EA & Marketing Fusion – Experience

Few days ago I dropped a note about my excitement about an upcoming workshop with marketing at my bank and I thought that someone might be interested in how the workshop looked like and how it went (I don’t think there’s anything secret about that but concrete outcomes). So this is a bit of my experience.

There were few goals for the workshop, namely:

• Bring awareness of what’s “customer journey” and “customer experience” to retail marketing people
• Bring awareness of importance of emotions in decision making (generally and why that matters considering customers)
• Make people think outside the box, “think different”, look for potential for innovation from customer perspective
• Motivate people after some reorganization and some lay-offs
• Team building of the new team
• Strengthen business & EA collaboration

Generally I consider the workshop to be successful (but as always there’s room for improvement:) Nevertheless, the location was great – outdoor in the city park was a good location and few bypassers even dared to come close and see details of our work. Weather was unfortunately not all that great, the forecast lied a bit and we had few cold showers and no sight of sun all day long. Picnic style gave it a touch of an easy-going happening and I think people were quite relaxed and open.

From the content point of view we have managed to do the following:

• Introduction to the purpose of the workshop, some history, why we are here, why we discuss terms customer journey & customer experience
• Ice breaking session – how emotions influence decision making in practice, supported by few games to see that even though people knew the trick, they felt into the trap of emotional decisions. We showed some winning commercials and showed how emotions worked there. This was really relaxing and quite fun, a lot of discussion went into our own campaigns and whether the bank is successful because or despite them.
• Personal experience – to show that emotions work we collected few words like contract, customer care, delight, payment etc and asked people to think of their experience both positive and negative with other businesses and share them with the group. Not surprisingly there was always a significant emotional footprint in every story and this was the first step for people to open up and think outside the bank.
• Creating persona – Then we jumped into the real work and each group created their persona for the next steps.
• Customer journey map –we introduced different customer viewpoints (actions, feelings, thoughts, expectations, obstacles…) and various phases of the customer journey. This tool took bit longer to get digested as there were probably too many new dimensions for people to consider. But working through this on their own they eventually got it quite well. Through a mortgage example we showed were (unlike bank’s processes) the journey starts and where it ends (for the bank it’s basically by signing contract = customer acquired). This part was focused only on capturing the customer’s story, pain points (“I don’t understand the contract”), environment (“real estate agent pushes me to decide by tomorrow”), no solutions. I have myself a handful of theseJ
• Innovation phase – again through examples and stories we set the playground for innovation taking into consideration findings from the journey. Despite lot of introduction stories that should show dimensions in which a business can innovate this didn’t generate that many new or different ideas. Here I need another game, like the next one to drive it better. Also, people were bit tired already.
• “What would Apple do” – this helped and was fun for people. They were supposed to think of what would another company do should it enter banking business. I took three iconic companies and handed out to the groups, explained their key characteristics, values, mentioned some stories from their business and let people play.
• Cover story – With all the ideas groups were supposed to pick one they would like to see on the cover of a magazine as a success story and develop how the magazine would look like (usual “Cover story” game).
• “Day D” – Finally, we constituted a board of venture capitalists and let each group to sell us their idea in 5 minutes. We challenged their ideas, ROIs and had fun.

Feedback from the team was very positive and was around 9 in average on scale 1-10. The feedback was supposed to reflect on usefulness & effectiveness of the workshop only, not the fact that it was outside, which is in general more fun.