Global Customer Engagement Strategy Workshop

The major accounts division of a global telecom company needed to reinvent its stale global customer engagement program. Customers found the program useless and boring: a series of extended sales pitches, rather than customer input sessions or educational experiences. Consequently, the telecom company came to Astadia for help designing a fresh approach to engaging their biggest customers. They sought a program that would educate customers, energize them, and gather their most important thoughts.

Approach

After consulting with the client, our senior staff decided that the right first step was a workshop focused on completely rethinking the telecom's customer engagement strategy. As Strategy Director, I took the lead in conceiving, planning, and executing this workshop. Our goal was to encourage the client team to imagine without limits while helping them to adopt the customer mindset, generate new ideas, and prioritize plans.

We assembled a broad group of 10 client executives and senior staff in London, UK for the workshop. Along with my creative director and senior copywriter, I led the group in a series of fun and useful activities in order to achieve our goal. Here is a sampling of what we did:

Empathy Mapping - Helped participants adopt the customer mindset by describing the customer experience at a customer engagement program event.

Back of the Napkin - Gave participants an opportunity to generate broad-stroke ideas for the customer engagement program in rapid fashion.

Design the Box - An unorthodox way to document more focused ideas for the engagement program by creating a physical package for it.

My team documented observations, ideas, and issues throughout the workshop. We also came away with many fantastic artifacts created by the client team that illustrated a wide variety of new ideas. After the session, my team reviewed all of the data and developed a concise set of findings and ideas for the client.

Impact

Everyone involved had an amazing experience with the workshop and my team received rave reviews afterward. It was particularly exciting to hear one client participant remark that our workshop was unlike anything a UK-based agency had ever done with them, and far better.

We provided our findings, ideas, and recommendations to the client stakeholders in a report and presentation. Because of the tremendous success of the workshop, the client immediately engaged Astadia to design an entirely new global customer engagement program based on our findings, an opportunity worth over $1 million.

Scenes From The Workshop