Today’s interview is with Sirte Pihlaja, who is the CEO (Customer Experience Optimiser) of Shirute, the first customer experience agency in Finland as well as a Lego Serious Play® Facilitator amongst many other things. Sirte joins me today to talk about happiness, creativity, why we need more fun in our business and CX lives, Lego and some serious playing.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – We are all only one moment away from creating a hyper fan – Interview with James Dodkins of Pega — and is number 398 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here’s the highlights of my chat with Sirte:

• Lego Serious Play® is a methodology that helps people get into a state of flow where they have the right mindset and the space to think differently and more creatively.
• Do you think customer experience or just experience generally needs an injection of fun, creativity and storytelling? Absolutely. I think all business needs a little bit more fun and creativity in it.
• Lego Serious Play® is different to traditional workshop methods, where you’re trying to fit your whole thinking process into one word on one post-it note.
• Lego Serious Play® involves building models based on challenges set by the facilitator that you can tell stories around, discuss and then build and agree a shared model.
• Sirte and her colleagues have created CX Play – a methodology, which applies the open-source Lego® Serious Play® methodology to the creation of better people experiences, whether that is customer experiences or employee experiences.
• One customer, a life insurance company, has used it to help them build an internal customer experience capability within the organisation and help build a common understanding of what customer experience really means for them.
• Another customer used it when they were merging two business units to help create an understanding of each other’s cultural backgrounds, how they thought about customers and what they thought about data etc. so they could build a common understanding of how they want to work together.
• Sirte’s mission: bringing happiness to people.
• The pandemic has brought to us a culture of no nonsense experience and a real experience economy.
• The digitalisation of everything and automation may be a drawback for companies because they are concentrating too much on how to make digital work and they are forgetting about other dimensions.
• What is very concrete for CX practitioners at the moment is proving ROI and making the case for CX. We need to talk the same language as everybody else on the management or leadership team.
• To achieve a customer experience transformation you have to have a common framework for the organisation and everybody on the same level so everyone knows what to do, what’s expected of them so they can all pull in the same direction.
• Be genuine and really and truly listen to your customers and your employees and always try to do the right thing.
• Sirte’s Punk CX word: Creativity
• Sirte’s Punk CX brand: Finnish Tax Authority

About Sirte

Sirte Pihlaja is the CEO (Customer Experience Optimiser) of Shirute, the first customer experience agency in Finland, and and a Lego Serious Play® Facilitator She is also heading the activities of the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA) in Finland. Sirte is an internationally known expert in her field, a trainer, designer and strategist with over 25 years of experience in advising large domestic an international corporations and brands in different industries (e.g. Elisa, Arabia, Fiskars, Hackman, Iittala, Marimekko, Nokia, Nordea, Rovio, S-Group, TeliaSonera, Veikkaus, VR and Finnish Broadcasting Company).

Sirte delivers creative solutions in customer experience research and experience design, customer experience management, data-driven business, voice of customer and reputation management, and concretising solutions through multi-channel service design.

Find out more about Sirte and the work she does by following these links: www.shirute.fi and www.cxplay.fi, say Hi to Sirte on Twitter and Instagram @sirteace and @sirteace respectively and, finally, feel free to connect with her on LinkedIn here.

Image by Francis Ray from Pixabay