Eva Buschkrei headed up online marketing at Vodafone in Germany when we worked together with her team to apply the principles of Customer Scenario design to targeted online marketing and merchandising for Vodafone's Web presence.

Terry O'Neil runs product marketing for CitiCards. We have done two engagements with CitiCard. The first was for the redesign of the customer experience around the CitiAAdvantage card to reduce attrition among first-year customers. For this project, we interviewed current and former CitiAAdvantage clients, and invited a group of them to a Customer Scenario Mapping session in Dallas, where CitiCard's customer experience team, the CitiCard marketing execs, and the American Airlines' AAdvantage team all worked side by side with four customer teams to redesign the experience for four different types of customers: 1. New-to-the-card clients who were looking to earn enough miles to take a family vacation, 2. Veteran card users--who consolidated most of their spend on the card in order to maximize their awards, 3. Small business owners, who wanted to combine business and family travel, and 4. Existing card holders who wanted to feel special, not just receive awards. The results were really outstanding as each group of customers gave Citi and American really good, clear actionable ideas, many of which were implemented and yielded good results.

The second, more recent engagement, we can't describe in detail, but it also involved working with four teams of consumers side-by-side with Citicard execs to explore some new product ideas. Stay tuned! 

Belinda So heads up the technology team for CargoSmart. Belinda is one of several of our clients at Orient Overseas Container Lines and their subsidiary, CargoSmart. We worked with their team and a group of U.S.-based retailers who import goods into the U.S.. The trigger event was new customs regulations for the U.S., which required importers to provide much more detailed shipping information or to be subjected to penalties. The CargoSmart team wanted to understand how they could make it as easy as possible for their customers to comply with these new regulations. The customers really enjoyed comparing notes and learning from one another as well as the mapping exercise to design streamlined ways to both meet the new government regulations and streamline their own shipping operations at the same time.

Seth Starner is a marketing and customer experience leader at Amway and Quixtar (their U.S. retail operation). We have worked with Seth and his teams a number of times to gain insights about how customers--end-consumers, but mostly their affiliates--can better promote and sell new products.  

The last time we worked together, Ruth Ann Swain worked at Emerson's Embedded Computing group to instill customer experience principles and to integrate customer co-design into the product engineering activities. Ruth Ann is also certified in Customer Scenario Mapping. We worked together as she recruited, interviewed, and led teams of highly technical customers in describing and mapping out their ideal design and testing processes for custom configured embedded computers into a wide variety of solutions. 

Tom Mendelsohn was our client at the time we evolved our consulting methology into the Customer Scenario Mapping techniques we have since then. Tom worked for the Massachusetts' chapter of the American Cancer Society (ACS) as its marketing director. He covinced the national organization to sponsor a 5-day workshop in which a couple of hundred participants, including cancer patients and survivors, and volunteers, and stakeholders from across the organization co-designed new and improved patient-centric processes. We used real-time prototyping techniques to demonstrate the resulting processes and user interfaces. Everyone had a blast and it was a pivotal experience for ACS. 

Cheryl Cargill led the Customer Advisory Group initiative for a start-up effort within GE Energy--to design a new approach to monitoring entire power plants. Cheryl recruited two tiers of executives: VPs of Operations at many of the country's largest energy producers, and plant managers and their technical architects. She developed a unique and powerful co-design framework: the Executives provided their input and priorities and agreed on a common set of goals for the project. They then nominated their subject matter experts who worked together on teams cross-organizations' along with GE's technical experts for each of several key initiatives. The two-tiered innovation project lasted about 18 months, with a couple of big get togethers in which all of the customers were able to compare notes, co-design priorities, and react to GE's proposed designs. 

We worked a few times with Tim Ingoldsby, head of strategic development for the American Institute of Physics, as he evolved that organization's publishing strategy with the help of its end-customers: the researchers whose work is published in AIP's peer-reviewed Journals, as well as the readers who read them and the librarians who purchase them on behalf of their end-customers. Tim characterized the work he did with us as "ground-breaking," and "visionary." He kept the videotapes from each session and would often refer back to them to see how much of what customers had asked for, the organization had actually implemented.   

Lisa Nakano was our second client at Equinix. She took over the customer advisory groups from Mark Reynolds. We really enjoyed getting to know Equinix's cloud and networking customers through in-depth interviews and then through the Advisory Group meetings where they shared their best practices and the "secret sauce" that made each customer a potential partner and collaborator in the greater Equinix ecosystem. 

Paul Venditti is one of the "big thinkers" at GE Research Center in Niskayuna, New York. He is constantly looking for new ways to gain and to embed customer insights into the applied research projects in a number of GE's different industry-specific initiatives. We've interviewed many of his customers and analyzed and interpreted the findings. 

Although we've worked together a number of time, our relationship with Cameron Karr began when she was in charge of enterprise clients for Business Objects. When the company was going through a major product transition, we ran group interviews with all of the end-users in each of Business Objects' major accounts to understand their migration issues. The startling results led to both a shift in R&D priorities, but also to a customer-co-design activity at their annual users' group meeting--in which end-users, and enterprise champions worked together with Business Objects' technical and product marketing experts to map out the ideal scenarios for the particular kinds of activities most of these users needed to be able to do, and to migrate from one software version to the next. Cameron put together a swat team of migration experts who would proactively contact customers as soon as they downloaded the free trial version of the new release to help with any migration issues proactively. 

Rich Kemp is one of the top executives in Investment Services that we worked with at ATB Financial in Alberta, Canada as that organization was planning for its enterprise-wide launch of a completely new enterprise banking system that would impact every client--from consumers, to small and large business clients. We interviewed the entire executive team, most of the key stakeholders in the bank, and then interviewed dozens of their end-customers of all kinds--from college students, to recent immigrants, to high net worth investors, to business owners and farmers and entrepreneurs. We then ran a series of Customer Scenario Mapping workshops in which all of the top execs, from the CEO down, rolled up their sleeves and co-designed ideal scenarios with different groups of customers. Teams worked on scenarios like: Recent immigrant moving to Canada needs to get a credit card, but doesn't have a credit history. Or, entrepreneur needs to renegotiate his line of credit due to slower than expected market uptake. Or, family needs to move to a new town and buy a new home. Or, recent retirees have different goals for how they want to manage their retirement income. Through this Customer Scenario-based approach to design, we were able to highlight the customer showstoppers that turned up over and over again across scenarios and ensure that the new systems that were currently being designed and rolled out would handle them gracefully. 

Aisling Hassell was in charge of revamping Symantec's entire Web Site at the time we worked together. She quickly realized that, in addition to revamping the Web site to make it more customer-friendly, Symantec needed to focus on the entire Customer Experience for end-customers, enterprise customers, value-added resellers, and system integrators. We used Customer Scenario Mapping to capture the combined needs of all of these constituencies and to feed their priorities into the web redesign effort and into the customer experience effort that then became a prioritiy for the VP of Operations. Aisling led Symantec into becoming a poster child in customer experience measurement and management.  

Bob Widlansky headed up product management for CCC IS's software tools for insurance companies and car repair shops. We worked together on a wonderful project that included car-owners, car repair shop owners, insurance company executives, and CCC IS's operations, product development, and marketing teams to co-design next generation tools that enable consumers to streamline their car repair experience. Among the quick deliverables out of the workshops we facilitated were mobile apps that can be branded by and integrated into insurers' customer-facing systems and processes. 

We worked with Mike Grace and a big team of customer operations folks at Cisco Systems for about four years, under two different leaders--Chris Chamberlin and Pat Moore. Our goal: streamling the customer experience of Cisco's small business customers around the globe--most of whom purchase Cisco networking products through resellers, who, in turn, purchase through distributors. This was one of our first and most ambitious customer ecosystem projects. We had all the members of the four-tiered ecosystem co-design streamlined solutions for each phase of the customer lifecycle. We did this in the U.S., Europe, and Emerging Countries. Then, we kept the same group of customers and resellers together as an advisory group for four years as Cisco's software tools were gradually improved under the guidance of and based on the priorities of this customer advisory group. 

Karen Brewer was our first client at Autodesk. At the time we worked together, she had been tasked with revamping Autodesk's web experience. She was forward thinking enough to want to involve Autodesk's different customer constituencies in the specification of the design, not just the usability testing. So we worked through Autodesk's reseller partners to identify their most insightful end-customers--interviewed both end-customers and partners and brought them all together for an in-depth co-design session. The result was a set of clear priorities, along with an operational dashboard based on customer-critical success metrics, that informed the design priorities of the web experience and software as a service experience.