Top 5 learnings from developing the new Flying Blue customer onboarding
In March 2018 the AIRFRANCEKLM loyalty program, Flying Blue, changed its program and website. It was a tremendous amount of work in which I had the opportunity and responsibility to renew the Flying Blue customer onboarding (also called enrolment).
From an outside perspective the process from idea to go-live may seem very smooth, but actually it took quite some effort in order to make it as fluid as it was. Interviewing stakeholders, planning workshops, hosting innovation sprints, in parallel to maintaining my formal responsibilities of being a Product Owner in a digital Scaled Agile ecosystem. It was quite a rollercoaster, but a joy as well.
By writing this post I want to share my key learnings during the process from concept to actual delivery for our customers.
Top 5 learnings (in random order)
Align with stakeholders before you make milestone decisions.
Only by having the conversation with your stakeholders 1 to 1 you know what’s valuable to them, and you don’t force them to make a decision too soon. When you are the one tying the knots together (and I was), you should also be the one to gain information that is relevant to your subject, including your stakeholders. If you try to be efficient and force decisions “on the fly” in a meeting with multiple stakeholders attending, you probably will end up in a big discussion bringing you no-where closer to the end result.
Try to be 1 step ahead of your stakeholders.
Being a step ahead is definitely not to show that you are smarter than your stakeholders. It is about proactively reach out on the subject. Reaching out before stakeholders have to ask gains trust, which relieves stakeholders from stress and provides autonomy to a certain extend. For example, every now and then a stakeholder expects an update. Try to answer the potential questions they might in your message. It is much easier to defend your statements when you are in the driver seat, than vice versa. Usually, if someone reaches out to you, you’re already too late 😉
Make decisions based on (proven) customer behaviour, and customer benefits.
This includes analysis upfront, but also user testing before actually building. Analysis upfront can be a benchmark analysis, but also funnel analysis, heat maps, or qualitative customer feedback. Putting your customer in a focal spot of the discussions and analysis will make sure you are building the right thing.
Side note: Please be aware that benchmarking is not your final result, but it can be used as input. Just because another organisation is doing something, doesn’t mean it’s suitable for your organisation. Even if you’re in the same business selling the same product.
Show what’s in it for the business before you start building.
By showing the USP’s upfront, your stakeholders will become promotor of your ideas and you do not have to inform all their stakeholders as well. They will do it for you. (Almost sounds too good to be true, right?!)
Co-create your solutions with people that have influence in your project.
In my case I had Business, Customer Analytics, IT and UX department representatives on the table. By creating the concepts together it saved me a lot of time having to re-align and divert course afterwards in smaller iterations. The trick in this step is to limit your core group to 7–8 persons, because a group that’s too big slows down decision making. Still you need the right people at the table, else you will not create enough support to your project along the way.
Result
I started my KLM journey as Product Owner for authorisation server, also called Logon team. After adding enrolment to my scope the name “Logon team” would not make sense anymore. Showing business stakeholders improved customer satisfaction, increased conversion rates, decreased time to market and a solid product vision, created increased mutual trust. The product sold itself, and was rolled out to 8 more touchpoints. The team doubled in size and a new team was born: Customer Identity team. The product team vision created 1 year ago is still relevant and is still used to prioritise upon.
If you would have asked me upfront about the benefit of getting the right people at the table at the right time, I would’ve never expected this output. Together with stakeholders we built a trusty environment, which moved the “Logon component” from neglected “must-do” to one of the cornerstones of our Air France and KLM CX personalisation strategy, with more features to come in 2020.
Bam! My first post! 🙌. I also realise that every point I make above is worth a separate post, but really high over I am confident that if you stick to those 5 points, it will make your life easier. If you enjoyed reading it as much as I did creating this article, you can always give me a heads up. Or off course if you have any feedback, or questions, you can find me on LinkedIn 🤓
Ciao,
Geoffrey
