A multinational company approached Starfish Taylor with a goal: they wanted to build a new customer experience to disrupt the market before somebody else did. And they asked Starfish Taylor to design and facilitate all their workshops for the 2+year project.

Market context for the company’s goal

In today’s consumer market, research stresses the importance of customer experience (CX), which customers use to differentiate among competing brands. CX quality is a competitive asset. Customer experience is a significant determinant of brand loyalty, customer recommendation, and the willingness for a customer to overlook any company missteps. In such a dynamic marketplace, each of these factors represents strength to any business. The company that approached Starfish Taylor wanted to tap into their current culture and system to better develop their CX potential.

Our delivery

To meet our client’s vision, Starfish Taylor designed and facilitated a series of Discovery Workshops in several countries of the customer’s global presence. One was in the UK, where we incorporated participants from all aspects of the business—from sales, to call centers, to production plants, to shipping and logistics, to accounting and to their business leaders. The Discovery Workshop drew on Starfish Taylor’s knowledge of CX and the need to align company culture, business values, and outcomes while keeping the customer’s experience front and center. 

Starfish Taylor’s approach was to design an event that delivered on the company’s objectives. This was accomplished in three phases: 

1. The Planning and Design Phase: Starfish Taylor spent time with our client to deeply understand the challenge they were approaching and what they need to get out of the workshop to move forward. This particular workshop offered a series of unique design challenges. Our primary challenge was to develop a way for participants to engage in a really short time frame while procuring the information needed for the overall CX program. This led to two smaller challenges: First, our client already had a customer journey maps in digital format, but they needed to bring the customer journey alive to test its accuracy in local context and then add or compare local experience to the larger global context. Second, the client needed participants to engage and collaborate together on terms that were abstract to them in a lingo they did not engage with daily—high-level interaction with process-centric information—to get feedback on the key points of the discovery workshop. The design challenge was thinking through some really big things, but we were able to work with the customer and bring them to life in the event.
2. The Event Phase: During the Discovery Workshop, we encouraged participants to own the problems and find solutions through humor, creativity, and experience. Key moments in the discovery workshop included: Customer Journey Maps; Pain Points; Moments of Truth; Risk Maps; and Alignment with the global vision (especially where local priorities were different). Part of the design phase was considering how to bring the elements of customer journey to life. In the event, teams projected the current state through a series of “skits” and brainstormed how business would look if the customer centric vision was realized. These skits kept participants engaged and gave a real-life idea of the possibilities we were considering.  To work around the problem of abstract language, we utilized learning moments, which introduced participants to concepts using common experience external information (e.g., a flight and restaurant experience). During the workshop, Starfish Taylor maintained a 3rd party ability to step back to offer input and advice.      
3. The Momentum Phase: Following the Discovery Workshop, Starfish Taylor provided the client with a Media Package containing the workshop materials in a format to consolidate information as they continued on discovery workshops in other countries. This template approach allowed the customer to reference back to the wider global risks alongside local context, for customer experience. 

Result

The Discovery Workshop delivered a number of core objectives, including alignment on the previously built global customer journey maps; an exhaustive list of pain points along the customer journey; the moments of truth for the customer that were priorities for the UK; a risk map; the areas of disconnect between the global customer journey maps and UK business; and a comprehensive understanding from the participants about the customer experience terminology. The UK group also came to understand the things they could improve immediately in local customer experience—“quick wins” for the UK teams to accelerate their plans for regional-based customer support. We also had a lot of fun.

Conclusion

Companies are increasingly aware of the importance of customer experience has in long-term profit strategy. The multinational company in this case study knew what they wanted to achieve but needed to discover what sort of knowledge they had, and how that knowledge could be applied to create a roadmap to achieve their goal. Starfish Taylor facilitated that discovery process by creating a workshop using a Design Thinking approach, with our proven methods, to deliver a memorable workshop participant experience, and met the customer’s objectives.