we had an oval and it didn’t have a fence. Hey, this is way back. I’m showing my age, back when we didn’t put fences around schools because it was safe, but we had this oval and it didn’t have a fence, and everybody would go and hang out in the middle of the oval, really close [inaudible 00:34:09] together. But then years later, a fence got put on and all of a sudden everyone went right to the boundaries. They went right out to the edges of the oval.

Pete Wright:
That is such a weird behavior. I can sense that. Of course, that’s what they would do.

Luke Jamieson:
So, there’s this element of, there’s a middle ground here. We either put people in this box and they’ve got nowhere to go. We can’t just take that away and say, yeah, let’s all just hold hands, sing Kumbaya and we will achieve a goal. There has to be some sort of guidelines. So, putting in these rails and say, this is the box, this is the area you can play within. There’s a whole heap of freedom within these, freedom within the boundaries. What that does, is it gives people creativity. It gives people this idea to push as far as they can against those boundaries. Where we’ve gone historically is we’ve just said, you’ve got to stick to this binary process in order to achieve a goal. The problem with doing that is if you don’t hit it, you don’t meet. We never set these big stretches that… We say, hey, here’s a stretch goal.
But the reality is, if you met your meets goal, you’re there anyway. So, we kind of limit people on how we structure their roles and their KPIs and what they need to meet. So we need to rethink that and say, well, if the end goal is the customer is going to be, get knowledge, they’re going to be satisfied, they’re going to be happy and our purpose. So, removing the goal of saying we want to have a CSAT score of 75 and just saying, we actually just want, we want to provide an incredible service to our members and our customers, and we want to be known in the industry as a certain type of brand or whatever it might be, and we want our employees to feel like they are here for a career, not just a job. All of these things, when we start to put these statements out there, how we support that is not through bringing that down to these binary black or white pass, fail KPIs. It’s setting a stage, setting an oval that allows people to move around freely within a certain boundary. I’m getting a bit lofty there, but hey.

Pete Wright:
Lofty is the sweet spot today. Thank you. That’s perfect. Well, and in the spirit of not leveraging what I know could go into a two-hour seminar between us on this subject. I want to first thank you because I think it’s fascinating, thinking about the intersection of the employee journey and what knowledge management can unlock. I’m going to put some resources in the show notes. I’ve got some Upland stuff we’re going to share, but I wonder if you have any particular, let’s think about 8:00 AM day one resources that you want to recommend that people pick up after listening to this show, that are going to help them really try to unlock some of the potential agency in their agents. Nate, you go first because I know you are just hankering to get this plugin.

Nate Brown:
Well, we definitely have fusion, which I referenced, and there is a very specific methodology for employee journey mapping, and it’s very good. I’ve used it. It’s super helpful, simple enough to where you can do it quickly. Robust enough to where it’s actually helpful and it’s got that meat on the bone, so definitely grab that. The other one, [inaudible 00:38:07].

Pete Wright:
Give me again though, what’s the author again?

Nate Brown:
Denise Leon. Denise Leon, Fusion. Yeah.

Pete Wright:
Outstanding.

Nate Brown:
The other one. Luke’s going to roll his eyes because I can’t do a podcast without talking about it, but Primed to Perform is, to me, it is the culmination of employee psychology. It’s like why do people work or not? What intrinsically motivates them to do really good work? And it’s so rich, especially in the area of customer service because we’re talking about developing that sense of curiosity and excitement play. We’re making this good and we’re making them hungry for it, and we’re making them the person that they want to become. And we’re doing that in a meaningful way and the fulfillment of our brand promise to our communities and to our customers. So, I mean, there’s so much good intrinsic motivation that comes with that. And you can monitor that throughout the entire customer journey. Then there’s a dark side too with inertia and fear and guilt and the different ways that we try to motivate people using dopamine in their jobs that ultimately sucks the life out of them. So, you can see through the stages of your employee journey, that idea of total motivation. If you’re motivating people, right, if you’re awakening things like knowledge curation or if you’re using the dark motivators that ultimately lead to very poor quality of work and attrition.

Pete Wright:
Luke, what do you got? Tell us a little bit. Give us the plug on some of the knowledge management tools. Of course, we’ve got to talk about the stuff that you’re working on that can fit in here too.

Luke Jamieson:
Oh, look. Happy to do so. The work that is happening in Panviva at the moment is just so exciting. As I said to you before, this whole idea of using AI to help deliver the knowledge so that someone doesn’t have to search, where a customer is talking and had a conversation with say, your chatbot surfacing up, everything to the agent. Once that comes through, that they don’t even have to go and search. They’ve already seen what the chatbot search within your knowledge management. It’s giving you these smart snippets so you can just keep that conversation going and not having to restart that all. That to me is super exciting. This ability to be bringing not articles to agents. I think that’s been the goal for so many knowledge management systems for so long is, hey, within three clicks you’re going to get the right article, or within this search, you’re going to get the right article. But you still then have to go through and dissect that article and repeat, break that down into layman’s terms back to a customer to be able to actually bring back smart snippets out of that, not just articles. That to me is really exciting. That’s where I’ve wanted to see knowledge management going for so long and to see that now coming to life is incredible. I think AI is playing a really, really interesting part in knowledge management at the moment. We’re seeing that integrate really nicely to be able to curate knowledge really quickly, but not just that, to be able to help us curate knowledge so that we’re able to find it easier. It’s giving us those smart tags. It’s helping us think about from the customer’s shoes, how else could they ask that question, and giving us the ability to have different responses, but also recognize through natural language recognition what someone’s intent is, and then being able to bring the right articles to someone. So, seeing that all come to life, and I think when that is happening right now, we’re seeing that happening right now within the product. I’m really excited to see how the market takes that.

Pete Wright:
No time like right now to be evolving this stuff, really, really good. I will just throw in, I did find the name of that book. It is a must read for understanding moods. It is called Learning to Learn and the Navigation of Moods: The Meta-Skill for the Acquisition of Skills by Gloria Flores. Fantastic. I will drop that in the show notes as well for those.

Nate Brown:
I’ll be excited to check that out.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, she’s a winner. So thank you everybody for downloading and listening to this show. Where do you want to go, Nate, you’re new on the show. Where do you want to send people to learn about you and the work you’re doing?

Nate Brown:
No, I’m not worried about you learning about me. But I would sure love for you to hop over to CX Accelerator, just a nonprofit community, just growing CX professionals on every stage of their career journey, so come on over and join us there.

Luke Jamieson:
Yeah, I want to get behind that too, because I’ve been a part of that CX Accelerator for, right from the beginning, and-

Nate Brown:
Yeah, you have.

Luke Jamieson:
It’s been an absolute just huge support for me. My network globally has grown through that, and it’s all about community and just helping each other, and there’s just… What’s so cool about the CX Accelerator is there’s no ego. It gets checked at the door and everyone’s there just to help each other out. It’s very cool. What Nate and the team there have done is epic.

Nate Brown:
I’m glad you’re recording this, Pete, and thank you.

Pete Wright:
Look at that. Testimonial. Well, because Luke already said all that nice stuff about Nate, I’m going to go ahead and say about Luke. Go subscribe to his mailing list over on LinkedIn. Fantastic reads. Every time, I read everyone that hits my inbox, please [inaudible 00:43:47] do that. All right, thank you everybody for hanging out with us for this epic, epic episode of Connected Knowledge. We sure appreciate your time and your attention. We’d love to hear what you think. Swipe up in your show notes, look for that feedback link. Send us a question, we’ll get it to you. You have question for Nate, question for Luke. We’ll get it to him. We’ll have him back. Answer your questions right here on the show. On behalf of Nate Brown and Luke Jamieson, I am Pete Wright, and we will see you right back here next time on Connected Knowledge.