Join up to stand apart - Brand Learning Report

Break down silos and join up to win at customer experience

Join up to stand apart

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1. Executive summary 3

2. About the report 4

3. Joining up differentiated customer experiences - what gets in the way? 5

4. Co-invention – joining up differentiated customer experiences to drive growth 6

5. Making it happen in practice – the 3i Drivers 10 5.1 Invention in strategy and execution

5.2 Integration of real working practices

5.3 Ingenuity of people

6. Summary – making it happen in practice 28

7. About BRAND LEARNING and the author 29

CONTENTS

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

This report identifies the practices that are getting in the way and explores how leaders can join up their organisation to deliver truly differentiated customer experiences. It provides fresh insights and practical solutions based on our work with over 160 leading organisations, as well as new research with companies such as Virgin, PepsiCo, First Direct, M&S, Aviva and Unilever, and in different fields such as Williams Martini Racing, United Nations migration and the Royal Marines. The key findings and recommendations outlined in this report are:

What’s getting in the way

Why current practices hinder success, such as rigid strategies focused only on today’s pain points, restructures that fail to overcome silos in practice and disempowered people.

Why ‘Co-Invention’ breaks down boundaries

How to break down silos and join up functions through the co-invention of differentiated customer experience solutions that have never existed before.

Joined-up customer experiences that are differentiated and relevant are a proven driver of business growth,1 and a top priority for leaders across industries. However, many organisations are struggling to keep pace with the rising expectations of uncompromising customers, and customer experience scores have actually declined in markets such as the US over the past year.2

The 3i Drivers - How to join up differentiated customer experiences in practice

INVENTION in Strategy and Execution

Inspire a customer experience movement, bring together teams to invent differentiated customer experiences and continuously improve the micro-moments using data-driven insights.

Enabled by…

INTEGRATION of Real Working Practices

Join up structures, processes and ways of working around the real needs of your customers, employees and partners.

INGENUITY of People

In an era of increasing automation and artificial intelligence, harness the ingenuity of people to deliver innovative customer experience solutions and amplify across the business.

It’s about insatiable curiosity in everyone, focused on how can we do things better together - what makes people tick and constantly asking ‘what if?’ and ‘why the hell not?'

Mark Gilmour Global Brand Director, Virgin Group

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Please note:

'Customer’ is used in this report in its broadest sense – ultimately focused on the end consumer, but including key intermediaries and influencers in a particular market.

Growth results are provided in case studies relating to recent historic initiatives, but not for case studies describing newer initiatives which haven't yet had time to fully deliver impact.

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• Brand Learning’s experience with over 160 leading organisations in more than 60 countries worldwide.

• In-depth interviews with leaders from ‘Growth Driver’ organisations such as Virgin, First Direct and Unilever, and companies achieving success through recent customer experience initiatives.

ABOUT THE REPORT

Joining up outstanding customer experiences is a challenge that requires fresh insights and practical solutions, which drive business performance. The recommendations in this report are based on:

Leading organisations across industries

• Qualitative research into ‘Growth Driver’ organisations delivering outstanding customer experiences.

• In-depth interviews with leaders from different fields – United Nations migration, Williams Martini Racing, the Royal Marines and Sky TV’s Newsroom.

New interviews with business leaders

Extensive practical experience Quantitative reasearch

+160 +60Countries worldwide

+1000Contributors to Growth Drivers study and Joined-Up CX research

Interviews with leaders in different fields

Best practice case studies

• Findings supported by quantitative data from Brand Learning’s Growth Drivers’ study and Joined-Up Customer Experience research (+1,000 contributors in total).

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The number one barrier remains ‘Siloed behaviours and ways of working’ (48%) – constant restructures to address silos are just creating more silos and failing to enable people to work together to deliver for customers in practice. There is too little focus on real working practices and cultural barriers between teams.

The result is even more bureaucracy in processes (35%), fixed structures (33%) and employees who don’t feel empowered (29%) – their needs for purpose, involvement and growth unfulfilled by organisations. The employee experience and customer experience are intrinsically linked; employees need to be empowered to deliver outstanding experiences for customers.

Strategies are too focused on today’s pain points vs future opportunities (27%).

JOINING UP DIFFERENTIATED CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES - WHAT GETS IN THE WAY?The customer experience is how customers feel and think about a business or brand through every interaction over time. Joined-up, differentiated customer experiences drive advocacy, purchase intent, loyalty, higher prices and ultimately growth, and were identified as a top hallmark of ‘Growth Driver’ organisations in Brand Learning’s Growth Drivers study.3

72% 70%

60%

46%

Growth Drivers Growth Laggards

LEARNING

Join up strategies around end-to-end

customer experience

Structures and ways of working built

around end-to-end customer experience

43%

44%

72%

74%

Current pain points must be addressed, but by starting there, strategy is created within the parameters of what is vs what can be, perhaps limited by the way the supply chain works rather than how it could work for customers. The result is strategies that fail to engage emotionally with customers and change behaviour, and teams unable to break out of today’s siloed practices.

Functional planning and execution is too rigid (22%) – the customer experience is changing all the time, you need to constantly iterate execution based on data-driven insights to sustain performance.

To help overcome these barriers and achieve your goals, we will demonstrate what growth-driving organisations do differently and how to make this happen in practice.

However, achieving success in the era of the ‘uncompromising customer’ is challenging. Empowered by information and choice in a technology-driven world, uncompromising customers demand an outstanding experience through multiple interaction points across the customer journey. It is essential that different functions work together to deliver outstanding customer experiences every time.

Whilst acknowledging the external challenges, we must recognise there are internal practices getting in the way. Too many organisations continue to try to solve customer experience problems by using the same thinking and approaches they used to create these problems in the first place. As Albert Einstein famously said "We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them".

Strategies too focused on

today vs future opportuni�es

Rigid func�onal

planning and execu�on

Fixed organisa�onal

structures

Bureaucra�c processes and

systems

Siloed behaviours and ways of

working

Employees don’t feel

empowered

27%22%

33%

48%

45%

29%35%

Fig.2: Internal barriers getting in the way of joined-up differentiated customer experiences4

Fig. 1: Practices - Growth Drivers vs. Laggards

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Customer Experience Co-Invention

Through our extensive experience and new research, we have explored what 'Growth Driver' organisations do differently to join up outstanding customer experiences. These organisations don’t start with fixing current pain points, recognising you can’t fix your way to future competitive advantage and that focusing only on today prevents teams from breaking out of silos. Winning organisations instead join up strategies, ways of working and execution using ‘co-invention’.

CO-INVENTION - HOW TO JOIN UP DIFFERENTIATED CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES TO DRIVE GROWTH

We are genuinely customer-centric, we are genuinely long term orientated, and we genuinely like to invent.

Jeff Bezos, CEO, Amazon

"Brings together different groups to invent and iterate differentiated customer experiences that have never existed before – breaking down silos and creating new value for all.”

Co-invention differs from ‘co-creation’, which brings in different parties during a phase of a development process.

Co-invention is inventing something that has never existed before, originating ideas and working together to execute experiences that engage customers at an emotional level to influence behaviour. It is a way of innovating the customer experience that everyone can contribute to, instilling a shared inventiveness that drives shared ownership. It delivers not just mutual value, but new value for customers, employees and partners by enabling cross-functional teams to design the future experience and deliver breakthrough solutions in practice.

Making it happen in practice – the 3i Drivers

INVENTION in strategy and execution

Inspire a customer experience movement, bring together teams to invent differentiated customer experiences and continuously

improve the micro-moments using data-driven insights.

Enabled by…

INTEGRATION of real working practices

Join up structures, processes and ways of working around the real needs of your customers, employees and partners.

INGENUITY of people

In an era of increasing automation and artificial intelligence, harness the ingenuity of your people to deliver innovative

customer experience solutions and amplify across the business.

Fig. 3: 3i Drivers

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The 3i Drivers are proven to deliver superior business growth5

We validated the findings from our qualitative research with the quantitative data from our Growth Drivers’ study research and Joined-up Customer Experience research, comparing the activities of Growth Drivers vs Growth Laggards. 'Growth Driver' organisations are classified based on these criteria: track record of at least 6% annual growth over the past three years, confidence in their ability to make the changes necessary to meet future growth goals and admired as Growth Drivers globally.

The research demonstrated that more than double the number of Growth Drivers vs Laggards strongly agree they apply the 3i drivers in their business. Moreover, priority activities required for Invention in strategy and execution, Integration of real working practices, and harnessing the Ingenuity of people were shown to distinguish Growth Drivers vs Growth Laggards (see fig. 4).

Growth Drivers Growth Laggards

Join up strategies around end-to-end customer experience

Inclusive, fostering crea�vity from all sources

Apply data-driven insights in everything we do

Joined-up strategies and ac�vi�es across func�ons rated as very good*

Join together cross-func�onally to invent customer experience strategies*

INVENTION

Agile working – quickly and responsively

Empower our people

Driven by an in-built sense of curiosity

Spend at least two days per month on learning

Structure and ways of working built around end to end customer experience

INTEGRATION

INGENUITY

72%43%

50%79%

63%48%

65%35%

84%65%

74%44%

72%44%

79%54%

76%62%

53%33%

76%Cross-func�onal working prac�ces are integrated around the real needs of customers and employees* 62%

Less than1 in 3

Less than1 in 4

Rate their organisa�on as highly joined up across strategies and ac�vi�es

Strongly agree that cross-func�onal working prac�ces are integrated

around the real needs of customers and employees

Strongly agree that their organisa�ons harness the

ingenuity of their people to deliver outstanding customer experiences

Less than1 in 4

Fig. 4: 3i practices of Growth Drivers vs Growth Laggards

2x

Growth Drivers vs. Growth Laggards strongly agree that

they apply the 3i drivers*

More than

However, there is need for significant improvement across all 3i Drivers:*

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Virgin Management group is a global family investment and brand licensing office at the heart of Virgin. Virgin

owns or licenses over 60 companies in core consumer sectors to fulfil its purpose of ‘changing business for good’. One of the many ways it strives to achieve this is by supporting Virgin companies to re-invent the customer experience in their sectors through ‘insatiable curiosity’ into customers’ lives and harnessing innovative solutions from outside their industries.

The global group guides the activation of its brand across the customer experience in a diverse range of sectors through Virgin customer experience principles. For example, a Virgin experience principle is ‘always being transparent and responsive’, and this guides the customer experience

strategy of Virgin companies such as Virgin Trains, which became the first train operator to publish clear punctuality data on its services and uses social media to deal with issues openly.

Virgin recognises the importance of employees and partners in delivering truly differentiated customer experiences – integrating working practices around their real needs and harnessing their ingenuity to design new solutions. For example, Virgin Money’s purpose is to make everyone better off (EBO), and EBO is integrated into all policies and used to evaluate business decisions. Leaders empower front-line employees to bring their real selves to work (consistently achieving 85% employee engagement scores), and involve intermediaries through initiatives such as the ‘Innovation Lab’ to invent new propositions together.7

Virgin Group - Changing business for good across industries6

Virgin America uses co-invention to drive differentiated experiences and join up ways of working between functions – collaborating together to re-imagine all aspects of the in-flight experience, such as social personalised in-flight entertainment systems, on-demand menus and its famous ‘singing safety video’. For example, a team comprised of marketing, digital, legal, operations, IT and their agency worked together to re-invent the booking experience through the first responsive airline website, which works twice as fast as any other airline on any device. Success was achieved through listening to the perspectives of every function in iterating prototypes at each stage, continuous improvement of the experience post launch and the active involvement of C-suite leaders to reduce hierarchical committee reviews.8

Culture and technology are harnessed together to deliver ‘instant service recovery’ for customer issues. The social personalised in-flight systems not only suggest beverage and entertainment

choices based on passengers’ previous trips, but also enable passengers to converse in real-time with Virgin America customer service teams on the ground. For example, if you’re worried about missing a connecting flight, the customer service teams can provide a response in-real time through the system with guidance on making your connection. Virgin America's responsive service is enabled through VXConnect, a social intranet which enables ‘team-mates’ to converse continuously. The system and processes were designed around how their people really work – 90% of the team-mates are remote from each other, need to share ideas fluidly, and are from a demographic that uses social networks heavily in their personal lives. The ‘team mates’ are not controlled by management, but rather empowered to act in the right way and use their ingenuity through common Virgin values such as ‘heartfelt service’ to make flying feel good again for customers.

Virgin America – Making flying good again across the ‘guest’ experience

We use data from all our companies to identify those gems of insight. If you want to create breakthrough differentiated customer experiences, you’ve often got to look outside category. If we’re in financial services and all we look at is financial services, it will be incremental.

Mark Gilmour Global Brand Director, Virgin Group

We can't teach them everything in training, we give them the framework and expect them to use their creativity and create a great situation for the customer. We teach them the basics, but we expect them to use their imagination and brainpower to solve the rest.David Cush CEO, Virgin America9

4th year in row – rated best quality airline in the US

No.152% Average annual opera�ng profit increase 2013–2015 4% Average annual growth

rate for revenue 2013–2015

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Winning across future demand spaces10

PepsiCo’s growth strategy is rooted in the ‘demand spaces’

they identify across the consumer experience, where PepsiCo brands can be paired together to meet a consumer need and leverage portfolio strength. The shared focus on these demand spaces brings together cross-functional teams to invent differentiated strategies and initiatives. For example, to drive brand choice in a ‘friends having fun together’ demand space, PepsiCo invested in sponsorship of the UEFA Champions League with Lay’s/Walkers, Gatorade and Pepsi MAX, and developed an end-to-end experience for consumers, shoppers and customers across an unprecedented 103 markets. In particular, focusing on the demand spaces helps join up marketing, innovation and sales to unlock new value for customers as well as consumers, such as exploiting the ‘young hungry consumer’ in North American foodservice channels through innovations including Doritos Loaded and variants of Taco Bell’s Doritos Locos Tacos.

PepsiCo also brings together Marketing and Sales through continuous improvement of ‘demand pockets’ – pockets of growth based on granular understanding of consumer demand in a particular channel, such as the Doritos/Mountain Dew customised programme for 7-Eleven which achieved 3.2m Doritos’ loaded servings in the first 30 days. By focusing on the micro ‘demand pockets’ as well as the macro initiatives, Marketing demonstrates its support for Sales teams’ specific channel objectives, building trust in their ways of working. Additionally, PepsiCo established a Design function which works across the portfolio to apply design thinking to enhance their consumer experience through breakthrough innovation, such as the Spire digital fountains and vending machines. Close collaboration between designers, food scientists and Marketing is achieved through projecting out into the future and re-imagining the consumer experience as it could be.11

Enabled through networks of ‘SLAM’ teams within a matrix structurePepsiCo’s matrix structure enables the organisation to deliver scale initiatives across markets. The category structure comprises Brand & Innovation development teams at global and regional levels (including Brand, Innovation, Consumer Insight and R&D supported by Commercialisation, Finance and Supply Chain) and Business Unit local activation teams at market level. A matrix structure can help enable joined-up working but can also create internal complexity with multiple lines of command and competing priorities, so an external and future orientation is essential.

PepsiCo instils pace and integrated working practices within its matrix structure through networks of ‘SLAM’ teams. The SLAM teams are mission focused and empower cross-functional

teams to work together to deliver specific goals across the consumer experience. They are output focused, using consent rather than consensus decision making (is this initiative safe to try?), with teams closest to the work making decisions, and underpinned by common values and rewards. Networks of SLAM teams drive and enable execution across the matrixed organisation – for example, a SLAM team was set up to mobilise a joined-up approach to the Champions League sponsorship activation. Involvement in these teams is empowering for people within a matrix structure, providing them with greater purpose and autonomy for delivering specific goals in a very rapid way. The operating rhythm is fast and iterative, supported by an analytics workbench of sales and category performance metrics.

Only five years ago PepsiCo was a group of independent businesses that were doing their own thing in a very different way. Now we have a much more integrated agenda that has the foundation of what we call ‘demand spaces’ - a map of where and how and with whom snacking is happening, and how we see that landscape evolving over the next years. Cesc Bordas General Manager, Snacks, West Europe and South Africa, PepsiCo

5% Average annual growth rate for revenue 2013–2015*

*organic revenue figures

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MAKING IT HAPPEN IN PRACTICE - THE 3i DRIVERS

As leaders, you need to start with a mindset that says we’re just going to get there. It enables you to work collaboratively but when you run into problems, bring some edge to deal with issues honestly and head on.

Richard MarriottDirector roles, British Gas and Amazon UK

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INVENTION IN STRATEGY AND EXECUTION

We’re in an era of entrepreneurship – people want to invent new solutions to make people’s lives better, evident through the 100 million start-ups launched last year12 as well as the popularity of crowdsourcing sites such as Kickstarter and Gofundme. Organisations are partnering with start-up communities or setting up their own start-ups to propel their breakthrough innovation efforts, such as Aviva’s Digital Garage or Unilever’s The Foundry. Whilst this can deliver impressive results, the danger is innovation becomes the remit of these specialists only. Joining up differentiated customer experiences requires invention in strategies and execution across the whole organisation, enabling everyone to contribute to breakthrough and

Inventiveness, and the small and big breakthroughs it generates, will be at least as important as innovation to the future of what we do and how we progress – innovation has become too elitist.

Adam MorganFounder, Eat Big Fish

As a programme co-ordinator managing the issues of forced

migration and resettlement in countries such as Zimbabwe and Somalia, you need to join up teams across multiple locations (support offices, airport and camps), as well as government agencies to deliver your purpose of ‘alleviating human suffering’. Your teams are operating in highly dangerous environments, with differing needs on the ground and challenging communication systems – vision and invention is required to achieve success.

In Zimbabwe, the programme leadership team shifted their strategy from humanitarian aid alone to enabling affected communities and the government to work together to find solutions – resulting in initiatives such as bringing perpetrators and victims together to agree reconciliation and compensation. The focus is on building momentum behind new initiatives through harnessing powerful influencers in both the government and the communities. In turbulent environments such as Somalia, strategies and plans are continuously iterated using ‘ground truthing’ – information provided through

Learnings from UN migration in Zimbabwe and Somalia13

incremental customer experience solutions on an ongoing basis. This shared inventiveness drives shared ownership across functions and a commitment to customer experience excellence.

Rather than driving top-down initiatives, leaders must inspire a customer experience movement to galvanise action, and bring together different teams to invent new customer experience solutions focused on future passion points (moments of high emotion that will delight customers) as well as current pain points. Invention is about iteration; cross-functional teams need to work together to continuously improve every micro-moment using data-driven insights.

direct observation by the teams on the ground. This continuous iteration and improvement is enabled through calls at least three times a week, in which teams on the ground share their insights with each other, explore opportunities, and agree how to adjust plans and execution going forward. Execution is not driven through ‘command and control’, but through recruiting and developing people with the right mindsets so they can adapt and deal creatively with issues as they arise in real-time.

5.1

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Cleveland Clinic continues to innovate and iterate its patient experience solutions. A notable patient experience initiative was ‘same day’ appointments that enabled any patient to be seen the day they called in. To evolve with the changing needs of patients, they continued to innovate this moment through their Cleveland Clinic Today mobile app (via which patients can request appointments, find doctors and access personalised health content) and real-time chats online with HCPs.

In the healthcare sector, pharmaceutical companies are highly focused on improving the patient experience but can find

that traditional business models and working practices get in the way. A healthcare organisation that is renowned for transforming its patient experience is the Cleveland Clinic, a not-for-profit medical centre, which increased its ranking in the CMS survey of patient satisfaction from average to among the top 8% in two years. One of the first enablers of this transformation was to invent the future patient experience for the Cleveland Clinic as a cross-functional leadership team. James Merlino (then Chief Customer Officer) took out the 60 top cross-functional leaders for a retreat in which they invented what the perfect patient experience could look like, focused on quality medical care but spanning all aspects of the experience from free parking to smiling friendly staff through every interaction.

It’s about constant curiosity to continually understand what patients are doing. What are all the things that influence a patient’s thinking and psyche through the day that we might be able to help with.

Eric DubeSenior VP, GSK Global Respiratory Franchise

To help inspire their customer experience movement, Cleveland Clinic defined patient experience principles alongside their purpose: 1. Providing safe care; 2. Delivering high-quality care; 3. Environment of exceptional patient satisfaction; and 4. Value conscious environment. These experience principles were translated into differentiated solutions across the patient experience for all functions:

Reframed everyone as patient-centred caregivers (patient-facing and enabling functions) – involving everyone in setting caregiver priorities and integrating expectations into annual performance reviews.

Maintained a patient-centred environment – tracking and analysing patient perceptions to maintain a patient-centred environment, such as ensuring rooms don’t become too noisy or dealing with spillages immediately.

Equipped teams to deliver patient-centred service – through its HEART responsive service model (Hear, empathise, apologise, respond and thank). For example, if a patient is annoyed about having to walk the day after surgery, explain that ambulating is critical – safety is important above all other principles.

Overall sa�sfac�on percen�le ranking 2008–12 (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services)

6% Average annual growth rate for revenue 2013–2015

55% 92%

Co-inventing the patient experience in healthcare14

5.1.1

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Thomson Reuters led a successful customer experience

transformation within their Tax & Accounting division, under their overall purpose to “make your work easier, faster, and more profitable through powerful tax and accounting solutions”. The change was underpinned by two key elements: the ‘programme’ side (data-driven workstreams focused on specific customer experience priorities) and the ‘movement’ side. This ‘movement’

was focused on gaining executive-level commitment and key influencer support for driving the customer experience vision, such as ‘Exec Connect’ asking each ELT member to complete three CX tasks per quarter (e.g. meeting with end users, spending time with customer-facing teams) or their ‘What is your CX Move’ programme with regular videos of leaders and employees highlighting what they’ve done this month to enhance the customer experience.

Inspiring a customer experience movement18

“We found those passionate ones who really wanted to be there, who wanted to keep the conversation going and who wanted to solve the problems.” Toby Lee, then CMO, Thomson ReutersTax and Accounting.

INSPIRE A CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MOVEMENT

How to inspire a customer experience movement

Start your customer experience (CX) movement

• Work with leaders and influencers at all levels to instil commitment behind the purpose – what excites them about the purpose for customers and why?

• Identify priorities for the CX movement, such as how to gain board support, new CX programmes or addressing critical capability gaps.

Galvanise action through inconvenient truths and cultural symbols

• Challenge the business through ‘inconvenient truths’ using the customer data or consumer research groups with the board to demonstrate why CX action is critical for future business performance.

• Build momentum through cultural symbols across the organisation. Nationwide received a thank-you letter from a father who had been helped through credit issues to find a mortgage, and was now in his first house and considered a hero by his children. This was used as a symbol of delivering Nationwide’s purpose for customers in meetings and forums across the business.17

Prove the business impact of CX programmes

• Demonstrate the impact of CX programmes on business results at prioritised journey phases - Net Promoter Score (NPS) is simple to calculate and communicate, but not the whole picture.

• Work with data analysts to integrate Voice of the Customer data (e.g. surveys, social sentiment, employee feedback, complaint logs) with interaction data from customer touchpoints and correlate to business metrics such as cost to serve, churn and revenue.

• Ensure you have the right conversations with leaders up front to agree the methodology and what success looks like in terms of ROI and timings.

7% Average annual growth rate for revenue 2013–2015

Leaders need a compelling purpose for their business or brand – it defines why you exist for customers and helps drive growth.15 However, in too many organisations the purpose remains disconnected from the customer experience, described as ‘missions laminated not lived’.16 Winning organisations deliver on their purpose through actions not words by inspiring a customer experience movement across the organisation.

“It was incredibly inspiring – it goes from 99th mortgage application to the emotional impact it’s having, it builds pride.Sara Bennison CMO, Nationwide

5.1.1

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INVENT CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE STRATEGIES AND PLANS TOGETHERThrough our work delivering strategy and planning programmes across industries, a common challenge is helping functions break out of today’s practices and work together to deliver truly differentiated solutions. Winning organisations don’t implement the same rigid strategy and planning processes. Instead, they bring together cross-functional teams to invent the future customer experience first, harnessing customer data and future trends to envision the experience if the brand purpose is fulfilled. Inventing the future first breaks down existing path dependencies, enabling teams to identify future ‘passion points’ to delight customers as well as ‘pain points’. Teams can then work back from this future to deliver more innovative strategies to both unlock the opportunities of tomorrow and address the issues of today.

Invention in strategy and execution requires a more inventive approach to customer journey mapping and strategy development, and new capabilities built into cross-functional teams. ‘Future state’ journey mapping too often isn’t based on the right customer data and foresight – it becomes too formulaic rather than genuinely inventive. i-Map is our approach for inventing differentiated customer experience strategies and initiatives.

“Clearly define the customer experience you want to create and back solve – if you’re clear on what a great customer experience looks like, you don’t get constrained by the way the supply chain and systems are.

Will OrrManaging Director, British Gas Home Installations

PURPOSE-LED POSITIONING

the future experience

the current customer journey

gaps and set goals

strategies & initiatives

INVENT

MAP

ANALYSE

PRIORITISE

Fig. 5: The i-MAP approach

15.1.2

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INVENT the future experience:

• Bring together cross-functional teams through a real business task to develop foresight into the future environment and invent ideas for the future experience. This could involve immersion in your customers’ world, co-invention with innovation hubs or customers, partnering with ‘bleeding edge’ starts-ups or networks such as Techstars, and exploring future market dynamics.

• Capture the outputs in a future-state journey map using the brand’s customer experience principles.

MAP the current customer journey:

• Map out the customer journey as it currently is. Drill down to understand the insights behind customer behaviour at each journey phase – keep asking why? Ensure all cross-functional team members have the opportunity to share their data and contribute.

ANALYSE gaps and set goals:

• Analyse gaps in the future journey vs current journey, and prioritise moments – both passion points to delight customers and pain points to fix. Work with data scientists to experiment with, analyse and correlate Voice of Customer data, interaction data from touchpoints and business metrics to validate goals.

• Apply predictive modelling to forecast future outcomes, such as multivariate regression or models applied to data to predict future behaviour. Be pragmatic with the data available but equally aware of the breadth of data you can access – it’s estimated businesses only use 5% of data they receive.19

PRIORITISE strategies and initiatives:

• Enable cross-functional teams to invent customer experience strategies and initiatives to deliver goals. Integrate across the customer experience levers, ensuring all relevant customer facing and enabling functions’ contributions are incorporated.

• For example, we worked with the marketing and sales teams at a global beverages organisation on joined-up strategy and planning. We helped each function understand the value of the other by getting them to 'wear each other’s hat' whilst working on a case study as well as using experts in each function to provide perspective and guidance.20

Fig. 6: Integrated Customer Experience Levers*

Less than

30%Over

40%

Companies involve HR and IT in developing CX strategies

despite the importance of technology and the employee

experience to CX impact

Companies don’t involve sales teams in developing CX strategies

despite their cri�cal role

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How to invent customer experience strategies and plans together

The starting point of i-Map is to define experience principles to guide how the brand purpose should be delivered across the customer experience, such as Virgin Group’s ‘Always being transparent and responsive’ or Cleveland Clinic’s ‘Providing Safe Care’. The principles are developed using insights and the brand values, and are easier to implement by cross-functional teams compared to traditional elements of a brand positioning such as the brand idea or essence.

Product/solu�ons

Customerengagement

Channel/distribu�on

Pricing/promo�ons

Service

Visibility

DESIREDCUSTOMEREXPERIENCE

TechnologyInfrastructure

People

*Example only - levers will vary by industry

16

In 2012, Airbnb founder Brian Chesky hired a Pixar animator to create illustrations of each stage

of the perfect Airbnb experience from the perspective of hosts and guests from ‘browsing for the right place’ to ‘checking out’. The illustrations were based on the outputs of team-working sessions to invent what this experience could be at particular stages if Airbnb fulfilled its purpose “To make people feel they can belong anywhere in the world”. As Joseph

Unilever integrates foresight and future trends into category teams’ planning and

ways of working, exploring emerging trends, disruptors to those trends and the implication at a category and product level. As Bill Marshall, Global Director, Human & Cultural Futures at Unilever comments, “If you’re in a cross-functional category team, the future trends are baked into how that whole category operates – we don’t just look at trends, we also look at disruptors to those trends. Looking at the disruptor enables you to look at the trend quite differently.” For example, whilst e-commerce is a key trend, a disruptor to that trend is that young people want to enjoy face-to-face real experiences, and are happy to enjoy indulgences within a balanced lifestyle. Magnum has used this insight to develop pop-up ‘Pleasure stores’ where consumers can make their own Magnums in an experiential way.

92% Average annual growth rate for revenue 2013–2015

6% Average annual growth rate for revenue 2013–2015

Inventing the future experience for hosts and guests22

Zadeh, Airbnb Product VP explains, “It's believing that the best experience will always lead to the best outcomes. Putting experience over any other consideration will lead to good things.” And indeed it has led to good things through differentiated customer experiences (from its one Airbnb event for hosts to its recently launched Airbnb Trips app offering location-based travel guides and services) and impressive business growth, with Airbnb now the most valuable accommodations company in the world.

Harnessing future trends and solutions to deliver outstanding consumer experiences23

Unilever also connects their category and brand teams with the start-up community and its own incubator business, The Foundry. Teams brief The Foundry on start-up solutions to enable differentiated consumer experiences, such as Knorr’s partnership with Digital Genius to build Chef Wendy, an app which uses AI and natural language processing to provide dish suggestions with Knorr based on recipe ingredients.

5.1.35.1.3

17

CONTINUOUSLY IMPROVE THE MICRO-MOMENTS

Fixed planning and execution no longer works in today’s dynamic external environment. Equally, simply focusing on agility is not enough; organisations cannot simply evolve with the changing environment, they must be proactive, continuously improving plans and execution at the micro-level. Google has highlighted the concept of ‘micro-moments’, demonstrating how the customer journey has been fractured into hundreds of real-time, micro-moments. In those moments enabled by mobile technology, customers expect brands to address their needs with real-time relevance.24

Whilst mobile is a key priority, there needs to be a broader focus on all micro-level interactions across the customer experience. Cross-functional teams need to collaborate to develop micro-level plans, iterating execution and adjusting the overall strategy when needed. Stronger data analytics and insight capability is critical to drive this continuous improvement of the micro-moments. Leaders must enhance the data literacy of all teams as well as data science capabilities in analytics groups, enabling these teams to experiment together with real-time and standard data, explore potential insights, and translate into relevant, personalised experiences for customers wherever they are.

To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment. Most large organizations embrace the idea of invention, but are not willing to suffer the string of failed experiments necessary to get there.

Jeff BezosCEO, Amazon

Amazon’s mission is to be the Earth’s most customer-

centric company, empowered by autonomous teams and an obsessive focus on delivering better for customers. Amazon leads the way through inventive strategies (Amazon Prime Video, Amazon Fresh, Amazon Dash to name but a recent few), but is equally obsessed with continuously improving the micro-moments.

Amazon focuses on thousands of use cases (interactions between users and the system) and treats every single customer use case differently. Machine learning, data analysis and insight is applied to understand user behaviour in micro-moments across the customer journey (from exploring new products to making purchases) enabling Amazon to target users with highly relevant content and personalised

recommendations such as ‘related to items you’ve viewed’ and ‘new for you’.

Amazon’s multi-disciplinary teams focus on these detailed use cases through intensive weekly meetings in which they interrogate complex data sets. They focus heavily on measuring inputs as well as outputs such as customer advocacy and growth, in particular their priorities – selection, competitive pricing and service delivery. One of Amazon’s leadership principles is ‘deep dive’, with leaders expected to stay connected to the detail, audit frequently, and be sceptical when metrics and anecdotes differ. Leaders at Amazon are expected to embrace complexity and treat each use case on merit. This obsession comes from Jeff Bezos himself, who still sends ‘question mark’ emails to his teams when he notices details of the execution that aren’t right for customers.

Only

23%

Companies strongly agree that func�ons work together to

con�nuously improve every aspect of the customer experience 25

Obsessively improving customers’ lives across the micro- and macro-moments26

21% Average annual growth rate for revenue 2013–2015

5.1.35.1.3

18

Energise teams through a ‘growth mindset’

• Instill a growth mindset into teams’ ways of working, so they openly acknowledge what’s working and look for opportunities to improve performance - failure and continuous learning is essential for invention.

• Encourage this honest evaluation through leaders that deal openly with failure and use learnings to benefit the team as a whole. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg asks her team after every meeting – What did we learn? What could we have done better?27

Design and iterate plans across micro-moments

• Equip multi-disciplinary teams to design micro-level plans for prioritised moments in the customer journey, such as researching, exploring solutions, making purchases, enjoying experiences or sharing it with others.

• Define what customers feel, do and think in these moments, the influencers and influences. Identify how this changes depending on context (e.g. time of day, where they are, the device they’re using) to uncover insight into their needs in the moment, and deliver highly relevant content and experiences.

• Use regular meetings and collaboration platforms to interrogate the data continuously, draw out insights and iterate plans across the micro-moments.

There is a performance factor to it. Culturally you get into that way of thinking concept/measure/test/perform all the time, in everything that you do – whether it’s finance, legal, sales or marketing, that performance criteria becomes part of the way that you live your life from a working point of view.

Richard BerryHead of Commercial, Williams Martini Racing

Enable with stronger analytics and insight capabilities in all, not just specialists

• Develop stronger analytics groups (e.g. data scientists to analyse sources of real-time and standard data, and apply algorithms to predict future behaviour), but equally generalist teams with the capabilities to work with the data specialists and translate into actionable insight.

• Ensure teams can frame the right questions, work with data scientists to source, clean and analyse the right data (e.g. Voice of customer, interaction data, location-based data, operational metrics, trends data), and visualise into actionable insights. Ways of working between analytics groups and business teams must be experimental with a bias for action, as we see in CX leaders such as Amazon.

• Enable teams through data analytics tools such as Suite CX and Clickfox, or general purpose tools such as Tableau, to help analyse the variety of data and visualise the findings. But such tools are not the solution in themselves, and still require the right skillsets in people to draw out insights to inform decision making. The same applies to automation software – without the right insights and content strategy, these programmes will fail to deliver.

How to continuously improve the micro-moments

19

M&S is one of the UK's leading retailers with over 1,330 stores worldwide. In a tough recessionary market in 2012 and under

price-pressure from discounters, M&S set out a new purpose for its food business to ‘make every food moment special’. The challenge was how to translate this aspirational purpose into joined-up customer experiences across the business to drive growth. The starting point was to instill commitment across the food management team, using customer data to demonstrate the need for change. As Nathan Ansell, the then head of brand and marketing, explains, “It was about revealing the inconvenient truths through simple stuff such as starting every FMT meeting with customer data or going out to consumer research groups as a board – a committed executive director was also essential.”

The insight in the FMT that M&S was a food hall not a supermarket was the catalyst for inventing new customer experiences, shifting from defensive price promotions to innovative solutions such as new deli counters and innovative chilled food. The momentum built behind the new direction as cross-functional leaders and teams saw the

sales uplift in-store from these new customer experience initiatives. M&S continued to innovate new solutions as a cross-functional team (Marketing, Product Development, Category Teams, Insight, Space & Range, and Buying Teams), such as their new ‘Taste’ range to address customers’ desire for more variety in prepared foods. The joined-up approach was achieved through starting with a customer need and inventing solutions that deliver benefits to all functions involved – for example, delivering a more distinctive sub-brand range for consumers that also solved display and range needs in-store and made cost savings.

In particular, closer collaboration was achieved between marketing and sales through gaining a better understanding of each other’s needs and priorities. As Nathan Ansell emphasises, “You need to adopt more of a trading mindset, looking for opportunities to drive trade into store such as relevant promotions as well as the brand building initiatives – this builds trust, which is really important.” The results have been impressive with their customer experience net promoter score up 14% and increased sales (with like-for-like UK food sales up 4% across the last three years).

Making every food moment special28

14%

Increase in net promoter score Increase in like-for-like sales in defla�onary market, 2013-20154%

20

INTEGRATION OF REAL WORKING PRACTICES

Invention in strategy and execution is the critical first driver, but we see too many strategies fail without the right culture, structures and processes to enable success in practice. Joined-up customer experience strategy and execution needs to be enabled by the integration of real working practices across the organisation.

A range of organisational structures are employed by businesses from hierarchical to flat, matrixed and holocratic, and most on a spectrum in between. The structure depends on your strategy and culture; there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution – holocracy works for customer experience leaders such as Zappos, whilst for others this self-management model just isn’t right. In our experience, success in joining up outstanding customer experiences doesn’t start with an overhaul of the organogram, which can create a lot of upheaval.

Rather the focus needs to be on integrating real work practices – how the real work gets done in the business, designed around the real needs of customers, employees and partners across the experience. We see too many customer experience strategies fail in execution because structures and procedures do not reflect these real needs. Consequently, continuous organisation restructures fail to empower teams to deliver for customers in practice, and end up creating even more complexity, bureaucracy and disempowered employees.29

The first issue is that structures and processes are not designed around customers as people, based on empathy into their real needs and broader lives rather than simply their transactions with a company. Secondly, these structures and processes don’t address the real needs of the other key group of people involved – your employees and partners. The employee experience and customer experience are inextricably linked; your people and partners need to be empowered to perform at their best to deliver your customer experience goals. A further barrier is discrepancies in culture across functions. Silos are at root a cultural issue; if people’s values and behaviours conflict, it is difficult for any structure or process to enable them to work in a joined-up way.

The fast-paced world of

broadcast journalism provides useful insights on joining up ways of working to deliver a distinctive experience. Sky News is focused on being the ‘first for breaking news’, and needs to ensure its input teams (reporters, cameramen, field producers, and home/foreign desks) work collaboratively at pace with the output programme teams for each show such as Sky Sunrise, Live at 5 and News at 10. There is high risk of silos and tensions between the input teams who research and craft

stories in the field, and the programme teams who package and edit them for broadcast. Equally each programme team is set up to operate separately to deliver distinctive angles on the news for their slots in the news schedule.

To enable joined-up ways of working, ‘package producers’ were brought in to play ‘integration’ roles, overseeing all the raw material inputs coming in between the news desk and the programme teams. They had an understanding of both the output side but also the inputs, and were often

sent out into the field to understand what raw stories are coming in. The input and output teams also interact at high frequency to enable evolution of stories through the day – a strategy meeting at the start of each day, five meetings through the day and continuous dialogue across instant messaging platforms. Leaders at Sky News are expected to be agile, with the ability to anticipate opportunities and change direction based on emerging stories.

Learnings from the Sky Newsroom30

350%

Increase in procedures and ver�cal layers

13%

Of the global workforce feel involved in their workplace

up to only

29 29

15.2

21

How to integrate real working practices

• Ensure the customer journey has been developed through the lens of your customers as people, identifying their emotional needs and lives beyond their interactions with your organisation.

• Map out the real work journey of employees and partners to deliver activities across this customer experience, and identify barriers and enablers to delivering the desired

experience at key moments. Use techniques such as observational research, focus groups and interviews, and ‘back to the floor’ role swaps to understand how the real work gets done by people and why.

• Explore the culture of different teams across key dimensions (e.g. leaders, rituals, ways of working). Identify the gaps and contradictions vs the ideal culture for the business.

Design structures, roles and responsibilities, ways of working and governance around the real needs of your customers, employees and partners. Integrating real working practices clearly varies by organisation, however there are common principles for what is working in practice across businesses with whom we work:

C-suite accountability: whether this is a Chief Customer Officer, Chief

Customer Experience Officer or Chief Marketing Officer, there needs to be

senior leader strategic responsibility for the end-to-end customer experience.

29% of respondents in our Joined-up Customer Experience research said there

is no board level responsibility for the end-to-end customer experience in

their organisation.31

Networked teams organised around CX goals: Organisations are mobilising

networked teams32 within existing structures, such as PepsiCo’s SLAM teams

or Cleveland Clinic’s patient-centric teams. The teams are organised around

priority customer experience goals and empowered to make decisions. The

focus is on the outputs and KPIs rather than rigid processes and policies.

Integration across networked teams: The risk is that by establishing different

teams focused on specific journey phases you simply create more silos; it is

equally important to integrate working practices across the teams:

Embed shared values and behaviours in ways of working and establish rewards

for collaborative performance.

Enable a common approach through standardised resources on the intranet

and open data systems.

Join up ways of working between teams through integration roles and regular

rotation of people across teams to stop silos building up.

Enable through centralised group: establish a centralised strategy, data

analytics and insight group to co-ordinate and enable CX strategy and

execution across the networked teams.

It's not good for the organisation to look at different businesses in silos; marketing can and should look at the entire experience.

Oliver ChongExecutive Director Comms & Marketing Capability, Marketing Group, Singapore Tourist Board

Design integrated working practices around the real needs of people

Generate insight into the real needs of customers, employees and partners

Shared values & rewards

TEAM

TEAM

TEAM

TEAM

TEAM

TEAM

Role rota�ons & Integra�on roles

Common resources

Open data

CENTRAL GROUP:CX STRATEGY, ANALYTICS & INSIGHT

CX GOALS

Fig. 7: Networked teams organised around CX goals

22

Integrating working practices through social connections

Facebook has used its social engineering

capabilities to avoid unhelpful silos and instil its values (be bold, focus on impact, move fast, be open, build social value) into its working practices. Rotation induction programmes are used to enable new recruits to experience working across different teams; at the end, the recruits decide which team to join but also now have social connections with all the teams and a commitment to the whole business. Further into your employee journey, if you’ve been working on the same project for

Enabling differentiated customer experiences through technology incubators

Organising for digital varies depending on your strategy and also your level of digital maturity

– digital centres of excellence, hub of spoke, multiple hub and spoke, and fully integrated. Regardless of the structure, Steve Jobs’ adage that you need to 'start with the customer experience and work back to the technology’ still remains true. Aviva’s purpose is to “free people from the fear of uncertainty’ and a customer experience priority was ensuring customers had a simple way to access, view and manage all their various policies. This is achieved through their ‘My Aviva’ interface, enabled by its ‘Digital Garage’ launched this year which brings together different functions in teams to innovate around the customer

experience. The ‘Digital Garage’ has been set up independently from the ‘mothership’, reflecting the different mindset and day-to-day working practices that start-up teams need to drive breakthrough innovation. Equally Aviva wants to ensure integration with the core business to share ideas, support initiatives such as its Hack 24 event for all employees, and enable new innovations to be more easily ‘spun into’ the core business (unless they are ‘spun out’ externally). This is supported through a blend of leadership in the Digital Garage from both the core business as well as external hires, rotation of people between the core business and the Digital Garage, and co-locating members of the core business and the Digital Garage team in the same Hoxton space.34

Our big play is the Aviva Digital Garage – we’ve created a campus and there’s an absolute convergence in those buildings of marketing people, customer service people, propositions people, engineers, and design.

Jan Gooding Global Brand Director, Aviva

51% Annual average growth rate for revenue 2013-2015

12–18 months, you are switched onto another team for a period – it can create inefficiency, but equally stops silos from building up and keeps team members fresh and energised. Facebook’s ‘be open’ is also built into the physical environment with open meeting spaces such as Hacker Square, and its company culture – for example, insisting everyone must always call colleagues by their real names rather than generic terms such as the engineering team or marketing team to help build deeper connections across teams.33

23

Transforming the customer experience through networks of teams

Driving best customer experience is a priority strategic pillar for

Lloyds Bank. To join up the organisation around its customer experience priorities, the leadership established networks of ‘hive’ teams to transform 10 key customer journeys such as account opening and onboarding for banking products and mortgage applications. These teams were co-located, bringing together people from different functions (product, channels, credit risk, conduct risk, operations and finance) to deliver minimal viable propositions using agile

methodologies, for example, launching online re-mortgage capabilities in four months vs the traditional 18-month time period. The different journeys are joined up from a customer perspective through focusing on customer lifestage moments and bringing propositions together for customers at relevant moments of truth. Establishing new governance models that enable more freedom for the teams whilst adhering to industry regulation has been a critical success factor, with the focus on proof of concept rather than rigid stage gate processes to deliver customer experience impact faster.35

Pioneering Amazing Service36

First Direct is the UK’s most recommended bank and has been

voted best UK brand for service, beating customer experience leaders such as Amazon and John Lewis. Since its inception, its purpose to ‘pioneer amazing service’ has been delivered

without branches through its 24/7/365 call centre service – open even on Christmas Day. In sync with the changing needs of its customers, it now delivers its same exceptional service through digital channels, for example iphone fingerprint technology for identification and voice biometrics by phone to make the security

The key is to ensure the teams feel liberated. Co-location is challenging, but crucial in creating a bond across the teams, instilling common thinking, and encouraging trust so they think about doing things differently.Stephen NoakesManaging Director Retail Customer Products, Lloyds Bank

The key is proceduralising the customer experience not the operation.Louise Fowler former Marketing Director, First Direct

TEAM STRUCTURES

Customer service teams (eight people max) delivering pioneering service, empowered to act and use judgment, enabled through coaching vs controlled through micromanagement End-to-end customer experience strategically driven by customer-centred leaders at C-suite level

Strong collabora�on between customer-facing teams and digital/IT systems teams, with programme manager ‘integra�on’ roles who ‘can speak technology and customer’ People experience teams also played this integra�on role enabling First Direct’s values to be lived across the business – from a midsummer snow-ball fight to bonding breaks

Designed around real needs of the customers – if there is a customer problem, every func�on deals with this first, even senior leaders

Call centre staff are equipped to use judgment in handing issues on calls – no scripts are used despite increased regula�on. This investment in capability drives high produc�vity because one staff member can deal with most things, without referring onwards or upwards in the organisa�on

Values (playful, family, pride, always on, passion, original) are fully integrated into their people policies. Select for a�tude and train for ap�tude – for example, the first interview an agent will have is over the phone, as that’s where they’ll deal with the majority of customers

Common customer KPIs and common values in everyone’s rewards – all employees including senior management are measured and rewarded on how they live the values, not sales targets, via 360� feedback

ROLES & RESPONSIBILITIES

PROCESSES & WAYS OF WORKING

DECISION MAKING

COMMON VALUES/ BEHAVIOURS

SHARED RESOURCES

REWARDS•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

Regular ‘Business in a nutshell’ communica�ons to integrate across the networks of teams

aspects of the customer experience simple and effortless. At the heart of First Direct’s success is integrating real working practices around the real needs of its customers, its people and intermediaries. First Direct’s people at all levels across every function are empowered to deliver amazing service for customers.

•

*Please note - First Direct is owned by HSBC so specific growth results are not available

24

INGENUITY OF PEOPLEInvention in strategy and execution is equally enabled by the ingenuity of people, with the commitment and capabilities to deliver innovative customer experience solutions and amplify across the business. Empowered employees are a proven indicator of a company’s customer experience and growth.37

Get some people who are really passionate about an issue and they will drive it, they pull together a virtual team and say we’re going to fix this, bringing emotion not just rationality. That’s what makes the real difference to delivering an outstanding, joined-up customer experience.

Sara BennisonCMO, Nationwide We’re in an era of increasing workplace automation, driven by artificial intelligence and robotics. Machine

learning is already re-defining how work gets done across industries, not just routine activities but also cognitive-based tasks. It is a critical enabler of delivering joined-up customer experiences more effectively and efficiently, from big data algorithms and automated packaging solutions such as Baxter the robot to Momentum Machine’s automated burger services and IBM’s Watson in customer service call centres. It is estimated that 45% of tasks completed by humans could already be automated using existing technologies.38

Yet in this age of automation, technology should not be seen as the only solution. Harnessing the ingenuity of people remains the key differentiator between standard solutions and truly differentiated experiences, from Barclays’ Digital Eagles pioneers to empowered Zappos call centre employees. Organisations need to mobilise people who want to make a difference for customers, apply their ingenuity to find solutions to customer needs, and amplify across the business. This collective ingenuity instils a shared culture that is obsessed with improving the lives of customers. Moreover, as economist

David Autor has written, automating tasks increases the needs for workers to do the other tasks that have not been automated.39 Automation of workplace activities previously delivered by humans places even greater importance on ‘right side of the brain’ activities. The focus will be less on employees’ knowledge, and more on their capabilities to be constantly curious, use their initiative in seeking out solutions for customers, and enable through new technologies – in short, ingenuity.

The issue is organisations are not fully harnessing the ingenuity of their people. ‘Questioning employees’ are looking for purpose and involvement in the organisation, but these needs are not being fulfilled.40 People are not robots; they need to be empowered to pursue new opportunities for customers. Ingenuity can be developed in the mindset and skills of teams, but only through a new approach to learning focused on improving team performance across the workflow rather than relying on one-off learning events, and more scenario-based learning to instil ingenuity into their mindsets and ways of working.

In the 2015 season, Williams’ pit stops were amongst the slowest

of all the teams and at one race even had a mix up with tyres. In the off-season, they broke down every component and brought ingenuity in finding creative ways to improve every aspect of performance. A huge

Learnings from the Williams Martini Racing Formula One team

amount of work was done to redesign critical components, both on and off the car, including the wheel guns. They worked with the drivers to ensure they would stop exactly on the marks and the team wouldn’t need to readjust. They added a visual person in there just to watch what’s going up and down the pit lane so the chief mechanic could focus single-mindedly on the release and not whether he’s releasing the driver into the oncoming traffic – this reduces the time by a 10th of a fraction of a second, which can make the difference between

gaining another place on the track or not. At the 2016 European Grand Prix, Williams equalled the fastest pit stop in history – 1.92 seconds. Their new pit stop techniques have even been re-applied to assist in resuscitating new-born babies in the University Hospital of Wales’ neonatal unit. The ingenuity of the Williams’ pit stop team is reflective of the culture of the Williams’ organisation, committed to a shared purpose of winning on the race track and passionate about seeking new ways to deliver success.41

15.3

25

Delivering happiness through the ingenuity of its people

Zappos is an online shoe and clothing retailer and its purpose is

delivering happiness for its customers and people. They use machine learning to deliver highly personalised experiences for customers such as advertising price points based on how much a customer spent on their last purchase or the value of items they previously searched for.42 However, Zappos’ differentiation is enabled through the ingenuity of its people, who are renowned for delivering wow moments for customers. For example:

• If Zappos doesn’t have the shoe you want in stock or your size, call centre employees will go to competitor sites to find what you want for you

• Zappos sent overnight a free pair of shoes to a best man who had arrived at a wedding shoeless

• Take a picture of an item and send it via the Zappos’ app and call centre teams will do the research for you

Zappos has made the ingenuity of its people a competitive advantage through instilling a common purpose of delivering happiness and shared values, such as

Barclays’ Digital Eagles – becoming ‘the most digitally savvy workforce on the high street’

Barclays’ overall purpose is “Helping people achieve their ambitions – in

the right way”, and they wanted to be at the vanguard of digital revolution and do so in a responsible way. ‘Digital Eagles’ was an initiative to help customers and employees get up to speed with tech and navigate their way around digital banking services.

Digital Eagles actually started as a colleague initiative to help employees get excited about the digital future and equipped with the skills to face the challenges with confidence. This initiative wasn’t driven from the top down, rather through a small passionate team of people who wanted to create a practical response to help colleagues and customers. A team of 18 was then seconded to be internal

champions, upskilling colleagues in digital technologies and practices. It worked very well, so they tested the programme externally with customers in a few branches. It was when the Barclays’ leadership saw the transformational impact the initiative was having on both customers and colleagues (often at a very emotional level) that the programme was scaled up across the business and became a core focus of the company strategy.

The new ambition was to become ‘the most digitally savvy workforce on the high street’, supported by an app-based learning programme through which teams could compete for points. The content was constantly updated to continue building new skills required for customer experience execution – for example, data security when the TalkTalk data leak happened. As a result, Barclays

has turned 18,000 of its employees worldwide into passionate digital advocates, who drive Digital Eagles’ customer experience programmes from Tea & Teach sessions and Eagle labs in branches (helping customers use digital equipment such as 3D printing) to Digital SOS days through social media networks.44

77.9% Average annual opera�ng profit increase 2014–2015

18,00018 Digital Eagles translated into

Gainingmobile customers took 18 months vs 13 years to achieve 4m online banking customers.

4m

‘create fun and a little weirdness’ and ‘be adventurous, creative and open-minded’. Zappos celebrates each person’s individuality – people are encouraged to be the same person at work as they are at home. They are given the freedom to be creative in delivering for customers with no call centre scripts and they amplify the great service by making exceptional stories cultural symbols.43

26

Instil common purpose, values and behaviours

• Connect people’s passions to a meaningful purpose for customers to galvanise teams to work together to make the customer experience better. Involve them in developing the purpose, brainstorm ideas for how it could be delivered for customers and explore why it matters to them personally.

• Commit leaders and teams to a shared values manifesto, which translates values into actionable behaviours. For example, Zappos has ten core values they live by such as ‘Deliver WOW through Service’ and ‘Do More with Less’.45

How to harness the ingenuity of your people

• Translate the purpose into a distinctive employee proposition based on insights into your people’s needs, and experience principles to guide its implementation across the employee experience.

Empower people through involvement

• Provide your people with greater ownership and opportunities to deliver impact for customers – people will only apply ingenuity if they feel involved through the employee experience and that they can make a tangible difference in their roles. This may be through networked teams empowered to make decisions or simply encouraging teams to contribute new ideas. For example, incubator programmes that give employees and partners the

LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional

network with more than 433 million members, driven by its purpose to connect the world's professionals to make them more productive and successful.

In 2012, it launched its LinkedIn (in)cubator programme, which once a quarter gives any employee the opportunity to form a team, invent new ideas and pitch their idea to the executive team. If approved, the team has up to

three months’ dedicated time to turn their idea into new solutions for its users. Approved incubator projects have ranged from meeting booking systems to new recycling systems. (in)cubator itself was inspired by Hackday, a Friday each month when employees were encouraged to work on just about anything they want.47

opportunity to think creatively and own the development of new ideas.

• Foster team collaboration through celebrating successes and learning from failures together, sharing new ideas across collaboration platforms such as Yammer and Chatter, and the design of the office environment with open meeting spaces such as Facebook’s Hacker Square.

• Equip leaders to coach teams to use ingenuity in everyday working – e.g. actively listening, encouraging questions, supporting personal passions, being open to new ideas and removing the fear of failure. Facebook’s EMEA VP Nicola Mendelsohn encourages her people to “do what you would do if you weren’t afraid”.46

40% Average annual growth rate for revenue 2013–2015

27

Develop people’s mindsets and skills through learning

• As well as building team capabilities for Invention in strategy and execution (such as inventive customer experience strategy and execution, purpose-led positioning, and data-driven insights), focus equally on developing ingenuity in the mindsets and skills of your people.

• Design learning programmes that equip teams to use their ingenuity in understanding and addressing real customer needs through the workflow. As with the Barclays Digital Eagles initiative, focus on real customer challenges and equip people through coaching from internal champions and leaders, networked resources (e.g. learning apps, videos on demand), communities of practice, as well as the formal learning events.

• Use scenario-based learning exercises that immerse your teams in real-life or simulated situations, building cognitive skills. This can be real work scenarios with teams working together resourcefully to achieve goals such as the Royal Marines or bite-sized online learning solutions. For example, we developed a scenario video for a telecoms company in which participants observed a customer’s journey and generated ideas for how this experience could be enhanced at each stage.

Ingenuity requires resourcefulness in different situations and the capability to think creatively in

dealing with multiple scenarios – a key characteristic of Royal Marines. This mindset and skills are developed through scenario-based practical exercises not just in the classroom, in which the army, navy, airforce and different NATO companies are brought together to use their ingenuity to complete missions. What you do and how you approach achieving your mission objectives in the scenario is left open to the team. Learning is focused on real-life situations, building troops’ experience of being in situations and their capabilities to deal with multiple eventualities. Continuous learning is enabled through sharing across nations (both people and ideas) and ongoing evaluation of performance through post-exercise reports (PXR).

Learnings from the Royal Marines48

True creativity can as much come out of functionality as it can your latest marketing campaign, but you’ve got to help other functions understand the tech opportunities rather than get dragged into the detail and technobabble.

Paul Randle Director of Digital & Media

28

SUMMARY - MAKING IT HAPPEN IN PRACTICE

Inspire a CX movement

Invent CX strategies and plans together

Continuously improve the micro-moments

Integrate real working practices

Harness the ingenuity of your people

Move fast, be prepared to fail and live the experience as your customers do all the time.

Nathan AnsellGlobal Director of Loyalty, Customer Insight & Analytics, M&S

716

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ABOUT BRAND LEARNING

BRAND LEARNING is a global consultancy whose mission is to help create growth-capable organisations. We work in partnership with the world’s leading organisations to inspire and build their capabilities to deliver customer-centred growth. We work with Marketing, Sales, HR, Leadership and Digital teams to lift their performance and ability to create exceptional customer experiences.

Rich BrysonGroup Client and Propositions Director at Brand Learning

Author

7

30

Sources

1. Brand Learning Growth Drivers’ Research 2016 identified ‘Join up strategies around the end-to-end customer experience’ and ‘Structures and ways of working built around end-to-end customer experience’ as top hallmarks of Growth Driver organisations vs Growth Laggards.

2. 2016 Temkin Experience Ratings: average CX scores for all 20 industries in US declined between 2015–16.

3. Brand Learning Growth Drivers’ Research 2016. Forrester’s Customer Experience Index has also shown that firms with higher customer experience scores have more customers who purchase again, don’t switch and recommend.

4. Brand Learning Joined-Up Customer Experience Research 2016.

5. Brand Learning Growth Drivers’ Research 2015. *Brand Learning Joined-Up Customer Experience Research 2016.

6. Brand Learning interview with Mark Gilmour (Global Brand Director, Virgin Group), 2016.

7. Virgin.com article 2015.

8. Brand Learning interview with Mark Gilmour (Global Brand Director, Virgin Group), 2016 and Work & Co case study.

9. Interview with David Cush by Carmine Gallo, youtube.com.

10. Brand Learning interview with Cesc Bordas (General Manager, Snacks, West Europe and South Africa, PepsiCo), 2016.

11. HBR article, November 2015.

12. GEM Global Report, 2015.

13. Brand Learning interview with Programme Co-ordinator for UN Migration, 2016.

14. Service Fanatics – how to build superior patient experience the Cleveland Clinic Way, 2014. Health Care's Service Fanatics – Harvard Business Review, 2013.

15. GROW: How Ideals Power Growth and Profit at the World’s Greatest Companies, Jim Stengel, 2012.

16. Brand Learning Growth Drivers’ Study 2015.

17. Brand Learning interview with Sara Bennison (CMO, Nationwide), 2016.

18. Brand Learning interview with Toby Lee (CMO, Thomson Reuters Legal and formerly of Tax and Accounting), 2016.

19. Data Analytics: Practical Data Analysis and Statistical Guide to transform and evolve any business, Isaac Cody, 2016.

20. Brand Learning client case study, 2016.

21. Brand Learning Joined-Up Customer Experience Research 2016.

22. Airbnb case study, inc.com article 2014. Fastcompany.com, article 2012.

23. Brand Learning interview with Bill Marshall (Global Director, Human & Cultural Futures, Unilever), 2016.

24. Google Micro-Moments – Your Guide to Winning the Shift to Mobile, 2016.

25. Brand Learning Joined-Up Customer Experience Research, 2016.

26. Brand Learning Interview. The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, 2014.

27. WACL event 2016, described in interview with Nicola Mendelsohn, VP EMEA, Facebook.

28. Brand Learning interview with Nathan Ansell (Global Director of Loyalty, Customer Insights & Analytics, M&S), 2016.

29. BCG research. Gallup Poll Survey, 2013.

30. Brand Learning interview with former Sky News journalist, 2016.

31. Brand Learning Joined-Up Customer Experience Research, 2016.

32. The concept of networked teams was introduced in Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World, General McChrystal, 2015.

33. Facebook Engineering Bootcamp, facebook.com posts. The Silo Effect, Gillian Tett, 2015.

34. Brand Learning interview with Jan Gooding (Group Brand Director, Aviva), 2016. The Lean Enterprise: How Corporations Can Innovate Like Start-ups, Trevor Owens, Obie Fernandez, 2014.

35. Brand Learning interview with Stephen Noakes (Managing Director Retail Customer Products, Lloyds Bank), 2016.

36. Brand Learning interview with former Marketing Director, First Direct, 2016.

37. Brand Learning Growth Drivers’ Research 2015.

38. McKinsey Four Fundamentals of Workplace Automation, 2015.

39. Automation and Anxiety, will smarter machines cause mass unemployment?, economist.com, 2016.

40. Brand Learning Growth Drivers’ Research 2015.

41. Brand Learning interview with Richard Berry (Head of Commercial, Williams Martini Racing), 2016.

42. Porter Novelli.com article.

43. Zappos.com; ukbusinesinsider.com; inc.com article – Uncommon service: the Zappos Case Study.

44. Brand Learning interview with former Barclays’ leader. www.barclays.co.uk/DigitalEagles.

45. Zappos.com values manifesto.

46. Campaignlive.co.uk interview 2015.

47. Fastcompany.com article 2013, ‘The LinkedIn incubator’ youtube 2013.

48. Brand Learning interview with Sergeant James Plowright of the Royal Marines, 2016.

With sincere thanks and great appreciation to all our interviewees, respondents, and to the broader team at BRAND LEARNING who helped shape this study and its recommendations.

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© Brand Learning 2016 All rights reserved

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