Every One is Part of the Whole
Release Date:
According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, the majority of workers in the U.S. say that focusing on DEI in the workplace is “a good thing.” With so many organizations adopting ways to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion, it seems that we, as CX professionals, should explore ways we can incorporate this important work into our efforts of improving customer experiences. And my guest on this episode has already made progress in incorporating DEI into CX and EX programs. Host Sara Walker welcomes Victor Udoewa, service design lead at the CDC, for a discussion on diversity, equity, and inclusion in CX metrics and programs.
Victor Udoewa
CDC
Connect with Victor
Highlights
Embed DEI through experiential knowledge
“I find that the probably best way that I have experienced to ensure that DEI is a part of that work is by making sure we’re reflective of the community we’re serving. So that could and hopefully does mean that we are hiring and doing diverse hiring and making sure that we reflect that. But but more than that, it actually means, at least for us, that we try to actually do participatory work. So you don’t have to be a full time employee working for us, working for our organization, but we are going to work alongside you because ultimately that changes the the notion of our work from being one that is expert led and expert driven, that is based on, I guess, what you might call mainstream institutional knowledge… To other types of knowledge such as esthetic, intuitive, energetic, emotional, lived, experiential, relational community. Et cetera. We’re bringing those in and elevating those saying those are really important.”
It’s a continual journey
“We don’t think of [DEI] as a politics of arrival. You have conquered. You have reached the pinnacle. This is really a question of just asking yourself, am I moving in the direction? Are we moving in a particular direction? So you want to ask yourself, what’s the one thing I can do to make us more, more ethical, more just, more equitable, more participatory? Et cetera. And then begin to do that. So it’s a direction based thing, a journey based approach.”
Transcript
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Sara:
Many organizations are recognizing the importance and advantages of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace. But how does that impact customer experience?
Victor:
Thinking about equity and experience together is one of the ways that I think of linking the experience of satisfaction, but also with the outcomes like what is the service that we're providing actually doing? And hopefully do we do it in a way that provides a good experience. But those can be connected, but they can also diverge.
Sara:
A look at how to build diversity into CX metrics and practices. On this episode of The CX Leader Podcast.
Announcer:
The CX Leader Podcast is produced by Walker, an experience management firm that helps our clients accelerate their XM success. You can find out more at walkerinfo.com.
Sara:
Hi everyone! I'm Sara Walker, host of this episode of The CX Leader Podcast. It's never been a better time to be a CX leader, and we explore topics and themes to help leaders like you develop programs and deliver amazing experiences for your customers. According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, the majority of workers in the US say that focusing on DEI in the workplace is a good thing. With so many organizations adopting ways to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion, it seems that we as CX professionals should explore ways we can incorporate this important work into the efforts of improving customer experiences. And my guest on this episode has already made progress in doing just that: how to get DEI into CX and EX programs. Victor Udoewa is the service design lead at the CDC, and we're going to learn more about his work. Victor, welcome to The CX Leader Podcast.
Victor:
Thank you. It's really good to be here. Thank you Sara. Appreciate it.
Sara:
Well, we're so excited for today's topic. I think that it's, you know, obviously an important element and has become much more visible for many people in the workplace over the last couple of years. But I think that, you know, today, talking about how to incorporate diversity into CX metrics and practices is a really interesting topic that I'm sure a lot of our audience is very eager to learn how to better impart into their current processes and practices. What inspired you to create a way to better include equity in CX and EX metrics? How did you get started in this effort? Tell us maybe a little bit more about your background and how we got here.
Victor:
Yeah. You know, in the IT space we think about user experience. And lately that has expanded to customer experience. And the big focus is on experience. So satisfaction and effectiveness and efficiency. But just how a user thinks about and feels about what happened and what they went through. But there's there's another component when you do social impact work. Right. Because your experience of something and actual outcomes could be similar or they could be very different. A good example is like learning design. So I design this beautiful learning experience, this course, and I want to measure actual learning. And I also want to measure satisfaction or learner experience. And you can have situations, I've had these situations where students have had an amazing experience. They loved it, but they learned very little. You know, it was just an easy A. They did fine. They had a great, a great time. They learned very little. And then you have this situation where people learned a lot, but it was so hard and arduous and it was tough and they just didn't really like it. But they learned a lot. And so those don't necessarily connect. And I think thinking about equity and experience together is one of the ways that I think of linking the experience of satisfaction, but also with the outcomes like what is the service that we're providing actually doing? And hopefully do we do it in a way that provides a good experience? But those can be connected, but they can also diverge.
Victor:
The second big reason is that we've just had a really, really big push in the federal government since President Biden has come into office, somewhere between 10 and 16 different executive orders related to equity or what we say JEDAI, justice, equity, diversity, access and inclusion have been created, right? And one of them is an executive order on transforming the customer experience of the federal government. Another is advancing racial equity and support for underserved communities. There's another one on further advancing racial equity and support for underserved communities. So the work that I was doing at NASA and that I'm now continuing at CDC, is part of meeting those executive orders. How can we do those both? And the very fact that President Biden had to create separate orders hints at the fact that many of us think think of those as separate. I'm just going to measure the customer experience. And even if that experience overall is great and inequitable, it doesn't matter because overall it's great. And so we wanted to make sure that part of the measurement of a great customer experience includes the equity of that measurement.
Sara:
Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. And I don't think that there's any CX leader out there that would say, you know, I want less customer feedback. Everybody wants more. And an important part of understanding and making sure that you've gotten feedback from all of your stakeholders is, do you have the feedback from the stakeholders who it is important that you're serving in a way that's going to end up in high satisfaction, and everyone's individual experience is so personalized and having a good as much demographic data that you can have about your customers helps frame the context of the satisfaction scores and feedback scores that they're providing your organization. So it's really when you think about segmenting or analyzing the data by demographics of diversity, equity, and inclusion, like, that is a very rich concept in terms of like, how can I better understand how this group of people are experiencing the service that our organization is providing versus another group, and then to build in the equity component, I think is really important and very interesting angle that you're taking to this work.
Victor:
Yeah. And I would say it's not even just segmenting it. Right. It's actually so so to give you an example, we we built this dashboard. Right. And my experience with dashboards and with executives, no offense to any executives that are listening is that they can become overwhelmed. Anyone can become overwhelmed with all these spinning lights and wheels and flashing buttons. Et cetera. So we made a really, really simple dashboard. Three numbers and that's it. A CX score, an EX score, and an SI, Service Index score. It measures the health of the service, how well it's performing, how well it's operating, how well we're reaching our goals. Three numbers. That's it. All three are from 0 to 10. Now if you see that okay, employee experiences are 9.3. Service index is a 9.7. Oh wait a minute. Customer experience is a 2.5. Well why is that? It does allow the executive to click the CX score and it disaggregates right. Okay. So here's the customer experience of this interaction. This is the customer experience of this phase. This is the customer experience of that. And then you can say well wait a minute. It's this interaction that's really low. All the rest are fine. Let me click that and it disaggregates right. And you can see all the different components that, that that is built up into. But one of the ways that we can disaggregate any level of that aggregation pathway is by the demographics. But when I say that it's not just segmenting, I mean that if I, for instance, have a customer base, that where 95% are white men who are middle class, upper class, able bodied, right? But in my strategy, my mission, I'm actually trying to reach out to women and especially black women, Latinx women, indigenous women, etcetera, immigrant women.
Victor:
And that's specifically part of my mission and my target. Right. And 95% of those people are having a really bad experience. Then when I look at the CX score, it won't be super high just because 95% are doing amazing. It actually gets affected by this tiny portion, because this tiny portion, 5% is actually one of my target groups. So we actually weight, we weight the different components that build into that score so that you actually see an effect in the overall score. So it's not just segmented, it actually gets reflected in the overall score because the idea is that if this is the dashboard by which you make decisions, which forces you to act, right, so you you desegregate it, you desegregate, you desegregate it, and all of a sudden you're saying, oh, okay, well, let me for this six months or this year, we're going to focus on X. And if X improves, it'll improve the score at this higher level. And if that score improves, it'll improve the score at this higher level for this interaction. If that improves, it improves the overall CX score. So it goes back up and it's a way to make strategic decisions. But if your score is high, even though 5% of your people are having a really, really tough time, you're not going to be motivated to do anything. So we built the dashboard to motivate action based on what we care about. And so the weights reflect that. And it means your overall score will be pretty low, even if 95% of your people are having an amazing time. If 5% are about 100% of your one of your target groups.
Sara:
Yeah, but I think that that's a very well articulated deep dive into why we do what we do. If you're listening, just to pat yourself on the back, that's not a very effective use of anyone's time or energy, right? Especially when it comes to interpreting top line results. Because if you didn't have those weights appropriately applied to drive the mission and the strategy forward, then the group in which you're trying to make up the greatest difference is not going to be appropriately served. So I thought you had a lot of really interesting points there when it relates to just why we listen to our customers in the first place, which is to be able to identify opportunities to make an impact and improve the experience. And then you you helped really, I think drive home a couple other points when it comes to things like storytelling within the organization and making sure that the strategy for the listening is set up and contextualized for the the ultimate kind of stakeholders and decision makers within the organization from the onset. And then how you provide that storytelling with the data in a way that is manageable and again, continues to progress the original goal. So super interesting work. Why is it that you think, Victor, that when it comes to DEI or certain groups are underrepresented or frequently overlooked? Like how do we just ensure that DEI is part of the strategy in terms of how we're analyzing the data and the feedback that we're requesting from customers?
Victor:
Yeah. You know, I find that the probably best way that I have experienced to ensure that DEI is a part of that work is by making sure we're reflective of the community we're serving. So that could and hopefully does mean that we are hiring and doing diverse hiring and making sure that we reflect that. But but more than that, it actually means, at least for us, that we try to actually do participatory work. So you don't have to be a full time employee working for us, working for our organization, but we are going to work alongside you because ultimately that changes the the notion of our work from being one that is expert led and expert driven, that is based on, I guess, what you might call mainstream institutional knowledge. So the knowledge that you get from doing the CX training, getting a degree in business or design from a book, from a lecture from a professor, et cetera. To other types of knowledge such as esthetic, intuitive, energetic, emotional, lived, experiential, relational community. Et cetera. We're bringing those in and elevating those saying those are really important. And actually those are the knowledges that we tend to study through mainstream institutional. We do a study of that and then we publish reports. So we're just transferring it over. Let's bring those people into it. And I think they bring that lived experience. They bring that focus because they care about themselves. They care about their experiences, they care about their communities. And it just naturally embeds the empathy instead of us having to always chase it and try to keep it within us, which is often fleeting. But by having them on the team and them, they doing the work alongside us and we doing the work alongside them, then it's just naturally embedded and we don't have to work so hard, I think at DEI because it's there on the team.
Sara:
Yeah, it's naturally inherent because it's purposefully sought out when you're thinking through the design of the experience that you're wanting to measure and incorporating that into the upfront of the listening. I can kind of equate that back to there is, of course, industry best practices and scientific principles that have to be applied in CX work. But every organization and the experience that they provide their customers is unique. So making sure that you're framing any of your listening to be very specific to the ways in which your customers experience your organization, and how do you set that up from the onset? Well, it's best to get that from as many from as good of representation of your customer base as you can. So I think of it a lot as like just as you would want to ensure you have cross functional participation in any of the CX design work and or the report out of the results and how we're going to use the results within the organization. It's kind of almost one step further. It's not only just a cross functional mix of of folks on the team, but to to your point, it's how do we ensure that we have the most kind of universal application of perspectives and of shared experiences and different experiences? Et cetera. To to really help give us the, the fullest picture.
Victor:
Yeah. And I think if you think of cross functionality, like bringing different people from different functions together, we actually try to do that with, with customers. So we try to create a qualitatively representative sample, if any kind of characteristic of the customer base, if it were changed, would affect how we would provide the service, how we would design the service. And we want to make sure that that that quality is represented in our group because that that's needed, that's a particular experience, a particular lived experience, particular embodied knowledge that can help direct the work that we do. I think it also, you know, to be honest, changes how we work. Right? So the metaphor that I like to use is a tree. And I'm going to try to avoid academic terms. So let me see if I can be successful. If you think of the root roots of a tree as our ways of being, how we operate our worlds, our realities, how we are in the world, you can think of the trunk as our ways of knowing, right? And that's how how do we know things? And usually that comes from our ways of being. And, you know, in the West and our kind of science based, economy based society, oftentimes the way we know things are through, you know, scientific based methods, through observation, we see knowledge as something out there
Victor:
and we can grab it and and take hold on to it. We often think of objective truths. Et cetera, et cetera. And then from that trunk, our ways of knowing come the branches, our methodologies. And then from the branches come the leaves, the methods. Now, if you work with a particular group of people and they have different ways of knowing, actually different ways of being, maybe they are more relational and maybe we come from a world that might be more transactional, that affects how they know things, right? They may know things through relationship, through relational ways. Et cetera. That affects the methodologies that they might actually use to do things in their world. Because people everyone is always designing. And so that affects the methods. And so that's been also a really interesting ride to experience changes in methodologies and ways of doing things that comes from the communities that you're working with and how they might go about thinking of learning things and improving their experiences as well.
Sara:
Yeah, that's super interesting. And I really like that analogy. I've I've not heard that before, but it also it strikes me as perhaps the the branches or the leaves or the pieces of the tree that you can maybe more effectively find commonalities because they're not as, as rooted or as sturdy as the trunk. Is that a fair assessment, or how do you work to once you receive those differences and take them in, how then do you kind of further integrate that change or bring others along and shared perspectives and blend that into what comes next?
Victor:
Well, we practice, I guess you could call it. A "pluralversal" approach. You could also call call it a multi-guide scene approach or two-eyed seen approach where we have, you know, when we're doing our research, we have multiple streams of research. So we have some research that's desk research, right? We have some people doing that background type of research. We have some people doing quantitative research. We have some people doing qualitative interview based research, some people doing observation based research. But we also have people doing things like positive deviance research, which is, you know, imagine someone hires you to help improve. The staff's experience at a hospital. Actually, they want you to come and help reduce the transmission of communicable diseases among staff. So normally you would say, okay, well, you know, based on how our ways of being and our ways of knowing what I've learned in school, I come and I arrive and I'm the expert, I know how to do this thing. And I am going to research and observe and do interviews. I'm going to synthesize all that and say, okay, this is what I found, and this is what I recommend we do with positive deviance. You say, well, wait a minute, I'm not the expert hospital administrator. Is there anybody here? Even if it's only a few people, any staff here who rarely get sick, and then they think in the hospital administrator says, oh, yeah, it's about 1.5% of our staff that doesn't ever get sick.
Victor:
Why? Hey, could I just go and hang out with them and just kind of watch and observe? I'm like, yeah, sure. And so it transforms it to say, I'm not the expert. Actually, you you have the expertise is already inherent in your community. There might be some blockage that's preventing what some people are doing naturally from transmitting, like that information from transmitting relationally to other people. So all I'm doing is learning. Oh, they use their knuckles when they touch the elevator button or things like that. And so I'm just helping to propagate knowledge that's already inherent in the community throughout the community. It's not coming from my expertise. So we have people that are doing positive deviance work. We have people that are doing relational research. We have people that are doing, I don't even know what you call this analogous research, where they might go to other realms and places in the world where similar activities might happen, like where might you check in? Oh, I might check in at a hotel. I might check in at the airport. So go watch watch what they do there, see if there's anything you can take back and bring to what we're doing.
Victor:
You know, we have all these different streams that come out of different ways of being, and then we just say, where do things line up, you know, and where things line up. We have a real good confidence in those findings where things don't line up or disagree. Then we're like, okay, let's look deeper into that. Why did this stream find this finding and this stream have this opposite finding. And we dig into that. And that gives us further direction for research, which can help us then improve the customer experience. So it's it's a really it's a really beautiful approach. We have multiple streams of things going at the same time. Sometimes we have we do two groups of people doing the same thing. Right. So this is triangulation, but not in terms of the method. This is triangulation of the investigator, of the people, of the researchers, of the designers, of the specialist, experienced specialists. And then you try to see, do they come to the same result? Do they come to the same finding? Are they recommending the same thing? And when they do, we have greater confidence in that. And if they don't, then we dig into that as well. So we practice kind of a multi eyed approach or a pluriverse approach.
Sara:
Victor. I think that those are all really interesting approaches, especially towards getting, you know, in the up front of the design process of the experience that you ultimately want to deliver. Can any of those approaches apply, maybe say, after the fact, meaning we have some sort of listening, be it a survey or some other form of data collection in place, and we're analyzing the feedback potentially by various segments and say, hey, the experience looks like it's going well for this group, but we have not such a great experience within this secondary group. And can you apply some of those same kind of dig in principles as far as positive deviance or exploratory understanding, to try to get to maybe where some of those gaps exist today and move towards actioning in an equitable manner amongst groups, or help us maybe understand a little bit more for those listening who are potentially already in motion with some of their listening and wants to, instead of reverting and starting from square one, make kind of consistent improvements in how they go about supporting potentially groups that are not as positive at this point.
Victor:
Yeah, that's a great point because you don't have to be at any particular point. We don't think of it as a politics of arrival. You have conquered. You have reached the pinnacle. This is really a question of just asking yourself, am I moving in the direction? Are we moving in a particular direction? So you want to ask yourself, what's the one thing I can do to make us more, more ethical, more just, more equitable, more participatory? Et cetera. And then begin to do that. So it's a direction based thing, a journey based approach. Um, one of the things that I would say, like when you're looking at data, for instance, oftentimes when I was in the private sector, even sometimes in the nonprofit or academic sector, you would look at some data and then you would say, well, we could help the most people by doing X, right, based on the analysis of the data. But sometimes to answer your question, when you have a group of people, right, who are helping to do this work and they come from a different way of being, it's kind of… It almost leads to what some people might call a more inclusive approach in that in some communities, actually, the thing you choose is to help the minority, to help the small percentage of people who are hurting. It's almost like the human body, like you get a cut and all of a sudden your body focuses blood and resources to sealing up that cut and dealing with any kind of foreign bodies that enter through the cut.
Victor:
Et cetera. It's like a focused approach as opposed to, well, that's only like 1.5%. That's only five, 5.5%. I'm not going to worry about it. It's like, no, because we're relationally minded, every individual is part of the whole. And if you're hurt, we're hurt. So let's focus on this and do that work. And then what we often talk about in inclusive design is that actually when you do work for the minority, the the one that is in need, etcetera, it actually ends up benefiting everyone in kind of ways that you didn't expect. So that's an example of like through analysis and trying to decide what to do, how we might end up at a different place than we would have using other ways of thinking about how you approach change and improving the experience, because you're looking at what's going to help the biggest number as opposed to what might help the one that needs the most help or is most in need, and how that would affect because there are people that think of their experience. And again, it depends on your community. You might have a community of people, a customer base where everyone thinks of their experience individually. So I'm really speaking of doing the work based on the ways of being and knowing of the customer base you're working with. And there are customer groups, especially in the government where I work, where they actually think of their sense of being, their identity relationally.
Victor:
So I am okay if my family is okay. I am okay if my community is okay. I'm okay if my. So so we have to then that that changes how we work. We have to think about that and that changes kind of how we do the work we do. We don't always in the in the federal government, there are lots of services where we don't have the ability, nor do we want the ability to be able to say, oh, well, look, we can do well, we can make money by focusing on the 75% here. Often in the public sector, we have a mandate, for instance, the US Postal Service. You must deliver the mail to everyone. That has a physical, even if they're on a mountain, if they're near the beach, if they're deep in the woods, that is the mandate. So there's not the opportunity to say, well, this one's a little too hard. We'll just leave that alone. We have to get to everyone. And, you know, that's an example of a really broad. There are other services, but, you know, they focus on specific groups, but everyone in that group must be reached with this health service, with this housing service, with this benefit service. Et cetera. Et cetera. So it's a different it's a different kind of understanding when you're doing it from the social impact space.
Sara:
Yeah. But I think you did make some really interesting points. Regardless, I know for the federal government specifically and other industries like health care, where there would be requirements to ensure that you're not leaving certain groups behind just because it would be more difficult to to make up some ground in terms of the experience that you're providing. But I do think an earlier point you made around how improving the experience for a subset who's not necessarily the largest or who's not going to maybe have the most financial impact in terms of the actions that you apply, can still lift up the overall experience. And perhaps the overall reputation or brand of the organization is a really interesting kind of facet and dynamic for ways to think about DEI, particularly for our listeners that are in the private space where maybe it's not as much of that kind of 1 to 1 requirement of their program, but still a greater goal for the work that they're doing, which I think inherently CX everyone who's in this industry is in it because they believe in providing a better experience for their customers and the stakeholders that they serve. So I do think we're all united in a in a broader mission of sorts. But of course, everyone has different metrics and goals and objectives that they're be be held to by their organization. But I just thought that was a really interesting component of some of the equity play in terms of how do you get DEI better laced into your programs and and how do you think about it, if maybe that's not the direct goal that you've been given in terms of running within your organization.
Victor:
Yeah. I mean, if you if you were to follow some of the mandates that we have in the federal government, you might naturally just think, okay, well, this one says I have to measure this. So let me measure my customer experience and report that and try to improve it. And this one says I have to measure that okay. So let me measure my equity and try to improve that. And instead I think what we're trying to do is to measure an equitable customer experience is one thing. And I think it works better. It's it's a beautiful goal. It naturally builds in equity. And so the way you improve your customer experience is through equity. You have to be equitable. But a good example of the of the thinking of how someone might identify relationally and how providing for a person without providing for other people might affect that person's experience is the work that we do, for instance, in child welfare, right? So you have a group of three siblings. Whose parents are incapacitated, incapacitated in some way and are not able to help shepherd their upbringing. So you're trying to place them in foster homes, and it's actually really, really tough on the children who have already developed a bond and have learned to lean on each other when no one else was there, and when they didn't necessarily have other family around to separate them.
Victor:
Like, and wait a minute. But I've put you I've put you in a house, you have a home now, you have you a your foster parents want to adopt you. This is great, isn't it? But because they're not with their siblings, especially because this, the one that's getting put in the house, is an older one and really cares for the young. You know, it just kind of messes. Or maybe they're the younger one and they really want to have their older siblings with them because they think relationally, like in a family unit. And so we we want to make sure we're doing things that speak to where the people are, not just from our universal, lofty understanding of what the good life is and the good life how people define it. What it looks like is different from people to people, from group to group, sometimes from individual to individual. So that's where that that lived experiential knowledge is really, really important and understanding what they identify as as good and what a good experience means.
Sara:
Absolutely. Do you think, you know, as we're we're wrapping up our conversation today, do you think that that is is best understood and best applied through things like design research and service design research up front, or how do we better appreciate every individual customer's unique experience so that we can have that lens when it comes to interpreting the feedback they're providing, and ultimately helping craft shape those experiences that the company is delivering. How do we get that such a personalized viewpoint into the consideration process at that more macro level? I feel like that's a really hard challenge.
Victor:
It's a very hard challenge. And research sounds good. Design research sounds good. Nothing wrong with that. You know, it's a particular way of approaching it. There are other approaches. Specifically, I like to think about economics, so bear with me for a moment. I have done a lot of social work over the years. Particularly the two biggest areas are work around homelessness, so working with people who are experiencing homelessness. And I've also been a health and trauma crisis counselor. Now, what I've noticed over the years, I kind of realized this on my own and then found a few people who came to the same realization is that when I was working with people who would be described as living in poverty, I realized that wait a minute. Poverty isn't what I thought it was, right? Because if I asked a group of people, maybe many of the listeners who were here, how long would it take you if I took away your job, your money, your house? How long would it take you to find food? How long would it take you to find a place to sleep? How long would it take you to find a new job? Usually when I ask that question with groups, most people will say, well, I could probably get some food in a few hours. I could probably find a place to sleep by that same day, by that night, and I could probably find a job then a few months. And I ask why? And they say, well, because, you know, I have a friend who is over here and my sister's over there, and and then I have this former colleague who has a job and they've been wanting, you know, they basically have a social safety net.
Victor:
Right. And so I realized, well, poverty isn't the absence of money. Poverty is the absence of healthy relationships. Another way to say this is poverty is the absence of healthy relationships through which money flows. But you could say the same thing for any other resource. It doesn't have to be money. Right? So, for instance, ignorance isn't the absence of knowledge. Ignorance is the absence of healthy relationships through which knowledge, a different resource flows. So the reason that we go out and we do extractive research, right, is because we don't have the relationships where that's flowing. So I have experienced. Something. What? I mean, you could call it relational design, relational research. But again, that's using the words research and design. That might come from a more Western framing. But the point is that when we have healthy relationships with the people we're serving that are just ongoing and continual, we get that continual flow of information of of how things are going, how their life is going, what's going on. And that's just always there. We don't have to have a special set time boxed research thing, because we have those really strong relationships, and we're getting that information throughout day to day, week to week, month to month. So we have done some of that work and that's been been really, really, really important and positive. But when you don't have strong relationships, we need to go out and kind of, you know, ask questions and interview. Et cetera. Because we're not in relationship with them. And that information isn't flowing. So yeah, there are lots of ways to approach it.
Sara:
Yeah. And I think maybe one positive there is that the worst thing you could be doing is not listening. So being out there, listening, getting better, developing that trust over time, you're only going to get smarter with the insights that you're provided and be able to develop that dynamic that will allow for some of those rich insights, and to ensure that you've got the equity and the experiences that you're providing and that you're really, truly serving your stakeholders.
Victor:
Definitely.
Sara:
All right. Well, we've come to the point in the podcast, Victor, where we try to distill, you know, a lot of the great insights and thought provoking content that you've you've left our listeners with. If you had to kind of boil it down to maybe one tip, one trick for how to better incorporate DEI into a program, what would you recommend our listeners consider to make a positive impact on those efforts?
Victor:
Make it more participatory. Invite customers and employees to work on the employee experience, but invite customers to be on the team. And ultimately, when you do, make sure to pay them equitably because they're often giving up time away from a job or two jobs or no job, but time they could be using to find a job to do that work. So let their embodied knowledge, their lived experience help in driving improvements in their own experience.
Sara:
A great tip. Well, thank you so much, Victor, for being here today. We've really appreciated it. I think it's been a great episode for our leaders to to take and put into practice, and it just is, I think, a good embodiment, a good testament to all of the work that everyone in this industry sets out to do in terms of improving customer experience. So really appreciate the time.
Victor:
Thank you. Appreciate it Sara. It's been it's been good.
Sara:
Victor, so we've had a lot of great dialog today. I'm sure we've left many listeners wanting more. If any of our audience were looking to reach out, get in touch, maybe ask you a couple of questions. Would it be on LinkedIn? How's the what's the best way for them to contact you?
Victor:
Yeah, LinkedIn is perfect. Just to remember, if you don't add a note when you make a connection to me on LinkedIn, I probably won't respond. So I'm trying to be very disciplined and say yes to people I actually know. So if I don't know, you just add a note as a point of introduction and I'll accept that and we can start talking. Oh, by the way, LinkedIn doesn't allow you to add a note if you do it on a mobile. So you got to use a laptop.
Sara:
All right. Victor Odawa is the service design lead at the CDC. If you want to talk about anything you heard on this podcast or how Walker can help your businesses customer experience, feel free to email us at podcast@walkerinfo.com. Remember to give The CX Leader Podcast a rating for your podcast service and leave us a review. Your feedback will help us improve the show and deliver the best possible value to you, our listener. Check out our website cxleaderpodcast.com to follow the show and find all our previous episodes, podcast series and a link to our blog which we update regularly and contact information so you can let us know how we're doing. The CX Leader Podcast is a production of Walker. We're an experience management firm that helps companies accelerate their XM success. You can read more about us at walkerinfo.com. Thank you for listening and remember, it's a great time to be a CX leader. We'll see you next time.
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Tags: Sara Walker diversity equity inclusion Victor Udoewa CDC DEI metrics