The time I helped create a board game to build empathy 🎲

An IT captive financial services client came to Fjord (Accenture’s Service Design Arm) looking to digitally transform their customer experience with their Global B2B clients.

problem

How might we… digitally transform the client’s B2B Customer Experience?

method (8 weeks)

• Phase 1: Research

• Phase 2: Workshop

• Phase 3: Concepting

my role:
I focused on ethnographic research, created workshop activities, and was responsible for knowing the market and industry trends. I provided the Business perspective to all our designs and concepts.

phase 1: research

Our research phase was focused on really understanding the IT financing current state, customer pain points, stakeholder priorities, and bringing together any insights and themes that emerged. Our deliverable was a Research Readout presentation that fed into the creation of the client workshop.

• Analyzed 21+ competitors across IT/Finance/B2B focusing on: Size, Revenue, Geography, Offerings, and existing Digital Solutions

  • Identified Hero Cases based on the competitive set to inspire the client

• Created a state of the industry report based on quantitative stats on the industry and customer experience market studies

• Interviewed over 30 global stakeholders and customers over the phone in 30 min-90 min format to understand their pain points and current usage of existing digital tools

Insight: We quickly realized that there was a disconnect between what the customer thought about the client and what the stakeholders thought they were succeeding in. The stakeholders knew that there were issues, but believed that the customers could not see them because of the manual workarounds the client used to please the customer. We also saw that there was a trend of clients using data to create personalized customer experience that the client was not doing today.

phase 2: workshop

Every workshop at Fjord is custom-designed for the client’s specific needs, and we brought together 20 stakeholders from across the globe for a two-day in-person workshop. We used this opportunity to share the research work and get the client to creatively come up with new solutions together.

Challenge & Solution: The client was afraid of change and disconnected from the pain points of the customer because their sales numbers remained high, so a majority thought that nothing was wrong. However, customers only stayed with the client because of their low price point, amazing on-the-ground support team, and long contracts. We needed to get the clients to see that the customers actually needed more to remain satisfied and to stay relevant in the industry. We ended up making “game night” the theme of our workshop to keep a light-hearted atmosphere while instilling the competition among the sales teams to get them to empathize with the customer.

Workshop activities included:

• Gamified case studies focused on designing new solutions to “fictional” problems and scenarios that were directly related to the client’s problems

• Designing an original board game and gameplay meant to immerse clients in the customer pain points (with customer quotes, problems, etc.) and then sharing the customer journey we designed to bring home the points from the game

• Sketching, storyboarding, and concepting

phase 3: concepting

After the workshop, we collected all the ideas that was generated, prioritize the ideas, and then further developed the concepts so that they can be taken to market. We delivered 4 concepts that the client is now using to create their digital strategy.

Challenge & Solution: The client was caught up in the legal realities of global financing and the high price point of highly technological solutions. We knew we needed to get the client to at least where the competitors already were, but also wanted to push the envelope where we could to challenge their thinking. We created basic concepts inspired by their competitors and then added an innovative twist to it based on trends, whether it was artificial intelligence or the internet of things. In order to not scare the client, we outlined what the MVP for every concept would be to ground the ideas in easy next steps.

What We Did:

• Concept sketching brainstorm + prioritization of concepts based on level of effort vs. customer benefit, cost/profit

• Detailed and illustrated concepts included: Concept Name, Description, Feature, Customer Benefit, Pain Point Addressed, Benefit to client, Dependencies, How it Works, and the Minimum Viable Product

  • Artificial Pricing Concept

  • Digital Asset Manager

  • IoT Returns Tracker

  • Redesigned Customer Portal

lessons learned

• Clients who are worried about catching up rather than innovating in the marketplace need executable next steps to actually implement your ideas

• Re-designing a portal (or any other customer facing interface) is the natural inclination for clients, but it’s up to us as consultants to push the client to look at improving the whole end-to-end customer journey

• Games can help with co-creation! Our client had a hard time getting out of their usual way of thinking and forcing them to play as someone else helped the client empathize with the client. We didn’t reinvent the wheel when doing so either. We got inspiration from Candyland in our board game!

Additional Samples of Work Available Upon Request