Becoming a customer-obsessed tech company is the blueprint mission. Part 1
Here is how DAYONE and our Digital Innovation as a Service make it happen.
The lives customers lead, the way they interact with products and services, their expectations of a brand as well as their sense of time and quality have changed dramatically in the past decade. Customers live an on-demand lifestyle where they want everything right now, right here, made especially for me. Organisations that fail to identify these shifts and navigate through them accordingly will lose relevance in the market. Companies that do acknowledge these new realities face a challenge to thoroughly transform their businesses. Not only in a sense of organisational shifts from siloed structures to cross-functional ways of working, but also in their approach to technology and their customers. DAYONE guides organisations on their way to become customer-obsessed tech companies.
Forget customer-centric: customer-obsessed becomes the new standard.
It will not suffice anymore to know your customers. To stay relevant, organisations need to think holistically about customers and their needs to truly understand them. Organisations that are customer-obsessed are the ones that will be able to maintain a sustainable relationship with consumers. This obsession means that the customer shouldn’t only be at the centre focus of a business but even more so, serving customers and solving their problems should be the main motivator and focus of an organisation.(1)
That’s where we come in. We are DAYONE. We do one thing and we do it well — that’s design. Instead of offering a one-stop-shop solution for digital transformation, we excel in customer experience through good design. We support companies towards impactful digital products and services with the following expertise:
Digital Innovation as a Service
Digital Innovation as a Service (DIaaS) is our way towards customer experience excellence. Too often businesses see customer experience as a synonym for customer service. We believe customer experience is not a single interaction point people have with your digital products. It is a holistic view of all interactions happening between your customer and your product or service.
More and more companies realise that brands are no longer build by advertising but through experiences. Customer experience is the key driver of sustainable business growth.(2)
Customer experience is the key driver of sustainable business growth.
But what makes an experience? The two primary touchpoints of an experience are people and products or services. An experience is the sum of your customer’s interactions with your product and the emotions and feelings that these interactions triggered. Organisations that fail to offer delightful experiences will end up with products that don’t make an impact. However, offering intentional and valuable experiences allow companies to increase their customer lifetime value.
Products can be innovative, smart or sexy but if they don’t solve real customer problems they’re frankly quite worthless. Customers expect products and services to do two things: solve their problems and make them feel good. An excellent customer experience comes from a product that does both. With the help of DiaaS we create experiences that matter.
1. DIaaS as a Mindset
We believe big change can only happen with the right mindset. A mindset that combines a curiosity for experimentation, a thirst for collaboration and a knack for understanding customers.
We are all designers.
In changing landscape where organisations must transform into customer-obsessed tech companies, there is not only a growing need for new skills, but even more so a need for new organisational structures and mindsets. Digitalising your product (and service) portfolio isn’t enough to stay relevant for your customers; you also need to change your culture.
The mindset that is needed to bring forth new ways of working is one that is focused on collaboration and experiment. The digital transformation the organisations face is so demanding that the only way to navigate through it is to work as one team. Both internally across departments as well as with external parties. We are all responsible for designing a good customer experience. That also means that the classic relationship between organisations and service providers is over. Instead of service providers delivering their craft to organisations, they take up the role of enablers and participants.
We strongly believe that working together results in great experiences for customers. Such a partnership is characterised by a hands-on approach focused on co-creation. It requires a space where both parties meet to work and learn together as one team. Participation of all parties is of utmost importance, because that is the only way to build a culture that excels in of customer experience. The focus shifts from solely delivery on the service provider side to building a common ground for continuous iteration and improvements. This shift demands acceptance of knowledge gaps and openness towards experimentation.
Case: Team 300 — DAYONE x TUI Co-Creation
Between summer 2019 and spring 2020, in our co-creation studio located directly in the heart of Kreuzberg, Berlin, we partnered up with TUI as Team 300. The mission of Team 300 was to rethink the mobile experience for package holiday bookings and consequently, drive conversion up by a three-digit increase. With such an ambitious goal it was crucial to combine the best of both worlds. Team 300 combined the industry knowledge of TUI with DAYONE’s DIaaS way of working.
Our partnership with TUI rested on three pillars: an independent co-creation studio, an end-to-end team formed in a circle organisation and close ties to the headquarters.
The co-creation studio
Our co-creation studio in Kreuzberg offered a playground for innovation and a space where experiments were possible. That is especially important for greenfield projects like this, as new spaces dedicated to experiment offer a new perspectives.
End-to-end team
One of the main goals in our partnership with TUI was to establish one dedicated team, dissolving the boundaries between a service provider and a client. This team, referred to as “Team 300”, combined designers, experience strategists, product owners, developers and stakeholders from both DAYONE and TUI. It was divided in smaller, self-organised circles in which each member had their own role and responsibilities. This holacratic approach enabled the team to work efficiently and make decisions fast.
Together as one
Innovation teams risk losing the connection with existing teams or only think about integrating in existing structures when it’s already too late. This is one of the main reasons why great ideas fail. To avoid this from happening, Team 300 was embedded within the TUI organisation. The collaboration between Team 300 and TUI was less of a satellite to the mothership and more like a marriage where both partners work closely together and have their own focus areas.
Though the whole organisation was focused on innovation, Team 300 was dedicated to formulate hypotheses for innovation and test them through fast experiment. The main focus area of these experiments were family package holidays. Once validated, the solutions were integrated in TUI’s Design System by the Scaling circle. However, the purpose of the Scaling circle went further than maintaining the Design System. The circle was responsible for scaling in the broadest sense of the word: scaling in business, technologies, markets, languages and touchpoints. This way, both teams worked hand in hand and were able to benefit from each other.
Summary
This article was the first of our three-part series on how companies need to become customer-obsessed to persevere in the changing landscape and build sustainable customer relationships.
Organisations need to become aware that being customer-centric will not suffice anymore in today’s market. Instead, organisations need to become customer-obsessed. Only companies that succeed to deliver delightful customer experiences across all touchpoints are able to build sustainable customer relationships.
The era of digital transformation brings along big challenges that force organisations to change their culture. The first step to change is to adapt the right mindset. One that is focused on collaboration, open to experimentation and genuine interest in the customer. This mindset helps us to build products following the mantra of “make it work, make it right, make it fast”. However, to make the right product fast, you need more than the right mindset: you need a framework.
Companies like Volkswagen, Deutsche Bahn, TUI and Burda as well as start-ups already put their trust in our Digital Innovation as a Service. Are you the next to be convinced?
Reach out to Nico Wohlgemuth, Managing Partner and Creative Strategist (info@dayone.de) for more information
When this sounds like a place you want to work at, we’ve got good news for you: we’re hiring! Reach out to Annika Köbsch, People Manager (career@dayone.de) for more information.
Written by Maureen Herben, UX Designer at DAYONE
Read more about DIaaS here:
Part 1: Mindset (article above)
Part 2: Framework
Part 3: Methodologies
About the author
Maureen works as a UX Designer at DAYONE. Besides her daily job she continuously improves herself in the field of user experience design and loves to share her expertise and insights not only with her colleagues at DAYONE but with a growing community on her Instagram account UX.Collection. What else does she like? Art, music and really good food are her favorites…
