Share-Engage-Connect: Impressions from the 3rd Customer Experience Forum in Berne, Switzerland

Share-Engage-Connect: This is the vision of the Customer Experience Forum, a conference that is organized twice a year by Zurich based Customer Experience Consultancy Stimmt AG and Swisscom, Switzerlands No. 1 telecommunication company. The idea behind this event is simple: an exclusive conference for customer experience pioneers to share knowledge, engage in discussions and connect with each other to further develop their knowledge about customer experience management and design thinking.

The latest Customer Experience Forum took place on December 1st 2010 in Bern, Switzerland and customer experience pioneers from Switzerland, Germany and Austria met to discuss the role of design thinking to create remarkable customer experiences. Participants from approx. 25 companies including Baloise Insurance, Zürich Life Insurance, Vodafone, BMW Financial Services, A1 Telekom Austria and Swisscom shared their experiences about managing the customer experience in their organizations.

Design Thinking in the Financial and Telecommunication Industry

Ira Holl, who is in charge of the Q110 branch of Deutsche Bank in Berlin, started the day with a keynote about her experiences of launching and managing a “bank of the future”. The vision of Q110 is to create a radically new retail banking experience and Ms. Holl and her team have completely redefined what customers can expect from a bank. The team has permission to experiment with new ideas which lead to occasional cooking shows, a Harrods trendshop for Christmas shopping as well as a café and lounge area that very often acts as the first touchpoint in the financial advisory process. Despite all these activities, Q110 is not just a playground but in fact a financially very profitable branch with enthusiastic customers who visit their bank not just for banking but also for other activities.

Christian Petit, Head of Swisscom Residential Customers, initiated a workshop and knowledge sharing session by asking “What is essential for a design thinking culture? What can be done on the level of an individual employee to live it every day?”. He also shared his experience of leading change at Swisscom from a technology focus to a customer experience and design thinking focus. The recommendations of this session included strategic considerations to foster a startup culture within the organization as well as concrete activities for managers to facilitate design thinking and to allow customer-centric innovation to emerge within the organization.

One central element of the Customer Experience Forum are case studies from participating companies. While I have not been able to attend all of them, I have summarized those where I participated.

BMW Financial Services: A “Key to Key” Customer Journey

BMW Financial Services shared their experience with rethinking and redesigning the customer repurchase decision at the end of the leasing cycle. The main goal is to keep customers loyal to a brand because once they switch to a different car brand, a quick win-back is not possible. The idealized vision of the customer journey is a “key-to-key” customer journey. When a leasing contract expires the customer should hand in his old key and pick up a new car with a new key.

Therefore BMW developed a sophisticated personalization system that allows to address the individual situation of each customer and includes customized up-selling offers to motivate customer would to upgrade his next car.

Swisscom Shop Redesign: The Difference Between Design and Design Thinking

The Brand Experience Team of Swisscom presented one of their latest projects – a redesign project of their retail shops – which turned out to be an excellent example of applying the design thinking and customer experience mindset in an organization.

Usually when companies decide to redesign their retail shops, the first thing they do is to hire famous interior designers and architects to come up with cutting-edge designs based on the company’s brand values and corporate design. Swisscom followed a completely different approach for its retail shop redesign project. The starting point was extensive research in existing shops to understand consumer behavior to understand how shops can enable and foster self-exploration by customers. With these insights, the team started to develop an initial store concept and tested this concept together with different experiments in various stores in Switzerland. In multiple iterations the team improved the initial concept, moved to different shops in different environments and performed new experiments with new prototypes. All of these activities focused on learning and improving the initial concept and the findings are now consolidated into a final design which will be rolled-out in all Swisscom stores in Switzerland.

This project is interesting because it shows the difference between a traditional “design approach” and a “design thinking approach”. A design approach, as described in the first paragraph with star designers and architects, would often focus on making things look nice and base retail concepts primarily on brand-values, modern architecture and existing rules of corporate design. This is not a criticism of designers or architects but instead of decision makers who think that “good design” primarily needs to be aesthetically appealing and then force designers into this work mode.

Following a design thinking approach, Swisscom incorporated the key principles of user-research and prototyping not just once in the development process but on an ongoing basis. The team has detached itself from the assumption that everything can be made perfect the first time and instead incorporated continuous learning and improvement activities in the development process. Each store acted as a prototype that was used to understand consumer behavior, learn from improvements and understand the financial impact of the new concept.

More Information about the Forum

Some of the presentations from the 3rd Customer Experience Forum and additional information about the different case studies can be found online on the website for the Customer Experience Forum. Stimmt AG has also written a summary about the even in German on their website at Customer Experience Forum 3 – Man kann nicht Nicht-Designen.

The next Customer Experience Forum is already scheduled: June 16th 2011

The next Customer Experience Forum is already scheduled for June 16th 2011 in Bern, Switzerland. The organizers, Helmut Kazmaier from Stimmt AG and Miriam Bleuler from Swisscom look forward to your E-Mails to discuss a participation in this event in 2011.

Especially if you would like to share your experiences from a customer experience project or how design thinking has been incorporated in your organization, don’t hesitate to contact Helmut or Miriam to discuss your participation. While the conference was so far in German only, there are plans to open an English-speaking track and participants from non-German speaking countries are welcome to join as well.