MadeFor Talks

With over ten years of experience within the service design sphere, Niels Corsten is a known expert in his field. Currently working as Service Design Lead at Deloitte Digital, he holds a deep and engaged passion for the fields of service design and customer experience 

It’s these interests that have led to the topic of Niels’ edition of MadeFor. Talks, “Sorry, but the menu has changed: How our skills and tools for designing services don’t suffice anymore, and what does”.

In this MF Talk, Niels demonstrated how journey mapping and many of the other tools that we use in the designing of services are outdated and no longer allow organisations to confidently achieve what they set out to do in the quest for high-quality CX.

In response to these pressing matters, Niels offered a new approach to managing and improving CX across organisations: journey management. Throughout the talk, Niels introduced the concept of journey management and how it has the potential to introduce new ways of working, roles, tooling, metrics, and more.

Through detailed analogies and practical examples, Niels demonstrated how journey management, while using emergent tools such as AI and machine learning, acts as fundamental organisational transformation, necessary to ultimately achieve CX excellence across our organisations.

This edition of MadeFor. Talks with Niels is packed to the brim with valuable information on how to upgrade your CX capabilities for 2023, at scale and we hope you enjoy!

Learning design and service design are two fields that, on the surface, seem vastly different. One focuses on the creation of educational experiences that can be applied to a multitude of settings (from education to business), while the other focuses on developing and improving high-quality services that holistically benefit the overarching customer experience.

However, as we delve deeper into these two fields, we discover that they share many common benefits and possibilities within organisations, and that there are similar results and significant consequences when either field is approached without empathy, creativity, and problem-solving skills.

This intertwining of learning design and service design is exactly what will be investigated in our upcoming education panel “In service of learning: how learning design and service design drive value in organisations”, with our Managing Director Agnese Spona, Service Design Leader and Educator Clara Llamas, and Tony Reeves, Founder and Managing Director of Ding.

The panel will provide an open discussion between these three industry experts on how learning design and service design can combine and intersect in order to drive inherent value within organisations to the benefit of employees and customers alike.

Emmet is an experienced multidiscipline design and marketing professional with a history of working in the digital product, marketing and advertising industries, including Mannok and Pramerica Ireland. He believes that applying user-centred design and observing user behaviour are essential ingredients in establishing products that enable innovation in the systems we use every day.

In his MadeFor. Talk, “The business value of CX/UX in the Insurance Industry”, Emmet walked us through how a traditional industry such as insurance is innovating in its customer and user experience, for both clients and internal stakeholders.

Emmet touched upon:

- Client Onboarding, from discovery methodologies to wireframe development - Balancing business metrics and deliverables with user-centred design

- Global Website - How customer experience effects the strategies and features of a global website that integrates content strategy, distribution and regional needs of the clients through all stages of the sales funnel.

- The lessons learned from incorporating both the internal and external journeys of clients and internal stakeholders servicing the clients that lead to better and more progressive customer experiences.

We hope you enjoy it!

Lilli Graf has been working in the innovation space for twelve years, currently working as a freelance service designer and founder of IMMA - a collective of impact makers and experts working in the field of climate adaptation.

Having spent the last six years working for top-tier design agencies such as Livework or Idean (now frog), she developed skills in systems thinking, service design, behavioural science, and business design. She continues to hone these skills through her consultancy practice, as she works on complex and strategic problems for private and public organisations across Europe.

In her MadeFor. Talk, “Future proofing your design skills - how to prepare for a changing world”, Lilli discusses the skills that service designers need to exist and thrive within a changing world.

She investigates how possessing the right skills will make you feel more confident and make your work feel vital and impactful, particularly when faced with new challenges and circumstances.

The skills that Lilli focused on were:

- Envisioning possible futures and designing for emerging needs

- Designing for unhappy paths

- Articulating the business value of our design work

- Considering trauma in our practice

- Learning how to foster our own resilience and optimism

We hope you enjoy this one as much we did working on it.

During this talk “What You Don't Know About Your Audience is Killing Your Marketing” Rand spoke about how understanding your audience's demographics, behaviours, and sources of influence is crucial to success.

By walking us through 3 case studies he showed us how using a combination of interviews, surveys, and audience research software, you can get high-quality, invaluable data to solve a host of targeting and conversion problems.

Using 3 case studies Rand showed how to find those hidden gems of data that can make the difference between success and failure.

Case Study #1 – A walk through how Pelicor, a packaging design firm learned about their customer's attributes and context through surveys and interviews.

Case Study #2 – See how Salsa Matcha, a delicious, Mexican condiment built a market through sources of influence in the food + recipes world.

Case Study #3 – Rand spoke about how Threatpost, a privacy advocate publication finds specific ways to amplify its brand and earn loyal subscribers/customers

Recently we had the privilege of co-hosting a discussion with our friends over at Adoreboard, on The Foundations of Customer Science, and how to apply the scientific method to data, in order to improve customer experience and lifetime value.

In this audio, they cover some of the fundamentals of customer science, including:

- What is customer science and where does it ‘sit’ in an organisation?
- What does a typical customer science project (and outcomes) look like?
- What is Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)?
- What data do you need?
- How do you get from raw data to useful insights?
- How do you combine quantitative and qualitative data?

If you want to find out more just grab a cup of something hot, sit back-press play, and enjoy.

For those that may not know Nate, he is Senior Director of CX at Arise, Co-Founder of CX Accelerator and general CX royalty… too much? Hmm not so sure, what can we say he’s sort of a big deal.

Starting off as a Customer Support Specialist back in 2008, today Nate can be seen teaching, advising, and helping large corporates and influential businesses adopt change, to better both employee and customer experiences.

During his MadeFor. Talk Nate will provide his perspective on customer Loyalty and the need to break free from many of the legacy techniques and mentalities that have been holding us back and embrace a bold mission-driven approach to CX.

Nate said:

“Only by galvanizing employees around the brand core, measuring customer behaviours in enhanced ways, and nailing our digital experience, can we still capture the hearts and minds of our customers long-term.”

During his talk, Nate will touch on:

• Unifying the organization around the principle of mission-driven CX to bring urgency and meaning to the work
• Using modern methods to enhance your Voice of Customer engine and understand your customers like never before
• Building a 360 degree view of the customer to reduce friction and enhance the digital experience
• Leveraging an intelligent change management framework to grow the work of CX over time
  

We hope you enjoy.