The most important breakthrough in CX and Service Design This year. CX3

Despite our best efforts over the last 50 years to create the perfect service design blueprint, things are still a little cray. This all got a little worse about 5 years ago when CX reared it's head and introduced the customer journey into the Kaizen, LEAN manufacturing ecosystem that had been finally streamlined and grown into a mature practice of "Service Design".

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Flash forward to today where it's not enough for the CFO and COO to have the nexus of data that runs the organization. Now we have to incorporate the CTO and CMO. All of these Silos have to talk transparently to each other. The problem? They all speak different data languages.

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At Service Design Week 2018, Advisory Board Member Dennis Wakabayashi broke opened the door to a whole new era of C-Suite Centricity where AI and Machine Learning tools will rapidly unite the C-Suite visibility into customer behavior as a single unified view of the business and the customer at scale. Essentially introducing a harmony of demand and supply at scale using AI Tools.

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Although AI and Machine learning will do the data crunching that humans cannot, the real barrier is still HUMAN CENTERED and requires savvy design professionals, evangelists and practitioners to make Centricity and asset for your business.

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If you want to kick start your CX/Service Design transformation. Integer Group has more info and a scheduling app at: https://www.21chickens.com/ that can help you get going in the right direction.

What do you think are the most important challenges facing organizations today as they transform into human centered, customer centric and data driven organizations? Please leave your thoughts in the comments below.

5 things to look forward to at Service Design Week 2018

1) Unprecedented Corporate Speaker List

This year, Service Design Week has somehow wrangled an impressive list of speakers and practitioners from both agency and brands who are all focused on piercing through the hype of Customer Experience and Service Design to transform these practices into a synthesized “next generation” of business transformation that promises to deliver harmony between logistics, marketing, sales, advertising and customer demand.

What I find most enthralling is the opportunity to hear from more practitioners who are accountable for the realities facing brands and agencies, rather than big name stage performers or consultants. This show is definitely going to provide a peek behind a lot of curtains and expose some tried and true secrets for attribution across all lines of operations on brand and agency sides alike.

Here are just a few of the speakers to look forward to this year:

1. Joanna Peña-Bickley: Head Of Design, Internet of Things / Amazon

2. Liz Brown: Senior Experience Designer / Ancestry

3. Samuel Carrington: Service Design Manager / Lyft

4. Xavi Cortadellas: Head of Innovation and Design / Gatorade

5. Benjamin Earl Evans: Inclusive Design Lead / Airbnb

A complete list of amazing speakers can be found here: 2018 Serviced Design Week Speakers

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2) Diverse Set of Hands On Workshops

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More than classroom lessons and great slideshows, this event has a day full of “hands on” workshops led by industry pioneers. Here just a few to put on your list of To Dos!:

Betting Big with Customer Goals
This introduction to service design will give you the practical tools and a solid understanding of core concepts to help you start applying service design across your organization. This is a crash course, starting at the most basic level, and boiling down the often esoteric and abstract concepts of service design into tangible skills. At the end of this workshop, you’ll feel confident in your understanding of service design and armed with a new toolkit to take action in your organization.

How to Pivot Organizational Culture toward Customer Centricity
Effective service design initiatives require going beyond just end-users to include front line staff and design for cultural change. Positive customer experience starts with every employee within your company. Develop a customer-centric strategy to drive repeat business and customer loyalty. Build a roadmap to: Hire and train new employees with your customers in mind, Strengthen customer-centric behaviors among your company’s leaders

Keeping-Up with Customer Expectations: Co-Creating Service Experiences for Future Economies
Service design is going primarily digital, evolving faster, trends are quickly changing, and expectations on standards are continuously being raised. Companies must be able to evolve their services & experiences just as fast in order to stay connected and competitive in the digital economy.

This workshop will explore digital-first strategies, tools, and tactics you can use to run highly productive remote meetings and Design Thinking sessions.

NOTE: This session is lead by MURAL who is pioneering some of the coolest CX / Service Design Collaboration tools in the market today. Truly cutting edge and uniquely positioned to help teams establish, cultivate and breed transformation across teams.

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3) Learning from pioneers who live and breath transformation:

CX3 is Integer Groups proprietary CX transformation methodology

KEYNOTE:
C-Suite Centricity: The CX Impact on Enterprise Performance
Dennis Wakabayashi: VP Integrated Commerce: The Integer Group/TBWA

The CX revolution is underway. Transformation is happening everywhere, and service design finds itself at the center of this storm. 

This keynote address will inspire attendees to find new success by looking at CX strategy from an entirely different perspective, using “Time” as a unifying principal to deliver profitable CX across your organization.

I’ll unpack practical tools and methods to reveal the most important connections between CX, operations, and annual financial success

CASE KEYNOTE:
Scrappy & Fearless: Making Strategic Design a Critical Competency for the Large Scale Enterprise
Elizabeth Trudeau: Founder and Head of Strategic Design / WellsFargo

In large scale enterprises disparate silos struggle to restructure and collaborate around their customer’s experience. Often, design’s perspective isn’t included until late in the game—far after strategic direction has been set. How can Strategic Design help incorporate the customer perspective early and foster enterprise wide collaboration critical for service design success? In this session, Wells Fargo’s Founder and Head of Strategic Design, Elizabeth Trudeau, will share her story on the needs assessment and process behind the formation of a strategic design function:

o    What is Strategic Design? Why is it important?

o    Making the business case behind a strategic design function

o    Becoming the advocate for cross-functional collaboration

o    How to position strategic design as THE resource to navigate the Fuzzy-Front-End

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4) Site Tours : Looking at Service Design and CX from the inside out.

Cantina Site Tour
Great teams yield better and faster results. That’s the philosophy of Cantina, a strategic design and development agency. By harnessing the power of collaboration, we help organizations move faster, work in new ways, and explore emerging technologies for practical innovation. Located in the center of Boston’s "Innovation" Seaport District, the tour will highlight:

• A collaborative workspace for teams, startups, and clients.

• Studio space for advance storytelling and prototyping using video, visual effects,
  3D fabrication, and VR.

• Cantina’s approach to human-centered design to deliver actionable insights.
  

Fidelity Labs Site Tour
Fidelity Labs is the innovation arm of Fidelity Investments. Our dedicated teams use methodologies such as Design Thinking and Lean Startup to rapidly identify and test new products and services to meet the evolving needs of Fidelity’s customers. In this tour, you will get to experience some of the experiments currently underway.

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5) Tons of industry leading free content

Here are just a few of the great resources Service Design Week 2018 is sharing with the industry:

CCW Digital Executive Report: Customer Experience
You care about the customer experience. But is the experience you’re creating the one your customers actually want? CCW Digital surveyed everyday customers about what they demand when it comes to the customer experience.

Special Report: Frictionless Experience
Nearly every business views the “effortless customer experience” as a top strategic priority. But what does that really entail? What exactly constitutes “effort” in the eyes of the customer? What causes this effort? And how can it truly be reduced (or eliminated)? Key topics include: • Is effort really important...


Building on Human-Centered Design: Evolving the Discipline of Design Research
Presented by: David Weissburg, Director, Design Strategy, Fidelity LabsMark Rogers, Director, Design Strategist, Fidelity LabsMissed out on Service Design Week 2017? Human-Centered design has emerged as the industry standard for design research. But might human-centered research, by its nature of putting “the user” in the middle, be in danger of...

For a full list of free resources click here. https://servicedesignweek.iqpc.com/downloads

Why every CX strategy should start with a Commerce Alignment Workshop

Change is hard. In every business where we introduce business transformation there is simple yet significant reason why we succeed. 

The first thing we do is align key stakeholders around a common view of the customer, content, and measurement.

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Here you see Marie Burns helping clients break down silos within the organization by sharing a clear alignment between cross functional teams,the customer mindset and how each stakeholder contributes equally to business objectives.  

So how is this accomplished?  

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It all starts with our leading strategists like Nikki Jones who outlines the customer mindset in context of retailer calendars throughout the year.  

Each stakeholder takes ownership of their part of the map and Nikki leads them in through a workshop to gather consensus around business objectives, content and measurement.

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The workshop starts with an overview of the customer landscape and open discussion to unlock free thinking about culturally relevant customer behaviors. 

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Next Nikki guides each contributor to declare their customer focused mission and alignment to the brand’s common view of customer experience. 

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Over the courses of the workshop, what unfolds is a inspiring and motivating evolution of teamwork where everyone begins to agree on a united approach to working together in new ways that transform the organization from a group of unique business leaders into a motivated team of customer centric gamechangers. 

It sounds simple.

Thats because it is! Yet many organizations fail to recognize the power of unified teamwork when it comes to rapid adaptation to a customer empowered economy.

 Take the first step.

Gather your team together and mutually agree on the desire of your customers and then unite as a group of transformative leaders who reimagine and create new and profitable experiences for both customers and your organization.  It can be done.