True Stories

Two areas where we have most recently used narrative techniques and storytelling are in customer research and community research. In both these areas, while the techniques have been applied differently, we have seen at first hand the power of narrative.

Customer Research:

We have been working with customers and staff of a major food retailer with a view to developing a customer service strategy. The brief called for research to underpin the development of a strategy and to kick-start the beginning of customer service improvement programme. This bridging between research and strategy development is exactly the area in which a research intervention such as narrative excels.

‘Customer service’ is a complex idea that means many different things to different people. To understand this and to create a change programme simultaneously, we used some of the narrative techniques described above. First, we collected stories about ‘customer service’ from several demographically selected groups of customers and from numerous groups of customer-facing staff. This was done using the anecdote circle approach described earlier.

The stories were then used with a sample of staff to create a set of archetypes in a highly interactive (and fun) workshop, where staff were encouraged to discuss the narratives and extract their own characters from the material. Staff used names, we suspect, from their own experience to christen the ensuing archetypes. So a fairly unfriendly character was called ‘Fred’ and another, quiet and ‘put upon’, was called ‘Mary’. Such characters may not exist in real life but, since the participants created them (instead of say using traditional market segmentations), they seemed to have a higher degree of cultural resonance.

These ‘customer service characters’ were then shown to senior management and other staff, who could see instantly the kind of customer service culture they wanted (and more importantly didn’t want) and act accordingly. The archetypes that emerged from the stories were absorbed into the ‘shorthand’ narrative language of the organisation.

So when a member of staff or a customer is behaving in a certain way they are instantly recognised as ‘doing a Fred’. This type of study could be repeated in the same way at regular intervals and the emerging archetypes compared with the original set. This provides truly innovative way of benchmarking culture change in an organisation.

Community Research:

We carry out a wide range of community research across a range of client groups. They might be communities facing demolition of their housing; young people in hard to reach groups, or housing association tenants. In all these areas the power of narrative in allowing us to understand these groups and to create positive social change is immense.

All communities are complex and stories and rumours emerge on the community grapevine all the time. The community’s perspective on its own history will be woven into these stories, along with individual and collective worldviews. An understanding of how these dynamics arise, and the nature of the stories being told, allows us to understand and therefore engage with the community.

In recent work, narrative research has helped us ‘manage’ the grapevine in communities, foster community capacity where there was none before, and work with the groups categorised ‘hard to reach’. Using techniques such as the anecdote circles above and listening skills which are a key part of narrative we have been able to allow communities, householders and others affected by major social change to genuinely have their say and feel that they have been involved and consulted with correctly for the first time.

Their stories are collected, analysed and fed into the planning and policy making process up front rather than as an after thought, which was often the practice previously. Their stories reflect their perceptions of the systems and situations they find themselves in and provide large signposts as to why projects have succeeded or failed. The use of story in this way has long been practiced in the fields of social and community research. For an excellent overview of storytelling in this context, it’s worth taking a look at Ben Haggarty’s (2004) survey of professional story usage in the UK.
 

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