Transcript.

So next is ‘You Are MITIE’ – The challenge here was how could we deliver a 101 base level customer service course to 70 thousand people. It has a bespoke model we developed with our client around what Customer Service means for you if you work at Mitie. It’s designed for people who aren’t used to reading masses of information…

This is really interesting because the design is simple and it feels like a journey. You’ve designed it to keep the cognitive load manageable, there’s no friction there.

This course has a lot of interesting things – the Action verbs, the In Group bias, the Messages, it was like an eSalad of behaviour heuristics!!

The one I enjoyed most was the Pygmalion effect, where we tend to perform better when it feels like someone has expectations of us. This is very much subconscious. The woman who guides us from the start made me feel like she has expectations of me.

Pygmalion – she was the sculpture brought to life by the belief and the passion of the sculptor, right? My favourite quote was someone who said of Rosa, the actor playing our cleaner, “it felt like she was talking to my soul”, which is one of the nicest pieces of feedback we’ve ever had!

Exactly, and you feel like you’d do better than you originally would because someone has expectations of you. So with this course you’ve made people feel that there are true expectations of how they should behave with the public and each other, how they should behave as an individual, because it takes a special type of person to do that role. And it feels to me that after that process, I would take an action – to make that person [Rosa] proud.

That ties in with some of the feedback, because one of the ways they measured success around this course was the number of people who made commitments to change their behaviour directly as a result. And it’s something they’ve tracked. So there was over 50 thousand individual pledges where people said ‘I will do this differently.

The Action bias is exactly that. It’s making sure you get a certain action. Action bias amplifies whatever someone is telling you to do or when to do it. In this case, that amplification comes from self-monitoring. You WANT to do it. The course is using a lot of action verbs. They’re exciting you about the journey. It’s proactive, dynamic and they’re designed to have that action bias.

Because you can ask people to respond, it does feel like the whole psychology of the Learning module is active. From the tone of voice to the exercises, that’s what I felt. And then the Messenger bias and the In Group bias, the source of content, the people that talk or the employees, you can relate to them.