Designing Culture
to Drive Customer
Experience
MARCH 12, 2020

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Meet Your Facilitators
ELENA GROTTO
Senior Vice President,
Business Transformation
Edelman
FELICIA JOY
Senior Vice President,
Corporate Advisory
and Group Head, Behavioral
Science
Edelman

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What You’ll
Learn Today
• The link between business strategy and culture
• The role of culture in customer experience
• The two types of approaches to culture change
• How to reshape customer experience by
redesigning culture
OBJECTIVES & GOALS

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Culture Is Having a Cultural Moment
Amazon proves company
culture doesn’t need to be
“warm and fuzzy” to be
effective

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Investing in Culture is Investing in Business
Nearly 3 in 4 employees
expect their employer to have
an inclusive, values-driven
culture. If not, they will either
work elsewhere or require a
substantially higher salary.
More than 80% of investors
cite “trust in the company” as
the top driver of investment
decisions and 95% say
maintaining healthy company
culture impacts this trust.
Enterprises with a top quartile
culture score twice as high
on customer satisfaction
and are 25 percent more
profitable than those with
bottom quartile cultures.
Sources: Edelman Trust Barometer; MIT Center for Information Systems Research

Behaviors, beliefs, systems
and processes that make up
normal and expected ways
of individually behaving,
relating and working
How We Think
About Culture
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Behaviors and Beliefs
ARE NOT BUSINESS ASSETS UNLESS
THEY LADDER UP TO STRATEGY

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Sources: Salesforce 2nd Annual State of the Connected Customer Report; Glassdoor “The Surprising Benefit PwC Uses to Attract and Retain Top Talent”; 3m.com “Core Elements to 3M’s Culture”
Sources: Salesforce
Example: Innovation Is Core to Business Strategy
of customers expect companies
to provide new products/services
more frequently than ever before.
of customers actively seek to buy
from the most innovative
companies
63% 56%

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Sources: Salesforce 2nd Annual State of the Connected Customer Report; Glassdoor “The Surprising Benefit PwC Uses to Attract and Retain Top Talent”; 3m.com “Core Elements to 3M’s Culture”
Sources: Salesforce
Employee
Experience
Customer
Experience
Innovation Innovation
How We Often Advance Innovation

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Culture’s Role in Aligning the Employee and
Customer Experience
Sources: Salesforce 2nd Annual State of the Connected Customer Report; Glassdoor “The Surprising Benefit PwC Uses to Attract and Retain Top Talent”; 3m.com “Core Elements to 3M’s Culture”
Employee
Experience
Customer
Experience
Innovation

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Culture’s Role in Aligning the Employee and
Customer Experience Around Strategy
Sources: Salesforce 2nd Annual State of the Connected Customer Report; Glassdoor “The Surprising Benefit PwC Uses to Attract and Retain Top Talent”; 3m.com “Core Elements to 3M’s Culture”
“Our philosophy has been to overinvest
in development, if there is such a thing.
It’s a fundamental commitment to
continuous learning and developmental
paths. The candidates we speak to are
keenly interested.”
- Mike Fenlon, PwC, Chief People Officer
For more than 70 years, 3M’s unique
15% Culture has encouraged employees
to set aside a portion of their work time to
proactively cultivate and pursue
innovative ideas that excite them.
Employee
Experience
Customer
Experience
Sources: 3M, Glassdoor, PwC
Innovation

OUR CULTURE TRANSFORMATION APPROACH IS SCALABLE
Holistic transformation
Best for an enterprise-wide
culture change, including pre-and
post-merger integration
Targeted Intervention
Best when a company needs to adopt new behaviors
to support a specific mandate, such as post-crisis or to
increase operational safety or cyber security
The Culture Change Continuum
Advancing culture by addressing a SPECIFIC change or engaging in HOLISTIC transformation
“We need to be
more innovative.”
“We need to integrate
and strengthen two newly
merged companies”

Why behavioral
science?
Behavioral science can get to the
root cause of human behavior and it
is measurable. By running real-time
pilots, we can understand more
about what employees are thinking
and how they are behaving. This
active approach generates data and
insights that can be leveraged to
create momentum and quickly
advance behavior and culture
change.
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Strategy for Targeted Culture Interventions:
LEVERAGE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE TO IDENTIFY AND REPLACE THE ROOT CAUSE BEHAVIOR
The Domino Effect theory
shows that behaviors are
interconnected; change one
behavior and others will shift.
To spur a culture change, we
identify and change the root
cause behavior(s) with a
targeted intervention.

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Combination of sciences
that seeks to understand,
explain, influence and
measure human decision
making and behavior.
What is
Behavioral
Science?
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A Few Concepts and Theories
THAT PROVIDE A FOUNDATION FOR USING BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE
Choice Architecture Default Effect
Social Norms
Fresh Start Effect Salience Effect
Domino Effect

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Choice Architecture
DESIGNING THE ENVIRONMENT TO
NUDGE SPECIFIC CHOICES
• For example, removing chairs from workplace
conference rooms to encourage fewer, faster
meetings.
• A study at Washington University’s Olin Business
School found that removing chairs, and nudging
standing meetings, resulted in reduced
territorialism and increased collaboration and
creativity.
CASE STUDY
Baer, Knight 2014
Brad, please change picture to fit new example.

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Fresh Start Effect
PEOPLE ARE LIKELIER TO TAKE
ACTION AND CHANGE WHEN A TIME
MARK CREATES A SENSE OF NEWNESS
AND MOTIVATION
• Redbooth, a project management
platform, analyzed data
from 1.8 million projects and 28 million
tasks to quantify productivity
• The highest percentage of tasks (20.4%)
were completed on Monday
• People were most productive starting at
8am with the daily peak of productivity
(9.7%) occurring around 11am
CASE STUDY
Redbooth, Priceonomics 2017

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Social Norms
PEOPLE TEND TO BEHAVE IN
ACCORDANCE WITH PEERS
& SOCIAL EXPECTATIONS
• In a study at a daycare, the number of
parents picking up their children late
doubled after a late fee was introduced
• The fee shifted the social norms calculus,
making it socially acceptable to arrive tardy if
parents paid for the option
CASE STUDY
Israel Institute of Technology; Gneezy 2000

HOW TO DESIGN A TARGETED CULTURE INTERVENTION
TO RESHAPE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
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A behavioral science
intervention is a measurable
plan to address a problem or
situation with the goal of
influencing behavior in a way
that does not remove choice.
What is an
Intervention?
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Diagnose Design Deploy Duplicate
BEHAVIOR CHANGE INTERVENTION DESIGN MAP
In one sentence, what issue are
you trying to address? Be specific.
What new behavior do you
want to promote?
What intervention ideas could shift
people from the undesired behavior
to the preferred behavior? (See
“Ways of Intervening” in the right
column to help you generate ideas.)
Define success. What change in
business outcomes would make this
intervention worth scaling? %
change in employee or customer
sentiment? % change in
productivity? # of new patent or
trademark filings? Increase in profit
margin?
What behavior is causing the issue?
If your test is successful, can you
use the same channel(s) to scale
that you used to test? (Consider
related variables like technical
capacity, budget constraints, etc.)
Which behavioral science concepts
might you be able to use to promote
a change in the current behavior?
(See the three concepts below.)
What channels are available for you
to test your intervention ideas? Can
you test in physical or digital
environments, or both?
How can you measure
differences between the
test and control groups to see
if your ideas are working?
My Hypothesis
(If I Try X, Then Y Will Happen)
Ways of Intervening
1 Communications
2 Processes or Policies
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Environment
(physical or digital)
Three Behavioral Science Concepts to Design Your Intervention
Design for change by adjusting:
CHOICE ARCHITECTURE
Designing the environment or context in which people are
making decisions to nudge them toward choices in their
own best interest. Example: removing chairs from
conference rooms to encourage faster and fewer meetings.
SOCIAL NORMS
People are likely to act in accordance with social expectations
and normative group behavior. Example: collaboration
becomes a team norm because a manager regularly asks
who from other departments is involved on projects.
FRESH START EFFECT
People are more motivated to change when there are time-related milestones
that create a sense of newness, like New Year’s Day, a birthday or a first day.
Example: at the start of a new quarter, a team commits to stop familiar but
failing tactics and double down on new approaches proven successful in the
prior quarter.

Activity:
DESIGN YOUR INTERVENTION
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Nudge to Self
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Thank You
CONTACT US
ELENA GROTTO
elena.grotto@edelman.com
FELICIA JOY
felicia.joy@edelman.com