The missing customer

In 2013 I enrolled in a 16 month Strategic Communications Masters program at Columbia University.

My team’s thesis project was to design an internal communications strategy for Western Union. Hikmet Ersek, the company’s CEO, had laid out his vision: “Our vision is to be there for our customers-whenever, wherever, however-they want to move money.”

Our task was described as follows:

This strategy must sound familiar to many employees at large companies. Customer-centricity is considered as the only way for companies to succeed. There is a lot of truth in that statement, but employees are rarely told what customer-centricity actually means and in large companies the customer is rarely a clear-cut role.

Columbia facilitated a number of Western Union employee interviews and an interesting picture emerged. The word customer was repeated so many times that it started to cause semantic satiation. Semantic satiation happens when a word is repeated so many times that it loses its meaning. Western Union employees were left asking themselves what the word customer actually meant.

The disconnect was extended to the external face of the company. The most visible representation of the brand, Western Union agents, are actually not Western Union employees. Western Union agents are franchisees. This meant that the owners of the first-line relationship with the customer as described by Mr. Ersek’s vision, the customer who moves money, was actually the point at which the customer-centric strategy fell apart. We learned that the biggest issue was that when we looked at all levels of the company, Western Union employees had no shared understanding of who their customer is. This left a large number of employees incapable to claim their stake in the strategy’s success.

It was encouraging to see how employees felt towards Western Union. They felt proud to work for a company that positively impacted the lives of so many people. They felt invested in the company. We could not waste this emotional connection.

In order to maintain the underlying idea of excellence in service, we needed to redesign the plan. We needed to get rid of the word customer all together. It would not appear at all in our proposal.

We focused instead on people. Doing so shifted our language from transactional to human. People relate to each other. People have emotional connections. We work for and with people. People make companies.

We also suggested to reverse the direction of the conversation. Instead of Western Union telling our employees how important customers are to the company, we let people who use Western Union tell us about how the company helps them. Instead of talking, we listen.

Instead of telling customers how much we value them, we make employees aware of the far-reaching impact of their daily work. We employed multiple channels in three separate stages of our internal communication plan. Conversational ones such as tweets and environmental ones such as stories of people who use Western Union. Townhalls that helped employees grasp their work impacted the new strategy. We also designed an interactive map that showed how employees within the company connected with people who use Western Union.

You probably wonder if Western Union used the people strategy we proposed. As far as we know, they did not. Perhaps they should have considered it, because only a year later one of Western Union main competitors, PayPal, ran this campaign:

Big shoutout to team Winehouse: Kenie Richards, Sarah Brown and Eric Hansen.