When I took on the role of Head of Customer Experience back in 2017 I panicked slightly. At that time I didn’t feel that I knew anything about the CIPD’s members, despite having already worked for the CIPD for a couple of years.
The big questions that I (and the CIPD) needed to answer were ‘Who are our members?’ and ‘What are their needs?’ and ‘Are we meeting those needs?’
In the second of this two-part blog post, I’m going to reveal the CIPD’s efforts to begin to answer those questions.
Sharing the love
Aligning our member research efforts to Clayton Christensen’s ‘Jobs to be done’ theory and Strategyzer’s Value Proposition Canvas we’ve begun to better understand our members.
We’ve shared our customer profiles with colleagues across the organisation as well as partner organisations with a responsibility for delivering aspects of the member experience. It’s important that everyone has an understanding of our members’ circumstances, their social and emotional motivations and their needs from their membership body (that members expect us to meet), as well as where we can exceed those expectations.
And we’re currently working on more sophisticated, value-driven profiles (using statistical modelling techniques), from which we’ll build out data-driven personas and empathy maps.
Mapping the customer profile to the value map
The Value Proposition has two sides. With the Customer Profile you clarify your customer understanding. With the Value Map you describe how you intend to create value for that customer. You achieve Fit between the two when one meets the other. (Value Proposition Design, Osterwlder et. al)
The question was: does the CIPD’s value proposition match members’ jobs to be done? Do we provide them with the right ‘pain relievers’ and ‘gain creators’? After all, the value proposition has evolved over the past 106 years rather than being actively and holistically designed from scratch (as would be the case if a Start Up arrived on our doorstep).
So the next step was to map the customer profiles to our membership value proposition – that is the CIPD’s member benefits.
We deliberately used neutral terms to describe the potential ‘pain relievers’ and ‘gain creators’. The categories covered a combination of what members told us in their interviews and in broad terms what the existing membership benefits cover. So for example we asked if people would like ‘news and ways of staying up to date’ rather than: ‘would you like our People Management member magazine?’ This would help members to think about their requirements in more objective way.
We offered respondents an opportunity in the survey to select ‘other’ and leave an (open ended) comment. But we found that most options had been discovered in the qualitative phase, and few ‘other’ suggestions were left. The exception were our ’senior leaders’ – they selected ‘other’ more than other members. This is probably because we struggled to get as many members in senior grades to participate in the qualitative research. Definitely a learning there for us for next time.
We found that generally the ‘pain relievers’ and ‘gain creators’ members are looking for from the CIPD are already part of our member benefits package. Which was certainly good news.
We also used the survey to ask some more tactical questions about our benefits. We asked about members’ awareness of, usage of, and satisfaction with each benefit. And how they value each of them. This is helping us to identify which benefits to focus any improvement efforts on, and also which benefits could do with a boost in terms of discoverability on the website and extra publicity in marketing comms.
Using JTBD insight in member marketing campaigns
A customer profile is also great source of customer sentiment to use in marketing campaigns.
A lot of members left feedback in the open ended comments that focussed on their lack of awareness of the full range of benefits. Here’s a typical comment: I literally had no idea of all of those benefits until I took this survey!’ It seems this isn’t a new issue for the CIPD. One member wrote:
Having got this far in the research survey I’ve learnt that CIPD offers certain services that I did not know exist and I’ve been a member for 32 years!
In response to that insight the CIPD quickly launched a new member benefits marketing campaign. Rather than something we run once a year in the run-up to renewals season, this will be an on-going campaign across all channels to highlight the value of membership and encouraging members to explore their benefits.
And it drew directly from the sentiment we found in our research. Members’ pains and their social and emotional jobs focussed on their credibility and a perceived lack of influence.
What does ‘Membership’ mean?
We wanted to the survey to answer some really fundamental questions – like what does ‘membership’ actually mean to our members? So asked them to put the following statements in order of importance.
Membership means:
- Supporting me, my career progression and my learning & development goals
- Personal recognition as a professional (e.g. designation/letters)
- Being part of a community of professionals
- Professionalising the profession (e.g. adhering to a Code of Conduct, research, professional standards and shared principles)
- Giving back to the profession and/or wider society (e.g. volunteering/campaigning)
Respondents ranked personal recognition as a professional first (39%). Followed by supporting me, my career progression and my Learning goals (26%).
We followed that up by asking how effective was the CIPD in supporting members in each of those areas. Personal recognition as a professional was ranked first with 26%. Supporting me, my career progression and my Learning goals came fourth (out of 5) with 10%.
As you can see we’ve a drop of 13% in terms of personal recognition as a professional. And a drop of 16% for effectiveness in supporting members in terms of their career progression and their personal learning goals. So we can see where members perceive us to be letting them down and focus our efforts accordingly.
So how are we’re turning this insight into action? In the short term we’re doing a UX review of all our career support materials to make some improvements to the current provision. And we’ve some larger, long-term projects underway around recognition, learning and progression.
Conclusion: improving the member value proposition
To date, our member research has revealed a number of things we didn’t know:
- we understand members primary JTBD and their pains;
- we understand how our member benefits map to those JTBD, how they create gains and relieve pains;
- we know what members expect from their benefits, what they’d like to have and what they’d be delighted to have.
We discovered that members aren’t aware of many of their benefits. And that satisfaction increases with the number of benefits a member uses.
We understand what ‘membership’ means to members, and where we’re we’re letting the down in terms of what it means and how we deliver on it. We learnt what benefits members are aware of, use, don’t know about, which benefits they value and which ones they don’t. So we’ve a good idea where to focus improvement efforts on individual benefits
The question is, can we use this insight to improve members’ perceptions that their membership fee isn’t value for money and that membership isn’t relevant to them and their work? We’re working on a way to track whether these attitudes and perceptions shift over time as we work on a range of improvements and better communications. (See the forthcoming Measure What Matters blog for more on this.)
It’s important for the CIPD to keep the momentum up. To continually remind ourselves that we’re a membership body: that we’re here to be our members’ career partner. And that to do that, we need to operate from a profound understanding of our members’ and the worlds in which they operate.
Thank you
As ever, a huge thank you to the CIPD’s Customer Experience team for your passion, ideas, creativity and hard work. This is your story.
—
Hero image references American Economist Theodore Levitt’s oft quoted remark: People don’t want a quarter-inch-drill. They want a quarter-inch-hole.
Noodlings, etc. 