INTRODUCTION & CONTEXT

In the course of this paper, the authors will present a case study of applying ethnographic methods to create a shared organizational understanding of customer needs and experiences as a means to bring about significant shift in organizational perspective and mindset. The authors will also present an overview of the organizational context for this effort and highlight key elements of the process, of the outcome, and of lessons learned. The ideas and analysis presented here represent an integrated perspective of an internal team player and outside consultants working in partnership to bring about this organizational change.

Ethnography has grown in prominence and popularity in the years since its initial introduction into business settings.¹ As it has become a more accepted research approach, there has been a growing awareness that the understanding it fosters (through depth of information and in situ exposure to customer needs) may have power to create shifts in how organizations interact with customers.² This shift is not only a function of better meeting customer needs through an emic understanding of their experiences, but also of potential re-alignment and re-configuring of organizations’ internal cultures, languages, and organizational structures. It is to this latter point that the authors turned their attention in mid 2010.

As with most research studies, this one began with a clearly-articulated set of objectives. We set out to identify the following about the multichannel customer experience:

• How customers navigate touchpoints in ways that do and don’t meet their needs
• Positive and negative elements of the multichannel experience that should be reinforced or corrected / guarded against
• New opportunities to combine or leverage each channel’s strengths and appropriateness for different steps along the customer’s journey

A secondary set of objectives had organizationally-focused outcomes–to shift the bank’s culture toward a more customer-centric perspective. The ethnography was a platform on which to foster cross-group interactions and build new relationships between group members through the process of co-creative meaning making and collaborative negotiation. Ultimately, the research represented a first step to collaboration across silos as well as a mechanism through which to introduce user-centered thinking and build appreciation for a service design approach.³

In hindsight, reviewing the project dynamics and the team’s emphasis over the course of the initiative, it became clear to the authors that the primary, more explicit, research objectives commanded the lion’s share of attention from the team. To our credit, we emerged with high quality insights that the stakeholders bought into, but upon reflection, we might have been better prepared to gain ground against the organizational objectives had there been a more intentional and regular focus on specifically addressing them. While the team conducted weekly status and progress reviews against the primary research objectives, the organizational objectives were not allotted equal attention. In a sense, we thought the inclusive ethnographic research process could speak for itself and the experience of participation would do the work of translating perspectives and fostering a service design orientation. We now realize that by orchestrating a broader, ecosystem view of the customer experience in a siloed organization, we found ourselves navigating massive organizational change issues and implications without an explicit charter or well-articulated process for doing so.⁴ Our experience suggests that ethnographers may increasingly be called upon to help organizations become more customer-focused and, thus, will need to be aware of the implications of playing a broader role and develop parallel consulting skills to diagnose organizational culture, develop cohesive cross functional teams and facilitate through resistance.

“THIS IS OUR SECRET SAUCE”

The first thing that Robin Beers, one of the authors of this paper, did when she joined Wells Fargo’s Internet Services Group (ISG) as the Manager of User Research in 2004, was to embark on the group’s first internally conducted ethnographic research project. For three weeks, she took designers and business strategists on the road to observe and talk to people about how they managed their finances. From that point on, ethnographic studies were undertaken each year to investigate a variety of topics related to consumer financial planning and management. The findings from these studies became baked into reusable user centered design tools and influenced product strategy and design across many projects.⁵ More subtly, but perhaps more importantly, the incorporation of an ethnographic approach to understanding customers contributed to developing and evolving a customer-centric culture within the Internet Services Group at Wells Fargo because it allowed us to bring real people’s faces, stories and needs to the table. So, when ISG’s Leader joined his peers in a senior leadership Multichannel Steering Committee that was tasked with developing a multichannel strategy for sales and service, he recommended starting with ethnographic research to understand the current multichannel customer experience.

Though this leader had a traditional business background, he had come to see ethnographic research and user-centered design as the Internet Group’s “secret sauce” – that is, a structured approach for bringing the customer to the table and creating positive experiences through understanding their needs, goals and tasks. ISG is essentially a technology company inside of a large bank and, as such, the group’s perspective, methods and tools are oriented towards prototyping, iterating and building online services. Within ISG, research methods like ethnography, participatory design, and usability testing – and tools, like personas and task models – are used to design around customer’s goals and tasks. The group’s leader believed that user-centered design processes and methods could be applied and extended to designing better multichannel experiences (both online and offline), and his goal was to bring this way of thinking about customer experience and holistic problem-solving to the rest of the Enterprise. The first step to developing user-centered design competencies was to understand the current multichannel experience via ethnographic research. The other channel leaders representing branch, ATM, phone channels and the deposits and debit card product groups agreed to take part, if not entirely enthusiastically.

“WHAT DO YOU MEAN?”

The typical timeframe to conduct an ethnographic study within the Internet Services Group is about four months from planning to insights. The multichannel ethnography took place over nine months, due to the intense socialization and educational component upfront. The first three were focused on pitching and selling the project to stakeholders across all channel groups. We knew that this socialization effort was critical to the success of the research. This process turned out to be an indicator of the challenges we would face throughout the project. In presenting our case for conducting ethnographic research, we developed a pitch deck that became a kind of boundary object for people’s assumptions about the initiative and how it should be positioned with the wider stakeholder group (Star & Griesemer, 1989). As it made its way around the various stakeholders, it went through many rounds of vetting and iterating, with some stakeholder feedback conflicting with other member’s opinions (Carlile, 2002).

The presentation was designed intentionally to look unlike the bank’s typical decks; it contained lots of pictures of people, bright colors and some visual models. We wanted to be clear from the outset that ethnographic inquiry was not the usual business-centric approach, but rather invited new ways of thinking and seeing. One visual model (Figure 1.) depicted how we would use insights from behavioral analytics in conjunction with ethnography to identify opportunities. When the deck was passed along to the business team for review, they had trouble “reading” the visual and replaced the model with a typical, chevron-shaped process model (Figure 2.). To them the funnel looked too loose – like the process of generating opportunities would go on and on forever with no end point.

FIGURE 1. AFTER

FIGURE 2. AFTER

It was clear that the way information was depicted, and the choice of words, would be as important as the communication itself. The inherent challenges in transferring knowledge across functional boundaries are tied to developing a syntax, the vocabulary. and semantic, the interpretation, approaches to communicating that aids in the processing of information and insures a quality exchange (Carlile, 2002).

Decentralization figures prominently in the bank’s traditional structure with channels and lines of businesses operating as almost separate entities and “running their business like they own it.” These functional groups also develop unique contextual knowledge and frames for reacting to situations, interpreting events, and solving problems. As such, there are boundaries (often referred to as silos) between these entities, with differences in practice, perspectives, cultures, language, terminology, experiences, and epistemic styles. The result is that groups form vastly different ideas, opinions, beliefs, values, and assumptions about how the world works and what is important. (Crossan et al, 1999, p. 529). Boundaries can prevent knowledge transfer and collaborative problem solving and reinforce competition between groups. Collaboration across silos means confronting and crossing these boundaries. The mechanism for traversing boundaries is communication which allows participants to broker their different perspectives and effectively translate terminology (Bechky, 1999; Bijker, 1987; Dougherty, 1992; Liedtka, 1999; Nahapiet, & Ghoshal,, 1998; Wenger, 1998).

So, as we moved further along in the vetting process, it was not uncommon for meetings to be taken up with lengthy discussions of what was meant by the terms “communication,” “service,” “interaction,” or “touchpoint.” We found ourselves negotiating the conveyed meaning and different interpretations of graphics and terminology at every interaction as well as authority concerning who could best determine how ethnography would be positioned. As experienced ethnographers, we wanted to lead the facilitation but we were also cognizant of the fact that this research was being conducted within the context of a larger multichannel initiative and complicated organizational politics were at play.

The bank is comprised of 85 different businesses and each is rewarded separately and according to their specific goals. Groups were not accustomed to thinking about or attending to the customer’s journey across touchpoints. In addition, a sales-driven culture forms the bank’s “power core,”⁶ with sales-optimized channels enjoying primacy within the touchpoint ecosystem and service-oriented channels viewed as sales-support and service cost centers. The result is an environment characterized by complexity, little collaboration between groups, and focus within groups on increasing revenue generated by sales and reducing service costs.

The context in which we set out to educate stakeholders on the value of ethnography was doubly challenging due to these factors and the fact that the ethnographic approach was strange and unfamiliar to many within the multichannel initiative. Ethnographic research emerges out of a different worldview than the numbers-centric one that most business functions come from and we were often asked: