Claire Fielding and I recently had the chance to get together and talk about one of our favorite parts of a mobility policy redesign: capturing the voice of the customer.
Claire and I both lead these types of projects regularly, though typically we’re working on separate projects, due to our geographic difference. While no two projects look exactly alike, we continue to see the same core principles apply despite working with unique organizations, objectives, questionnaires, and stakeholders.
What we’ve both some to understand is that collecting the voice of the customer is not simply a way to make people feel included in the process. It establishes the baseline for the entire project.
So, make yourself a tea or coffee and spend a few minutes with us.
“Voice of the customer” can sound like a broad or even slightly fluffy term. In a mobility policy redesign, the first challenge is often determining whose voice we are actually trying to capture.
Is the customer the mobility team? Business leaders? HR and Talent? The employees who have experienced a move? In practice, it is usually a thoughtful mix.
I’ve found that deciding whom to be involve is a valuable exercise, as it requires the organization to consider questions such as:
Who does the mobility program ultimately need to serve?
Who relies on mobility to achieve business or talent objectives?
Who influences whether the program succeeds?
Who has experienced the policies in practice?
Employees who have completed an assignment or relocation can be particularly valuable contributors, for they have lived the policy rather than simply reviewed it on paper. They can speak to how the relocation, immigration, tax, and other forms of support came together during a real move, as well as where the experience may not have matched the policy’s intent.
A strong stakeholder process is not necessarily the largest one.
Conducting 30 or 40 interviews can generate an enormous amount of information, but it can also make the findings difficult to synthesize and act upon. The goal is not to speak with anyone who could possibly have an opinion; rather, it is to identify a representative group that collectively provides the right range of perspectives.
Depending on the organization and project, eight to ten carefully selected stakeholders may provide richer, more multidimensional feedback than a larger group. This is where the upfront work pays dividends: being thoughtful about who participates, what perspectives they represent, and which questions we ask makes the resulting insights much more useful later.
Stakeholder interviews should never be treated as a box to check at the beginning of a redesign.
The findings become part of the foundation on which the new program is built, since they help identify current pain points, clarify how the business uses mobility, and connect the redesign to broader organizational objectives. They can also provide compelling evidence when the project team needs to explain the case for change or build leadership support.
Claire and I both agreed: their usefulness does not end once the initial findings have been presented.
Mobility redesigns can be complex, and even well-planned projects occasionally stall. The team may encounter competing priorities, disagreement about a policy decision, or uncertainty about the direction it should take. Returning to the original stakeholder questionnaires, interview notes, transcripts, or findings summary can help right-set the project.
Revisiting stakeholder feedback also demonstrates that the organization did more than collect input: it listened and acted on it.
When stakeholders can see a clear connection between what they shared and what ultimately changed, they are more likely to understand and support the resulting program. That does not mean every suggestion must become a policy provision; instead, it signals to the stakeholder that their feedback has been considered, the tradeoffs have been understood, and Mobility’s decisions can be connected back to the project’s objectives.
The stakeholder phase may happen near the beginning of a mobility redesign, but when it is done well, its influence should be felt all the way through.
And stay tuned for more Bite-Sized Advice from my advisory colleagues.