12 Customer Experience Learning for 2016, by Zilver Innovation

1. 12 customer experience learnings
to apply in 2016
We’ve gathered 12 learnings from a year of doing amazing projects in service design and customer
experience. We’ve turned them into our new year’s resolutions for 2016. We hope you join us in our quest
to make cx and service design the most excitingly effective and intensely gratifying field to work for.
- The Zilver crew -
Erik | Fred | Sanne | Marit | Ingrid | Mark | Pieter | Merel | Linda
zilverinnovation.com | welcome@zilverinnovation.com | @zilverBDI | #cxlearnings | creative commons attribution licence 4.0 2016

2. Bad personas stigmatize. They aren’t useful and don’t relate to real customers.
Good personas however are a great asset. They help you to empathize with your
customer, bridge silos and focus your innovation efforts.
Create true Persona Power by cleverly combining deep qualitative insights with
quantitative research! Define them so high-res that you can track your personas in
your online data. And when you build your personas, why not involve everyone
who will work with them? Discover how exciting it is to feel connected to your
end customer in everything you do. Long live personas!
Fred studies the quantitative validation of decision journey personas with the OHRA team.
- JANUARY -
PERSONAS ARE DEAD…LONG LIVE PERSONAS!

3. - FEBRUARY -
THINK CUSTOMER OUTCOMES
At conferences in Berlin, Lisboa and Bucharest we’ve tested our latest thinking
and tooling on outcome driven innovation.
Outcomes, simply put, are the reasons your customer is buying and using your
service. They are the essence of what you offer to your most precious stakeholder!
Keeping your customer’s outcome in mind will help you get a firm grip on where
you can be of value and on which parts of the customer journey you truly need to
work.
You don’t want to miss all that, do you? So start to think customer outcomes!
Erik and Marit sharing their outcome framework at the productized conference in Lisboa.

4. - MARCH -
CUSTOMER INSIGHTS ARE A BRAND’S BEST FRIEND.
Brands should help people make choices. Internally, brands are great drivers for
focused innovation. They can help align teams around a shared purpose. But this
only works if the brand is firmly rooted in deep customer insights.
Your brand is not about your values or personality. It’s about the relationship
you want to have with your customer. It’s about how to be yourself in such a way
that you’re valuable and meaningful to them.
So align customer insights with your internal DNA and values, and discover a
brand that sparks innovation and fuels healthy growth.
Marit interviewing entrepreneurs to get a firmer grip on how the Delta Lloyd brand can be of value to them.

5. - APRIL -
DON’T TALK ABOUT CX,CO-CREATE IT!
Customer centricity is way to important to be just a mindset, or a change
program. As an organization, you need to deliver. Make those customers
happy so they choose you and stay with you!
We therefore believe co-creation and service design are at the heart of
customer experience. They’re what turn an abstract vision into concrete,
measurable value. So gather your own best customer centricity advocates,
put them in a room and let them co-create those excellent experiences that
will make a difference.
And then? See May.
Marit and Sanne have helped a multi-disciplinary Marktplaats team brainstorming on customer centric value propositions.

6. - MAY -
DON’T HESITATE.PROTOTYPE!
Prototyping is crucial in any design activity. Especially in customer experience and
service design. We even dare to say that you are wasting valuable time and
budget, when you postpone the big LFPP (Leap From Paper to Practice)!
Experience prototyping allows you to co-create with stakeholders, get real time
customer feedback and get a firm grip on your business case.
Funnily enough this appears to be even more valuable when stakes are high and
organizations are large… so in every organization and in every project: prototype
and learn!
Fred co-creating with Europcar staff in Palma de Mallorca to build and test customer experience improvements.

7. - June -
LEARN FROM THE LOOKING GLASS!
In two ways we have found ourselves looking in the mirror this past year.
Firstly we have taken quite some time in the first half of this year to go through an
intensive process of defining our own brand and guiding principles. Practicing what
we preach! It was lovely and genuinely insightful to be for once the subject instead
of the facilitator of this proces.
Secondly we’ve started applying these principles in our daily work in the second
half of this year. To see whether they worked (yes), and to learn how they could help
to improve the quality of our work (in so many ways).
What a fantastic, fruitful and inspiring process! By being our own guinea pigs, we’ve
learned even better how to be of value to you :-)
Sanne,Erik and Hugo discussing the application of Zilver’s guiding principles in our daily work.

8. - JULY -
INTERPRET DATA TO IGNITE MAGIC.
In this very warm summer month, we started working with a psychologist who
studied our research practice. And we discovered something valuable: the true
secret of actionable customer insight research lies in interpretation. Of course it’s
vital to acquire deep contextual user data. To let customers talk about their lives
instead of you asking them about your products. But the real magic happens when
you and your team start to interpret that data.
So get your colleagues in a room and immerse yourself in the interview data:
discuss those diaries, watch those videos and then…watch them again. Live it,
smell it, bend it, breathe it and dream it. True meaningful innovation will not come
from objective data.
Fred,Sanne and Marit interpreting customer insight research data for Rabobank.

9. - AUGUST -
DISRUPT LIKE ACUPUNCTURE!
We cannot share too much about this months topic…but we’ll give you a sneak
preview: with a very nice network of clients and designers we’ve been working on a
concept for disrupting a very traditional market.
Based on our customer insight research we’ve managed to pin-point the exact
locations where to be disruptive and how. Now, the business model, customer
experience, retail model, online channels and product design are all orchestrated
with the exact right pressure at the right points. like acupuncture!
Darn, what a shame we can’t tell more! But we promise keep you posted in 2016!
Sanne,Marit and the client team explore options for disruption that will amaze prospective users.

10. - SEPTEMBER -
HARNESS WHAT YOU ALREADY KNEW.
When we start to work for new clients we often encounter a huge base of information
that is not leveraged fully! Market studies, research reports, expert opinions, customer
data: all gathering dust in drawers or only used partly.
Our advice: first look at what you already have. Before you embark on new research,
invest in organizing and classifying your current knowledge base, and involve those
people who (should) work with that knowledge. It will beter leverage the investment
you did in acquiring the knowledge.
And it will make subsequent research much more focussed and effective!
internal stakeholders of Schiphol Group going through expert opinions that Sanne and Erik made accessible for them.

11. - OCTOBER -
BLUR THE BOUNDARIES FOR A SHARPER FOCUS.
One thing we’ve noticed in 2015 is how diverse our clients and stakeholders are that we
work with. From corporates to social foundations , from finance to mobility, from
marketing to R&D. Customer experience blurs all these boundaries! To arrive at a sharper
focus on one thing: help your customer reach their outcomes.
This blurring of boundaries may look fuzzy and complex in the beginning. But don’t fear:
meaningful innovation emerges not from silos but from the collaboration beween
people. People from different channels and business lines, involved different expertise
domains like branding, customer intelligence, marketing, sales, product management.
Do not fear! Embrace blurring boundaries and cooperate!
Erik and Marit have coached a multidisciplinary team at NRC Media in jointly looking for opportunities to improve their readers’experience

12. - NOVEMBER -
LET GUIDING PRINCIPLES LEAD THE WAY!
Guiding principles are a fantastic instrument. They form the perfect bridge between
‘outside-in’thinking (customer insights) and‘inside-out’thinking (interpretation of these
insights, see July). They tell you:“This is what our customers want, and this is what we
can do everyday to make them happy”.
So if we’d have to choose one way to capture a brand’s essence we would choose
guiding principles! They are uniquely yours, as they incorporate your DNA and your way
of meeting customer outcomes. They help you turn abstract insights into concrete
action. And turn vision into value. We love guiding principles because we’ve seen them
work! (see June).
Marit and Erik have co-created guiding principles with a broad internal team at Rabobank.They have fired enthusiasm and triggered coordinated action.

13. - DECEMBER -
SHARE AND SHINE!
In the past year we’ve seen customer experience, business design and service design gain
traction and mature into well respected business disciplines. Interestingly this has also led to less
outsourcing: more and more organizations consider these capabilities as strategic assets and
prefer to build them internally. We can only applaud this development, really!
Our vision has always been not only to involve, but also teach our clients our methods, tools and
approaches. We believe a well educated client will also challenge us more, and we like to be
challenged! So… For 2016 we’ve decided to make capability building part of our core business.
You can look forward to our dedicated customer experience
and service design training, starting Q1 2016!
Erik,Merel and Pieter training a group of 100 corporate trainees in design thinking and service design at an event organized by Berenschot

14. zilverinnovation.com | welcome@zilverinnovation.com | @zilverBDI | #cxlearnings | creative commons attribution licence 4.0 2016
We’re curious to hear which learnings truly triggered you!
And what YOU learned in customer experience and service design in 2015.
Share your thoughts with us at welcome@zilverinnovation.com
or on twitter @zilverBDI #cxlearnings
www.zilverinnovation.com