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Debbie LevittAny business you ask will claim to be focused on their customers’ needs. But it can be hard to find companies that embody actual customer centricity in their design and business processes.
Debbie Levitt helps companies discover the actual pathways that their customers are taking and shows them how they can help customers accomplish the tasks that move them along their journey.
We talked about:
- her work as a CX/UX consultant
- her definition and description of a customer journey map
- how to get out of your own head and into your customer’s with sound research methods
- how agile and lean practitioners have strayed from the original customer-focused conceptions of those practices
- the importance of discerning whether a company actually truly cares about customer centricity
- pragmatic ways of connecting customer centricity to other business prerogatives
- how to find stakeholders in your organization who are likely to be your allies
- how to identify the actual customer problems that need to be solved
- her growing interest in task analysis alongside of customer journey mapping and other practices
- the wide range of information that you can discover with task analysis
- the importance of focusing on observational methods when doing task analysis
- her new book on Knowledge Oriented UX Design
Debbie’s bio
Debbie Levitt, MBA, is the CXO of Delta CX, and since the mid-1990s has been a CX and UX consultant focused on strategy, research, training, and Human-Centered Design/User-Centered Design. She’s a change agent and business design consultant focused on helping companies of all sizes transform towards customer-centricity while using principles of Agile and Lean.
She has worked in various CX and UX leadership and individual contributor roles at companies including Wells Fargo, Macy’s, StepStone, Sony Mobile, and Constant Contact. In the 2010s, San Francisco UX and marketing agencies had Debbie on speed dial. She completed projects for Traction, Fjord, LIFT, Rauxa, ROI·DNA, and Fiddlehead.
Clients have given her the nickname, “Mary Poppins,” because she flies in, improves everything she can, sings a few songs, and flies away to her next adventure.
Her new book, “Customers Know You Suck,” (2022) is the customer-centricity how-to manual.
Outside of CX work, and sometimes during CX work, Debbie enjoys singing symphonic prog goth metal, opera, and New Wave. You can also catch her on the Delta CX YouTube channel.
Connect with Debbie online
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 140. Every business on the planet claims to care about their customers. But finding companies that truly, actually embody customer centricity in their design and business processes is surprisingly difficult. Debbie Levitt helps companies discover the actual pathways that their customers are taking and shows them how they can help those customers accomplish the tasks that move them along their journey.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hey everyone. Welcome to episode number 140 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really happy today to have with us Debbie Levitt. Debbie is best known as the Mary Poppins of CX and UX. She also has an official job title. She’s the Chief Experience Officer at her consultancy, Delta CX. Welcome, Debbie. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you’re up to these days.
Debbie:
Yeah, thank you so much. And hello listeners and watchers. I’m Debbie Levitt, and mostly I am doing CX and UX projects, training, and consulting. So sometimes it’s just a CX/UX research project for somebody. Sometimes we’re going into companies and helping them be more customer centric or elevating their UX practice. So it really ranges, but these are the things that I do and people can learn more at deltacx.com.
Larry:
Cool, thanks. And the way I discovered you was through one of those… You do a lot of outreach around this as well and have an amazing YouTube channel that I’ll link to-
Debbie:
Thank you.
Larry:
… for folks who are curious. But the thing that in particular has been on my mind a lot lately, and the way I discovered you was that you did a video with UXPressia on customer journey mapping, and there was so much to like about that video. I’ll link to that as well in the show notes. But one of the things I just, well, I think there’s so much about customer journey mapping. One is that it’s too often in many people’s experience conflated with sales funnels turned on their side, I think, or something like that. So I wonder, I would love to just get your definition and description of what a customer journey map is and in particular, what a good one looks like.
Debbie:
Yeah, definitely. I think very often customer journey maps suffer from, like you said, either being the business’s perspective of the customer’s journey, like, oh, it’s awareness to advocacy, or it’s the sales funnel. And so that’s the first mistake people are making is we’re not even seeing the customer’s journey through the customer’s eyes, which should be a sin, somehow. It should be illegal. So that’s one of the key problems, I think, with customer journey maps, and I hope people will watch that video even at 1.5x or 2x, but it was a really fun look at what you should look for in a customer journey map to make sure yours isn’t garbage. Because I think another common problem with them would be, we guess at them. It’s amazing how many of them are guessed at or made up and only a small percentage of the ones that are guessed at and made up say that at the top. They say “assumptions” or “assumptive” and we’re not even being clear and honest when we’ve guessed and made stuff up.
Debbie:
So I think very often customer journey maps are, unfortunately, garbage. They should be a representation of that end-to-end customer journey from the moment the customer or potential customer, user, partner, whoever this is, from the moment they might need something or someone like what your company or business offers, to after they’re done with you. And I think very often a customer journey map looks at a little slice of what they did before they got there because someone’s thinking about marketing and SEO and then they look at your time in their ecosystem, and everything that happens before and after is often ignored. So we don’t have to go too deep into it because that was a great video covering a lot of these things, but those are some of the key problems I tend to see with customer journey maps.
Larry:
It occurs to me that one of the things in there is cultivating among all concerned genuine customer centricity and curiosity about them, whereas people often have in their silo and they have their obligations as a product person or an engineer or designer or writer, whatever their role is. And how do you get people out of their professional practice concerns and more into the customer’s actual head?
Debbie:
Yeah, I think the best way for that is going to be making sure that we’re conducting qualitative research, whether that’s early generative discovery, exploratory research where we’re observing people doing things, we’re talking to them of course in a good UX research method, à la UX research method, and asking the right questions. And then of course, testing and evaluation, where again, we’re watching people use a thing and we’re trying to determine if it’s right. And I think that when those studies are planned correctly and we get our teammates to observe them live, not run the session or ask the questions, but observe them live or even watch the recordings later, sometimes it’s hard to keep telling yourself the same stories, or lies, about the user once you’ve seen them and you’re going, “Oh holy cats, this was not what I thought at all.” But again, it all comes back to the quality of the research, which includes asking the right questions, bringing in the right people.
Debbie:
We have a client who I saw hire a company to do research, so, of course, you hope you’re hiring an agency, you hope they’re going to do really excellent research. And the agency went and found eight people of basically the same age in basically the same city making basically the same amount of money. And I thought that sounded like a bit of a homogenous group and it wasn’t really going to give us a good look at this audience. It was probably going to be a bit skewed. So we just have to be careful that when we do conduct research that it’s not the fastest research we can do or the least research we can do, but that we’re also considering the quality of that research so that we can get the evidence and information that will help our teams make better strategies, better decisions, and ultimately better products and services.
Larry:
You’re reminding me, we have something there that you said in your book, I didn’t mention that at the start, but Customers Know You Suck is the title of your book and one of the things in there, something you just said, sorry, reminded me of something you said in the book about… Wait, it’s going to come back to me. Oh, you’re kind of critique or observations about agile and lean practices, is that related to that notion of quality, is that notion of moving quickly and… Anyhow, can you talk a little bit about that?
Debbie:
Yeah, sure. I think when we think about how fast we’re trying to go at our companies, I think it partially comes from people who read The Lean Startup and thought, oh wow, in 2008 or 2011 or whatever, many years ago, it was super cool for a startup to just go as fast as they could and show potential investors they could do things. And then partially from incorrect implementations of Agile and Lean. Because if we look at Agile and things like the original Agile Manifesto, it calls for great design. It calls for focusing on customer satisfaction. Lean, the original definition of lean, not the Lean Startup version, the original definition of Lean calls for delivering value to the customer as the customer perceives that value, not by what we think is valuable. Lean talks about finding risks and waste and mitigating these early and amazingly, I feel like we’re not doing any of that.
Debbie:
I feel like we don’t truly care about customer satisfaction. We throw them the least minimally viable thing we can and we claim it’s good enough and maybe we’ll fix it later. Definitely the way these things have been interpreted and implemented are not quality focused. The only place where we still have a quality focus is in our code. Okay, we’re going to write some code and then we’re going to have QA check it, because we want to have quality code and not release bugs. But yet when it comes to the actual concept, the solution, the thing we want to deliver to people, we don’t seem to want to test that. We don’t seem to want to vet that. We think that the best way to test that is to have six to 10 people build it for weeks or months and then figure out how close we got.
Debbie:
And it’s incredibly wasteful and incredibly reactive, and I’m just amazed that more people haven’t figured that out. I know Agile was exciting when we were first talking about it because it was so different than taking a year and a half to release a thing. So it was exciting. Maybe we’ll release a little piece of a thing every month. Wow. Okay. But it’s now 10, 20 years later for many companies trying to do some version of Agile. And we should be now looking back and saying, okay, we’re faster, but how’s our quality? How are we at satisfying customers and keeping them? Are they loyal? Are they naturally loyal to us or do we have to offer them discounts and tap dance and apologize? So there’s such a huge arc here. It’s hard to talk about in a small amount of time, which is why I have a book about it. But these are some of the things that I think about and that I tend to bring up when I’m talking to companies like, “Okay, Agile, what’s that mean to you? And what should it mean?”
Larry:
Yeah, no, and as you talk about that, it’s interesting to me that so much of that is about incremental, the whole notion of iteration and small task accomplishment, moving things forward, but design doesn’t exactly work that way and customer satisfaction is never experienced that way. For them it’s just like the whole gestalti holistic look at the thing. Do you do tricks for, not tricks, but methods or techniques or you’ve mentioned the importance of qualitative research. I can see this being a big part of it, but how else can you get that more holistic, genuinely customer-centric impression of things, I guess?
Debbie:
Well, I mean, it really all starts with your company deciding they want that, because I’ve certainly seen companies who claim to want that and really didn’t. And so we have to be first considering, does the company I’m working at really care about its customers? Many of them don’t. Or can we find some allies in executives and leaders who do care about customers? Sometimes it’s the sales people because they can’t make the sale. Sometimes it’s the marketing people because we have customers we see as not loyal because they leave us because we suck. So I think that before we can get too wrapped up in this, we have to figure out, will this company make any small or large changes? Because I’ve seen so many people burn out and get frustrated that they’ve tried so hard to get people around them to care about the customer and see things from their eyes and whatever they’re calling it this week and still nobody cared.
Debbie:
I’m convinced that all the empathy we talk about is completely fake. We don’t have any empathy for people, let’s just admit it. But I hope we at least have care. Maybe we have sympathy, maybe we have money driven care and sympathy, but we have to figure out where does our company stand on this? Because I don’t want to see people, not purple, purple’s great. I don’t want to see people burned out over trying to make these changes that might not happen. You have to figure out what is the, they used to say burning platform, but someone felt that that was probably a little bit too negative and violent to say, so we’re shifting that one, but what is the driving reason to be more customer-centric?
Debbie:
And I think for starters, we have to find ways to tie that to better strategies, better decisions, more efficient projects that are not cycles of guesses and cycles of, ah no, I hope this one works out better. I hope B is better than A. A sucked, and now I’m guessing that B’s better. Oh, B was worse? I know so little about our customers that I made something worse than what we have? So we think we’re in these cycles of doing things fast, like AB testing, and it’s amazing how much of that is just total dartboard guessing adventures. So again, much longer potential answers here, but I know we have a lot of topics to get through in a short amount of time.
Larry:
Well, yeah, but there’s two things I want to follow up on that is one, I’m just really curious because you’re a person who’s had access to the C-suite in the executive level, and I’m curious, how frequently do you have success at convincing people to actually do the organizational things that actually make an organization more customer-centric? Do you have success stories there?
Debbie:
I have found that the success is tied really to what I just said, which is can we tie customer centricity to other things we’re trying to do, in companies where they just measure how much should people click this button? And if people click the button more, celebrities rejoice, and if clicks are down this month, oh my God, let’s fire some people or something. So if you have a company that is only looking at those types of vanity or business metrics, they don’t like to change because they tend to think we make money because people click this button. Don’t tell us to do anything other than drive clicks to this button or drive people through this funnel in this way. And they don’t want to rethink the funnel. They don’t want to see the funnel from the user’s perspective. They don’t even want to think about how the user got there or anything.
Debbie:
So I’ve had definitely mixed success. I’ve had total failures where people brought me in, they paid me noticeable money, I gave them all of my suggestions and strategies and roadmaps and whatever, and they did a little of it. I’ve never had anybody do none of it, but I’ve definitely have had a lot of companies sweep under the rug the larger problems that I brought up, they took care of some of the smaller problems. Hey, you don’t have a big enough UX team. Okay, we’ll open up some jobs there. Congratulations. It still sucks to work there. You’re still completely dominated by a crappy VP of product who is so bad, people are literally quitting just because of this person. What should we do with that guy? They promoted him.
Debbie:
And so I think that I can talk all day about, oh, customer centricity and here’s why it’s important. But that’s why I said we have to check if anybody even cares, because in the companies that are not tying customer satisfaction and retention to the customer experience, then they’re unlikely to care about CX and UX teams, CX and UX work, hiring professionals, bringing in content strategists. But if they see success as, well, the sales team brought in people. Hey, marketing wrote some cool things, that brought in people. Success. If they’re not willing to look at the longer arc of the customer experience and care that people are dissatisfied and care that they’re leaving or wish they could leave, then it’s a place where it’s going to be hard to make change.
Debbie:
The places where I have made change have been in, let’s just call it more trouble. We’re running out of money. Our investors are wondering why we’re not successful yet. They have had more impetus to look at themselves and really try to become better because there was someone they had to be accountable to. Some of these other companies, especially pretty much the larger they get, the less they want to change because someone says, “Hey, we’re a squillion dollar company because this is the way we do it and this must be working.” And is it working? Yes and no. Nobody wants to look at the “no” side of that.
Debbie:
So again, that’s why I tell people, it’s great to try to make change where you are and to talk about customer centricity and talk about the risk mitigation and the customer and business intelligence and better strategies and decisions and efficiency. But don’t be surprised if kind of nobody cares, because even though you’re telling them there’s a path to happier customers and more money and whatever, it doesn’t compute for some people. They just see you spending money and they think we only make money with more marketing.
Larry:
Yeah, no, and I totally get that dynamic and the way you just described it, you can see that does sound like there are some success stories to point to, but I think the more common situation might be a lot of people, among my listeners, I fear, who are stuck in organizations that need customer centricity but don’t have the executive backing for it. Are there like guerrilla approaches or the leading from the bottom kind of approaches that work in this area?
Debbie:
Ultimately we have to find the allies who in some way are being held accountable or responsible for this. For example, somebody is being held accountable or responsible in small or large ways for customers who leave us. When we lose existing customers because they cancel or they downgrade or they quit or whatever it might be or they don’t come shop with us again, somebody is in trouble. Sometimes it’s marketing, sometimes it’s sales, sometimes it’s some sort of strategic department, sometimes it’s a product manager or product CPO or product VP. Find the people whose heads are figuratively on a block when we don’t meet some of our goals, when we don’t keep our customers, when we don’t make more sales, when we don’t sell more licenses, those people might be inspired to try some new things and you just have to remind them, we’re not changing the whole company overnight. We just want to take a few teams or a part of the product and try working this different way.
Debbie:
Yes, it’s a way of working that takes a little bit longer because it’s more focused on quality, so it’s going to take a little longer than we’re used to, but we should have something at the end of it that is much better, if not extremely exciting, much better than what we’re doing now. And see if that person is willing to experiment a little and give you that time and budget, even for one team or one product area. And I’ll quickly say, one mistake that I see a lot of people come to me and they go, “Hey, I’m hearing from marketing or other people that they really want to see more sales come through our online checkout, so I’m going to work on a checkout optimization project.” And I know you’ve just met me, but what do you think I tell them? Can you guess?
Larry:
I’m going to guess that you suggest that they back up into the journey map and see if all the necessary prerequisite to that checkout have been addressed in a customer-centric way?
Debbie:
Pretty much. You win. Yes. Thank you. That was wonderful. Basically, I tell them, look, sure your checkout could be improved, but chances are it’s not your problem. Chances are if you go back and look at your Google Analytics or your Microsoft Clarity or your funnel or however you’re tracking this stuff, chances are you are losing a monster amount of people at the homepage, at the search and search results, at the individual product page. It’s probably not the checkout. So why don’t you spin up a project to really figure out where you’re losing people and really improve that, that’s going to make somebody look really good and you have to partner with that person.
Debbie:
Again, could be a marketing person, could be a product executive. Sometimes it’s even sales, but partner with that person and say, “I’m on a mission to make you look good. What is going to help? What’s going to make you look really good? What can we do? And can we get some money for that? And can we get a few months? This isn’t something I can do in two weeks. Can we get a couple of months for some research and some fresh design, then give it to engineering. So another month or whatever. This is really a project for a quarter, possibly even longer. But I’m on a personal mission to make you look good by increasing our sales or getting us more leads or whatever it is.” So I think we just have to remember, sometimes people say, “Well check out optimization is low hanging fruit.”
Debbie:
Okay, but if you move the needle, the size of the needle, people are not necessarily going to be impressed and say, “Oh wow, look what customer centricity delivered.” Look at where you can make a noticeable change. And sometimes, depending upon the size of a company, a noticeable change is half a percent or 1%. You don’t have to grow something by 20%. You can start out conservatively and say, “What if we grew this by 1%? How would that change anything?” For some people, that would really be a big deal. I worked two years at Macy’s, they’ve ate their hats over 1% and half a percent because of the amount of money Macy’s was dealing in.
Larry:
When you’re that mature of an organization… Hey, and as you’re telling that story, I was reminded of something else that you said a couple times in that video I referred to earlier, where you talked about that these days you’re more interested in the task analysis or as much if not more interested in task analysis as you are in the overall customer journey. Yeah.
Debbie:
For sure. So obviously when it comes to a customer’s journey, there are many ways to research it or not research it and guess at it. And then there are many ways to visualize it or represent it. And we’ve got plenty of options. People are making customer journey maps. Some people make storyboards, some people make flowcharts, some people make service blueprints where they also look at what’s happening in the company and tie that in. But task analysis has been around forever and it’s another way to look at a customer’s journey. And the idea with task analysis is that you start usually with observational research. This is not really the kind of thing you can do from a survey or an AB test, and it’s not always easy to do just from talking to people. But basically you find your target audience, a representative number, so usually that’s going to be eight to 12 from each segment or persona or typology that you have, and you have a discreet task for them and you watch them do it.
Debbie:
That might be remotely with a shared screen, that might be standing in an airport watching how people check their luggage or how they go through security or things like that. Now that you see a good mix of people doing the same thing, you can map how do they do that thing? Because there will be variations in how they do it. And most importantly, there will be interesting things like tools, workarounds, and knowledge. So tools are, for example, what’s on my desk. I have a fly swatter. It’s a tool. I’m using that for good, I promise. But we have all kinds of tools all around us to take care of things that something else didn’t take care of. We’ve got workarounds, same thing. I’ve got notes on my desk and cheat sheets and browser plugins and spreadsheets and reminders and whatever, slide rules, we’ve got all these things that help us put bandaids and workarounds on otherwise crappy processes.
Debbie:
And then we’ve got knowledge. Knowledge dependency is a huge, wonderful piece of task analysis. And that is, where did a task or a step or a system expect people to know or understand something that they don’t? And we really saw this a lot at the start of the pandemic when a whole group of people who’d never used Zoom before had to use it for the first time, and you saw everybody stumbling it for their first or second time. And you saw the knowledge, that someone without knowledge of this system, what was intuitive for them and what was just a loser time after time, like we can’t hear you, you’re on mute, wrong microphone. Time after time these things weren’t clear or intuitive. There’s nothing on the screen.
Debbie:
For example, when I broadcast to YouTube, I use vMix, which I’m in right now. vMix not sponsored. I love them. I’m even wearing my vMix shirt today. I love them. So hi vMix. So vMix has a feature where if there is no sound coming through my system, they will flash a thing on my interface that says low volume. You can’t see that. But it’s to help me from making the mistake, which sometimes I make anyway, but for forgetting to turn my mic on, using the wrong mic. There’s so many things that we saw in Zoom weren’t clear or intuitive to people, and that was a knowledge moment. They didn’t have enough knowledge about Zoom to use it well, but the goal there is not more training. The goal there is to build the more intuitive system. So vMix didn’t write a tutorial on how to remember to unmute your mic. They built in something to try to keep me from making a mistake. So the knowledge piece is something that I really like to focus on because it’s not usually in customer journey maps.
Debbie:
We gloss over these things too often in customer journey maps. Like in the book, I tell a story about a person I watched gate check their bag. They did everything wrong, absolutely everything wrong. And I was a bit of a person watcher, and I struggled with whether I should have just helped them. But I was a bit of a person watcher there and I watched them do everything wrong. They had no knowledge clearly of how to gate check an item and nobody helped them. And what would they say if we interviewed them? They would probably think they did it okay. They probably think the airline is a jerk or the gate agent is a jerk, and why didn’t I get my bag back later? Where was it? And they’re going to think they probably did just fine, but they were lacking knowledge and the system didn’t help them with that knowledge.
Debbie:
And we might end up making a customer journey map where gate checking goes just fine, or hey, they figure it out eventually, so it’s probably okay. And we have to raise our standards because they figure it out eventually. Still summons what I like to call the four horsemen of bad CX and UX: frustration, confusion, disappointment, and distraction. These are crappy experiences. And in some cases the person who struggled with the gate checking might not even understand how badly they did it. And if you survey her, she might be like, “Yeah, that was pretty good, but it sure did take me a while to get my bag back.” Because she went to the wrong place. I watched her go to the wrong place. So that’s an example of some of the things that customer journey maps often miss. We don’t often note when people used a tool, we don’t often note when they didn’t have enough knowledge or savvy about the domain to do something well. Or we assume that without that knowledge we need to train them more or give them more tool tips. And that is a no.
Larry:
Right. And I love that knowledge is the last thing in there because that’s the closest thing in the realm to… And I think the new role of content design is helping a lot with that, both the discovery and then the expression of knowledge in a way that’s useful to the customer after that. But I love that.
Larry:
Hey, I can’t believe it, Debbie, we’re already coming up close to time. These conversations always go way too fast. But I do want to give it, if there’s anything that’s come up in the conversation that you want to follow up on, or if there’s just anything on your mind about customer journey mapping, CX, UX that you want to make sure we get to…?
Debbie:
Gosh, so hard to do in a half hour. I think we hit some great high notes. I would love for people to learn more about task analysis. I do have a book coming out about task analysis in April or May, 2023. So I would say look for that. I think it’s going to be called Knowledge Oriented UX Design or Knowledge Oriented UX, something like that. But they’ll be able to check it out on the deltacx.media site. That’s where we put the books, but we’re still writing it and we’re hoping it’ll be done quite soon. And also, depending upon when people watch this, we are also running some workshops on the topic. So you can also head to the deltacx.media website where my books lives at live and also check out some of the workshops. Right now it’s just listed under SPACE, my workshop called Strategizing Products and Customer Experiences. SPACE for short. I threw it under there because I didn’t make a page for it yet.
Debbie:
But yeah, I would say if people would like to keep in touch with me, they can certainly follow me on LinkedIn. It’s Debbie Levitt, D-E-B-B-I-E L-E-V-I-T-T. I tend to prefer that people follow me rather than connect, but you pick and the deltacx.com website will lead you down all possible roads because I have a few different websites right now and it’s hard for people to remember what’s where. So just hit deltacx.com. I’ll be soon updating it so it helps you better find the other stuff.
Larry:
Okay, I’ll list that one first. It sounds like the one-stop shopping, but I’ll put all that info in there and looking forward to your new book. Yeah. Well thanks so much, Debbie.
Debbie:
Thank you. Me too.
Larry:
Yeah, no, I really enjoy you come-
Debbie:
Thank you. Me too. Thanks for having me on and I wish everybody happy content strategy and customer journey mapping or task analysis.
Larry:
Thanks so much.
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