Resumption of service

And we're back for 2007 - been a long break between posts. And a chance to think about what I'll be doing for the coming year.

Only made one New Year's resolution - to start a revolution that will create a truly customer focussed business here at Telecom . Arlene thinks I am crazy but it's the one thing I really care about from a work perspective. I have lots of theories about why it isn't customer focussed currently- most are best left for a beer conversation as they tend to focus on what's wrong as opposed to how do you design a new future.

I've been working on this 'revolution' for a while now and thought that last year it had come to a grinding halt. We had an opportunity to pitch some of the work we have been doing around customer experience design to the Exec via a couple of GM's - in short I screwed up. Tried to make it too much about 'hey- this is cool. We're designing stuff. We never design stuff.' It came across as self-serving and I really thought I'd blown the chance for the team to get the right skills and resources on board to make sure we really design from the customer in. Spent a couple of weeks beating myself up about it as well.

The good news is that we had an opportunity for another part of the team to pitch this direct to the Exec and we reframed the story completely. Al and Dale took the exec through customer personas, showed how we use these to create options to meet customer needs and then tied this together in a way that hit what the Exec want to see - by designing from the customer in you can create a lean, low-cost organisation as you design out all the un-necessary contact customers have with you when things don't work. Exec love it, and we now have the resource we need to really design a world class experience. And to top it off, I've learned my lesson (again?) about the need to pitch it to the audience in a way that works for them.

revolution started.....