SES is a very successful and highly technical organization. Every one of its
clients—from broadcast, to aero and cruise lines—wants the Apple experience.
But, the organization hadn’t implemented design thinking best practices to
improve the customer experience. Our client, the Head of Global Product Design
and Engineering, came to us for help with a transformation effort that was
running into friction and silos. He saw customer-centricity as a key way to
drive service innovation and growth.
We started with a discovery and insights research effort to understand the
customer experience and the existing culture of the organization. We spoke to
customers across the world to uncover their unmet needs, experience with SES,
and thinking styles. As part of this process we identified allies throughout
the organization, including the Global Head of CX, who was a champion of
service design. This gave us additional leverage to introduce more
cross-functional thinking and doing to the organization. We created detailed
personas and customer journey maps based on the research, and used these in a
prioritization workshop to identify a key pain point to redesign: customer
onboarding. Focusing on this critical phase allowed us to demonstrate a win
and build momentum for additional change.
Our work doubled satisfaction with customer onboarding by reducing silos,
shifting from a transactional to a relationship sales and account approach. In
addition, we leveraged customer insights to reframe how the then-new medium
Earth orbit product should be positioned to customers. We continued our work
with SES, helping them assess and improve their UX maturity and integrate
learnings into a critical product launch. At the conclusion of this project,
our client received a promotion to VP of Innovation.
