BOSTON–There is a lesson for credit unions when it comes to capturing data, according to a behavioral scientist from Harvard, and it can be found in one eight-year-old’s desire for a pizza.
Francesca Gino, a Harvard Business School professor and the author of “Rebel Talent: Why it Pays to Break the Rules at Work and in Life,” told a virtual CO-OP THINK Event that all of the data being captured by credit unions only really has value if it leads to more than just a personalized experience for the member—it must create a “hyper-personalized” experience.
“Personalization can be the difference maker,” Gino said, adding that difference also extends to benefits for employees.
As an example, Gino pointed not to a credit union but to one of the CU movement’s fastest-growing competitors, the fintech Acorns. She shared one person’s experience after they stopped during the sign-up process. The company immediately responded with a human being, not an email or chatbot. That creates “peer-to-peer interaction that is much more personal. The main ingredients of personal service are all based on data Acorns has gathered before the customer has even started the journey.”
Forget The Fancy Stuff
As another example, Gino cited the story of one of the world’s most renowned, Michelin-rated restaurants in Italy. An American family was visiting that included a father, mother and their two sons, and they had returned for the second consecutive night. The father ordered an expensive 10-course tasting menu comprised of numerous intricate and unusual dishes, but when the chef/owner, who had noticed the “faces of desperation” among the two kids, asked the eight-year-old what he wanted, he responded emphatically, “Pizza!”
Pizza was not on the restaurant’s menu, but the chef went to the kitchen and called a local restaurant that did offer pizza and had it delivered by taxi.
“I find this story to be really beautiful, but also really telling as there are a couple of interesting points that come out for me from that story,” said Gino. “First of all, it didn't require a lot of thinking on the part of (the owner), but merely being very focused on creating great experiences for every customer, and in that case it might not only be the father and the mother but also the boys. He was careful in the data that was in front of his eyes--the very desperate expressions of the two boys--and he used that to make a creative decision to come up with a solution to a problem that he was facing…The type of data that we can respond to comes from all different sources and I think this story points to that.”
The Broader Picture
Gino said the chef/owner was focused on the broader picture and mission.
“Maybe he was able to do something that doesn't come naturally to most of us because of our human nature. We often see what we want to see. We're driven in the way we respond to data by something that is known in psychology as confirmation bias. We look for evidence and we ask questions that try to confirm our own views instead of thinking much more broadly about data that speaks against it.”
Overcoming the bias hurdle, according to Gino, requires changes in mindset and behavior in order to have the “rebelliousness” necessary to make better decisions.
“I want to give you some ideas on how you can embrace this mindset yourself, but also how you can motivate it in others, trigger it in others, as well,” Gino told the meeting.
The Real Lesson of Flight 1549
To illustrate her point, Gino again shared another story, this time of the US Airways flight 1549, which famously crash-landed in the Hudson River in New York in 2009, with all passengers surviving. Captain Chesley Sullenberger has been hailed for his calm leadership in the emergency (and has spoken before a number of credit union audiences since retiring).
Gino said she studied Sullenberger’s response because she was interested in his decision-making processes and the data used.
“What I was struck by in reading the (cockpit) conversation is that in that moment Captain Sullenberger only had 208 seconds to make a decision,” said Gino. “That is very little time when you also add a lot of stress because of the feeling of responsibility he had for the 155 passengers on the plane. Those are the perfect conditions where most of us will go into tunnel vision; we would go to the most obvious answer rather than considering the data a little bit more carefully.
“If you were to read that conversation in those 208 seconds I think he would be as surprised as I was to see that it kept broadening his view; he kept considering alternatives. He was eliminating them quickly, but he kept broadening his perspective and again he came up with a rather ingenious solution to a problem.
“I learned that by the time the accident happened he had a ton of experience with 30,000 hours of flying…,” Gino continued. “Yet every time he walked into the cockpit he had built a habit for himself, a mental habit, of always asking the question, ‘What do I stand to learn today?’ And that is what allowed him to not only acquire expertise and experience, but also hold on to his humility.
“I think that is something we can all do to broaden our perspective. It means reaching out to the very customers we want serve,” Gino said.
A Mistaken Assumption
But there is a mistaken assumption with that latter concept, the idea the best way to gain perspective is to imagine how it would feel to be in “somebody else's shoes or in our customers shoes,” according to Gino.
“As it turns out the research suggests that that approach is not effective,” she explained. “Perspective-taking is actually really hard. Despite our best intentions, to put ourselves in the shoes of others” is difficult.
Instead, said Gino, research has consistently shown that asking questions and starting a dialogue with the constituents involved creates a much better chance of actually producing solutions.
“Asking questions also generates other types of benefits,” said Gino, and that includes not just serving members but also improvements in other areas, including sales calls, entrepreneurial pitches and more.
The benefits of the question-asking process even extend to conversations involving bots, Gino said.
“We find that question-asking is very powerful. It not only it allows us to gain perspective…but also we get more appreciation from the very people that we're trying to serve,” said Gino. “Trust, loyalty, enjoyment all go up when we start that type of dialogue. What is also interesting is that when we ask questions it’s also likely that we're going to start generating conversations that allow us to learn more, again from the very people that we're trying to influence. We're building a better relationship with the very people we're trying to serve.”
What’s Also Needed
To be successful in capturing individuals’ perspectives also requires that the credit union be “authentic” in how it asks those questions, Gino added.
Gino stressed that authenticity benefits not just the organization itself in the quality of data captured to drive personalization, it also creates greater employee satisfaction.
As an example, she cited a call center in which employees felt more comfortable following scripts due to authenticity, which allowed them to bring their own styles to calls and to perform at a higher level.
A ‘Beautiful Example’
For a third example of capturing and using data in new ways Gino returned to another famed restaurant at which innovative approaches have always been taken with traditional recipes and “curiosity” is encouraged.
The restaurant had a sous chef famous for his attention to detail who was putting great effort into a lemon tart dessert before it was sent out to a patron. While carefully arranging the plates, the lemon tart was dropped and crashed to the floor. At the same time, the owner/chef arrived.
“Now, ask yourself, what you would have done in front of that piece of evidence? Many restaurant owners like him would probably yell at the mistake and use it as a teaching moment to talk about high standards,” said Gino. “But he didn’t do that. He said, ‘I think we have an idea for a new dessert,’ and sure enough they came up with a new dessert. It's a deconstructed lemon tart and it's now the most popular dessert at the restaurant. The name for it is ‘Oops, I Dropped the Lemon Tart.’ Now to me that's a beautiful example of a leader in everything that he does.”
Do Not Judge
Gino urged credit union leaders to look at their own data with a lot of curiosity while not judging what has happened but instead look at it in a different light.
“It turns out that is a really powerful approach to work and life that gives us the opportunity to think about creative solutions to any problem that we're encountering, and to treat data in a very creative way,” said Gino. “We're often quick to judge when ideas come to the table and they're different from our own. We try to see very quickly and judge the idea to point out what's wrong with it or the many reasons why it might not be practical. But what I've seen in organizations is that we benefit from instead approaching data--even when it's not consistent with our own view--with curiosity.”
Moreover, said Gino, asking for input from others really pays off when it's time to develop different ideas for the future, as those stakeholders are much more likely to do so because they feel that the space was created for them to suggest something different.
“The ability to keep bringing in views that might be different…fuels the creative process,” Gino told the THINK event. “(Starting) dialogues without centricity is something that doesn't come naturally to most of us. We need to rebel against human nature in order for us to make the best of data to use it so that we can fulfill the mission the purpose of the organization that we work for, and make sure that even in the face of strange problems or situations or crisis, that we come up with creative solutions.”