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A new client is headquartered in Seattle, but they have employees all over the west coast and as far east as Denver.

The client recently gathered a team in Seattle to write the company's customer experience vision statement. They used the step-by-step instructions from The Service Culture Handbook to guide them.

It was expensive and time-consuming to fly people to headquarters, but my client felt it was worthwhile. Participants were motivated by the process and felt the result was truly reflective of the company culture.

Many companies don't have the option to bring employees together right now. Travel budgets are being slashed and in-person gatherings are limited. Employees might be located all over the globe where there are extensive restrictions on international travel.

I'm going to show you how to adapt my vision writing process to a virtual meeting. To keep this post shorter, I'll focus on the changes you need to make to the original process.

A group of coworkers participate in a video conference.

What is a customer experience vision?

It is a shared definition of outstanding customer experience that gets everyone on the same page.

Having a customer experience, or CX, vision allows you to align your people, process, and product in the same direction. You can use it to avoid internal conflicts and get everyone focused on delivering a consistently good experience.

Here's an example from Convo, an app-based video relay service for deaf and hard of hearing people:

Our mission is to connect humans through universal communication solutions shaped by visual and cultural experiences.

This statement was created using the process in The Service Culture Handbook. In the book, I called this statement a customer service vision. Over time, I've realized the importance of focusing on the broader customer experience.

Fortunately, the process for writing a customer experience vision is exactly the same.

Prepare your virtual meeting

The in-person meeting lasts two hours, but I’ve found the virtual meeting should be scheduled for 2.5 hours. It takes a bit more time to get everyone to collaborate virtually.

Aside from adding 30 minutes to the meeting, there are a number of steps you should take beforehand to ensure the meeting is a success.

Some of those steps remain the same, whether you're facilitating virtually or in-person. You can read the full process in this guide, but here's a summary:

Get buy-in from senior leaders.
Identify existing cultural artifacts.
Invite a cross-functional group of 7 to 10 people to participate. (Closer to 7 works better for virtual.)
Send out your one-question survey.
Identify your primary customer.

The one-question survey is sent to all employees who will be covered by the customer experience vision. Participants are invited to provide a free text response to this question:

What would you like customers to think of when they think about their experience?

Virtual meetings require some extra preparation in addition to the steps above:

Video conferencing platform
Shareable documents
Downloadable handout

Video Conferencing Platform

A video conferencing platform is essential so people can see and hear each other, and see the various draft vision documents you create.

There are three basic criteria for selecting a platform:

Compatibility. All participants must be able to access the platform.
Audio/Video: Every participant should join with audio and video.
Sharing: You’ll need the ability to share websites and presentations.

I've facilitated virtual CX vision writing sessions with both Zoom and MS Teams. Both platforms work well and are easy for participants to use.

The biggest difference between the two is Zoom allows you to create breakout rooms. The breakout room feature allows the meeting to run much closer to the original process, where two teams create their own separate draft visions before joining their ideas together in one statement.

You'll need to make an adjustment to the process if you aren't able to put people in breakout rooms. I'll go over those adjustments in just a moment.

Shareable Documents

It's easy to use white boards or flip chart paper when facilitating an in-person meeting. While many video conferencing platforms have a whiteboard feature, I prefer to use a shareable online document, such as a Google Doc.

Here are some of the advantages:

Multiple people can edit the document at once
The documents automatically save changes
You can easily access and share the documents outside of the meeting

These are the steps to creating your shareable documents:

1. Create all documents ahead of time, so you have them handy while facilitating the virtual session. All of the documents should be blank.

2. Make sure each document is fully shareable so you can share them with participants and access them yourself during the meeting.

3. You'll need just three documents if you'll be using breakout rooms, labeled as follows:

Team A
Team B
Group

Adjustment for no breakout rooms: Create a shareable document for each participant and one for the entire team. I found it easiest to name the documents after each participant while naming the group document "Group." For example:

Melanie
Elijah
Dennis
Christina
Chloe
Freddy
Luka
Group

Downloadable Handout

Each participant should receive a downloadable handout prior to the meeting. The handout contains important information that participants should have access to throughout the session.

I ask participants to do one of two things so they can easily see it without leaving the virtual meeting:

Print out the document, or
Display it on a second screen

I've created a Google Doc template that you can use. Here's an overview of the four sections it should contain:

Feedback and artifacts. Include a word cloud image of the one-question survey results. (Refer to this guide for more information.) This section should also contain any existing cultural artifacts, such as the company's mission statement, vision statement, values, brand slogan, or service standards.

Customer profile. Identify your primary customer along with additional examples of customer groups. The CX vision should focus on your primary customer.

Check questions. List the three questions used to quality check a vision statement.

Is it simple and easily understood?
Is it focused on our customers?
Does it reflect both who we are now and who we aspire to be in the future?

Document links. Provide links to all the shareable documents you'll be using in the vision writing session.

Bonus: Participant bios. In larger organizations, the participants in the vision writing meeting might not already know each other. If that's the case, it could be helpful to include very short biographies of each person in the handout. Name and role is good at a minimum. Keep in mind that there is no time built-in to the meeting agenda for introductions.

Preparation Summary

Make sure you complete all of these steps before your vision facilitation meeting:

Get buy-in from senior leaders.
Identify existing cultural artifacts.
Invite a cross-functional group of 7 to 10 people to participate. (Closer to 7 works better for virtual.)
Send out your one-question survey.
Identify your primary customer.
Select a video conferencing platform.
Create shareable documents.
Make the downloadable handout.
Share the video conference login information and downloadable handout with all participants.

Facilitate the vision writing meeting

The meeting to write your customer experience vision should take 2.5 hours. The process for facilitating a virtual meeting is largely the same as the original, with three small changes:

Jump In
Virtual Facilitation
Breakouts vs. No Breakouts

Jump In

Start the meeting right on time and get to business. You will feel time pressure throughout the meeting, and you do not want to add to it. The time pressure is by design, since a little pressure makes it easier to get participants' gut reactions.

Here are a few tips:

Start the video conference a few minutes early to welcome people.
Begin the meeting promptly, even if people are late.
Skip introductions. I’ve found them to be unnecessary and time-consuming.

As a facilitator, part of your role is to keep things moving!

Virtual Facilitation

Running a virtual meeting of any kind takes a little more energy than running that same meeting in person. We lack the visual cues of seeing each other's body language. You can't just grab a marker and draw an illustration on the whiteboard.

Here are a few general tips for effective virtual facilitation:

Make sure all participants are visible on their web cameras.
Call on people from time-to-time to ensure everyone participates.
Keep the meeting moving, but be patient as people work with the technology.

Breakouts vs. No Breakouts

The original process breaks the group into two groups and gives each group 15 minutes to write a draft vision. This can be followed if your video conferencing platform allows you to create breakout rooms, but you'll need to make a few adjustments if this feature is not available.

Breakout Rooms

This works nearly identical to the in-person process. One small change is you should have created three shareable documents prior to the meeting, labeled Team A, Team B, and Group.

Here's what to do when it comes time to divide people into groups to draft vision statements:

Form two teams (A & B) of roughly equal numbers.
Ask each person to open the shareable document for their team (A or B).
Put participants in their breakout rooms and give them 15 minutes to write a draft vision statement.
Participants should type their draft directly onto the shareable document.
Pop into each breakout room from time-to-time to check on progress, answer questions, and remind people of how much time they have remaining.

At the end of the 15 minutes:

Go into each team's shareable document.
Copy their draft vision statement.
Paste the draft vision statement into the Group document.

You can then share the Group document with everyone and resume the normal meeting agenda.

No Breakout Rooms

You'll need to make a few more modifications to the process when the video conferencing platform you're using does not have breakout rooms. I took a remote facilitation idea from leadership expert, Grace Judson, and slightly modified it.

You should have created a shareable document for each participant plus a "Group" document prior to the meeting.

Ask each person to access their own shareable document.
Give participants five minutes to write a draft vision statement.
At the end of the five minutes, copy and paste each person's draft statement into the Group document (keeping the author anonymous).

You can then share the Group document with everyone. Here's where we make one more modification to the facilitation process:

Have participants quickly read all the statements.
Ask people to identify common themes.
Discuss what elements, words, or phrases people particularly like, and why.

The remaining process remains the same.

Need Extra Help?

There's a lot here. The process can seem intimidating at first. But don't worry, I'm here to help!

Feel free to contact me with your questions.
You can also schedule a call to walk through the process.

There's one last danger I want to point out.

Each step in the process has been carefully chosen and tested. While you might be tempted to make some modifications, experience suggests that's a bad idea.