Debbie Levitt
Any 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
DeltaCX.com
LinkedIn
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
https://youtu.be/XXSEsT1IvHU
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,
