Storytelling is a Trojan Horse for Customer Experience Learning

What is storytelling, and why is it an important tool to have in your CX Toolbox?

In a post I wrote several months ago, I outlined the 5 Rules for Turning Data into Action for a Better Customer Experience: Centralize, Analyze, Socialize, Strategize, and Operationalize. I have since pulled out details from Analyze and Socialize to create a sixth rule: Synthesize (or Contextualize).

What does that mean?

Synthesize is really the opposite of analyze. Once data have been broken down and analyzed for better understanding, they are most useful for the end user when they are transformed into insights; those insights are best ingested/digested in the form of a story. That means putting all the pieces of the analysis together to tell a story, putting them into context for those who need to act on it — a story that can be easily understood and translated into a better customer experience. Here’s where we tell the audience what a great experience looks like.

The example I like to give is one of a client of mine that was offering repair service in their stores. We listened to customers about the experience and uncovered that there are three activities that had to happen for the customer to leave completely satisfied and likely to recommend (a Promoter). We spun those details into a story for the employees so that they could walk in the customer’s shoes, too, to understand what that experience had to be like. The service they provided improved almost immediately. Employees were able to contextualize/visualize what a great experience looked like. So, rather than using metrics and charts to tell employees what customers want, we spun a story for better understanding

Let me take a few steps back and answer some basic questions about storytelling.

What is storytelling?

Storytelling is a communication tool and a teaching tool. It’s a Trojan horse for learning. You can tell stories, and people will listen; they won’t even know that they’re (supposed to be) learning! Stories allow you to deliver a message in a way that engages people, inspires them, and helps them understand a desired or intended outcome as a result of a series of steps or actions taken.

Why use storytelling in your customer experience management strategy?

Quite simply, storytelling is a tool to gain buy-in, whether it’s from executives or from the frontline. Storytelling can facilitate delivering an impact from both the emotional and the rational perspective, capturing both the hearts and minds of the intended audience.

I believe that bombarding the frontline with charts, graphs, metrics, and bullet points is not the way to teach them or to inspire them to deliver a great customer experience. Setting an example or being a role model is probably the best way to teach; absent that, when we tell a story about the intended customer experience, it paints a picture of what is expected; we end up taking employees on a journey, the customer’s journey. And it humanizes the experience.

Stories can also be used to recognize or to reinforce desired behaviors. People connect to stories and, therefore, remember them/the point.

In addition, stories…

• clarify and help the audience understand
• give you background information
• convey what the characters (customers) think, do, feel
• bring a concept or experience to life
• engage the audience (employees)
• explain the ideal customer experience
• sell (concepts and products)
• support change
• reinforce
• motivate and inspire
• facilitate empathy and understanding
• make you want to care
• help you connect
• draw the audience into the story, carry you away
• help the audience relate
• convey good and bad, successes and failures
• are memorable

Can anyone be a Customer Experience storyteller? Or must it be taught?

I don’t believe that everyone is a natural born storyteller. I do think some people need to be taught. Can it be taught? Yes. To some degree. It does take creativity, but if we can develop that creativity, we can teach storytelling.

How do you teach storytelling?

I think we need to break it down into bite-sized chunks. Stories have various components to them, so the teaching begins with those components, including…

• the usual: who, what, when, where, why
• the business challenge or problem
• the customer challenge or problem
• steps to re-create the challenge or problem
• the thinking, doing, feeling of the participant
• the desired actions and outcome, the denouement

… and we must also consider…

• the audience: different audiences require different messages or different levels of detail
• what’s the message; what are you trying to convey
• how will you tell it
• how will the audience participate after you tell it
• how does participation affect the story or change the outcome in the future

I also think that, for teaching purposes, we need to ensure future storytellers…

• draw on their own experiences for anecdotes and to help connect with the audience
• share their own lessons learned
• stay on point and keep it focused/straightforward

This TED talk from storyteller and filmmaker Andrew Stanton (WALL-E, Toy Story, and more) provides the clues to a great story. It’s worth the watch, if you want to learn how to tell a story.

Video Transcript

A tourist is backpacking through the highlands of Scotland, and he stops at a pub to get a drink. The only people in there are a bartender and an old man nursing a beer. He orders a pint, and they sit in silence for a while.

Suddenly the old man turns to him and goes, “You see this bar? I built this bar with my bare hands from the finest wood in the county. Gave it more love and care than my own child. But do they call me MacGregor the bar builder? No.”

He points out the window. “You see that stone wall out there? I built that stone wall with my bare hands. Found every stone, placed them just so through the rain and the cold. But do they call me MacGregor the stone wall builder? No.”

He points again. “You see that pier on the lake out there? I built that pier with my bare hands. Drove the pilings against the tide of the sand, plank by plank. But do they call me MacGregor the pier builder? No. But you fuck one goat…”

(Laughter)

Storytelling is joke telling. It’s knowing your punchline—your ending—knowing that everything you’re saying from the first sentence to the last is leading to a singular goal, and ideally confirming some truth that deepens our understanding of who we are as human beings.

We all love stories. We’re born for them. Stories affirm who we are. We all want affirmations that our lives have meaning. And nothing does a greater job of that than when we connect through stories. It can cross the barriers of time—past, present, and future—and allow us to experience the similarities between ourselves and others, real and imagined.

The children’s television host Mr. Rogers always carried in his wallet a quote from a social worker that said, “Frankly, there isn’t anyone you couldn’t learn to love once you’ve heard their story.”

The way I interpret that is probably the greatest story commandment: “Make me care.” Please—emotionally, intellectually, aesthetically—just make me care.

We all know what it’s like to not care. You’ve gone through hundreds of TV channels, just switching one after another, and then suddenly you stop on one. It’s already halfway over, but something’s caught you, and you’re drawn in, and you care. That’s not by chance—that’s by design.

So it got me thinking: what if I told you my history with story—how I was born for it, how I learned along the way? And to make it more interesting, we’ll start from the ending and go to the beginning.

If I were going to give you the ending of this story, it would go something like this: and that’s what ultimately led me to speaking to you here at TED about story.

The most current story lesson I’ve had was completing the film I’d just done that year, in 2012. The film is John Carter, based on a book called The Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Burroughs actually put himself as a character inside the story and as the narrator.

He’s summoned by his rich uncle, John Carter, to his mansion with a telegram saying, “See me at once.” But once he gets there, he finds out his uncle has mysteriously passed away and been entombed in a mausoleum on the property.

(Video)
Butler: You won’t find a keyhole. Thing only opens from the inside. He insisted—no embalming, no open coffin, no funeral. You don’t acquire the kind of wealth your uncle commanded by being like the rest of us, huh? Come, let’s go inside.

AS: What this scene is doing, and what it did in the book, is fundamentally making a promise. It’s promising that this story will lead somewhere worth your time. That’s what all good stories should do at the beginning: give you a promise.

You can do it an infinite number of ways. Sometimes it’s as simple as, “Once upon a time…” These Carter books always had Edgar Rice Burroughs as a narrator, and I always thought that was a fantastic device. It’s like someone inviting you around a campfire, saying, “Here, let me tell you a story. It didn’t happen to me, it happened to someone else—but it’s going to be worth your time.”

A well-told promise is like a pebble being pulled back in a slingshot—it propels you forward through the story to the end.

In 2008, I pushed all the theories I had on story to their limits.

(Video) (Mechanical sounds)
♫ And that is all that love’s about ♫
♫ And we’ll recall when time runs out ♫
♫ That it only… ♫

(Laughter)

AS: Storytelling without dialogue—it’s the purest form of cinematic storytelling, the most inclusive approach you can take. It confirmed something I had a hunch about: the audience actually wants to work for their meal. They just don’t want to know they’re doing that.

That’s your job as a storyteller: to hide the fact that you’re making them work for it. We’re born problem-solvers, compelled to deduce and to connect things—that’s what we do in real life. It’s this well-organized absence of information that draws us in.

There’s a reason we’re all attracted to an infant or a puppy—it’s not just that they’re cute; it’s because they can’t completely express what they’re thinking or what their intentions are. It’s like a magnet. We can’t stop ourselves from wanting to complete the sentence and fill it in.

I first started understanding this storytelling device when I was writing Finding Nemo with Bob Peterson. We called this the unifying theory of “two plus two.” Make the audience put things together. Don’t give them four—give them two plus two.

The elements you provide and the order you place them in are crucial to whether you succeed or fail at engaging the audience. Editors and screenwriters have known this all along. It’s the invisible application that holds our attention to story.

Stories aren’t an exact science—they’re not widgets. They’re inevitable if they’re good, but not predictable.

I took a seminar with acting teacher Judith Weston, and I learned a key insight into character: all well-drawn characters have a spine—an inner motor, an unconscious goal they’re striving for, an itch they can’t scratch.

She gave the example of Michael Corleone in The Godfather—his spine was to please his father. Even after his father died, he was still trying to scratch that itch.

I took to this like a duck to water. Wall-E’s spine was to find the beauty. Marlin’s (in Finding Nemo) was to prevent harm. Woody’s was to do what was best for his child. These spines don’t always drive good choices—sometimes terrible ones.

As a parent, I’ve seen this firsthand. You’re born with a temperament; you can’t change it. All you can do is recognize it and steer it. Some temperaments are positive, some negative—but maturity comes when you acknowledge what drives you and take the wheel.

We’re all learning all the time. And that’s why change is fundamental in story. If things go static, stories die—because life is never static.

In 1998, I had finished writing Toy Story and A Bug’s Life, and I was hooked on screenwriting. I wanted to get better. I came across a quote by British playwright William Archer: “Drama is anticipation mingled with uncertainty.”

When you tell a story, have you constructed anticipation? Do you make me want to know what happens next? And more importantly, do you make me want to know how it all concludes?

Have you created honest conflicts with truth that create doubt about the outcome?

In Finding Nemo, the short-term tension was whether Dory’s memory would make her forget what Marlin said. The long-term tension was whether they’d ever find Nemo in the vast ocean.

In Pixar’s early days, before we truly understood story, we just followed our instincts. In 1993, “successful” animated films were The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King.

When we pitched Toy Story to Tom Hanks, he said, “You don’t want me to sing, do you?” That summed up what everyone thought animation had to be.

We wanted to prove you could tell stories differently. We had our secret list of rules: no songs, no “I want” moment, no happy village, no love story.

Ironically, our story wasn’t working, and Disney panicked. They asked a famous lyricist for advice, and we got his fax: there should be songs, an “I want” song, a happy village song, a love story, and a villain.

Thank goodness we were too young and rebellious—we doubled down. A year later, we cracked it. It proved that storytelling has guidelines, not rules.

Another key lesson was about liking your main character. We thought Woody had to become selfless, so we made him selfish to start—but he became unlikable.

(Video)
Woody: What do you think you’re doing? Off the bed. Hey, off the bed!
Mr. Potato Head: You gonna make us, Woody?
Woody: No, he is. Slinky! Get up here and do your job. Are you deaf?
Slinky: I’m sorry, Woody, but I have to agree with them.
Woody: What? You don’t think I was right? Who said your job was to think, Spring Wiener?

AS: So how do you make a selfish character likable? You make him kind, generous, funny, considerate—as long as one condition is met: he stays the top toy.

That’s what it is—we all live life conditionally.

Before I even decided to make storytelling my career, I can see key things from my youth that shaped me.

In 1986, I understood the idea of theme when Lawrence of Arabia was re-released. I saw it seven times. I could tell there was a grand design beneath the surface.

Then, in one scene, it clicked—when Lawrence crosses the Sinai and reaches the Suez Canal. A boy yells, “Who are you?”

That was the theme: Who are you? Every scene and line fed that question. A strong theme runs through every well-told story.

When I was five, I discovered what I think is the most important ingredient in story—and it’s rarely invoked. My mother took me to see Bambi.

(Video)
Thumper: Come on. It’s all right. Look—the water’s stiff! Some fun, huh, Bambi?

AS: I walked out wide-eyed with wonder. That’s the secret sauce: wonder. It’s honest and innocent—you can’t fake it.

There’s no greater gift than giving someone that feeling—to hold them still, even for a moment, and make them surrender to wonder.

When an artist does that to you, you feel compelled to pass it on. The best stories infuse wonder.

When I was four, I remember finding scars on my ankle and asking my dad what they were. He said I had matching ones on my head, hidden by hair.

He explained that I was born premature—very sick—and the doctor told my mom, “He’s not going to live.” I was in the hospital for months, had many blood transfusions, and survived.

That made me special—or at least I wanted to be special. I wanted to prove them right. Whatever I was good at, I’d strive to be worthy of that second chance.

(Video)
Marlin: There, there, there. It’s okay. Daddy’s here. I promise I’ll never let anything happen to you, Nemo.

AS: And that was my first storytelling lesson: use what you know. Draw from it.

It doesn’t always mean plot or fact—it means capturing a truth from your own experience, expressing the values you feel deep down.

And that’s what ultimately led me to speaking to you here at TED today.

Thank you.

(Applause)

MoreKnown.com summarizes his seven clues to a great story:

1. Know your punchline, your ending. Everything in your story is leading to one resolution.
2. The number one rule of a good story is to make your audience care. All of these rules help to accomplish this.
3. Make a promise. Promise the reader (or listener, or viewer, or whatever) that the story will be worth their time. This will propel you from the start to the end of the story.
4. Hide the fact that your reader will have to do some of the work themselves. “Absence of information draws us in.” You will have to choose the order of events and what to include/exclude, but your audience connects to the story when they have to figure things out for themselves.
5. It’s alright to nod to a grand design. In Lawrence of Arabia, Stanton points out a scene that directly asks the protagonist, “Who are you?” This is the theme of the whole film. Have a theme.
6. If it’s possible, allow your audience to surrender to wonder. This is the secret sauce of the best stories.
7. Focus on your personal strengths as you tell your story. Use what you know.

In your organization, do you use stories to teach? How do you tell your customer experience stories?

Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today. -Robert McKee

 

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