Warning: liveblogging

Prone to error, typos and crimes against grammar. Post will be updated and corrected during the talk and over the 24 hours afterwards. 

How do you achieve alignment in a company with 24 CEOs like Länsförsäkringar? You focus on the inside first. Help them create a structure that determines the services they want to deliver. This is all about designing a culture.

1. Have Fun

Change is hard. People are worried about cannibalising core business. If people have fun, they forget they are having hard work. Dancing in a party is hard work – but more fun than a gym.

The company needed to understand who they were designing for. They started a co-creation process to make the stakeholders as much the designers as the consultants. The staff started talking about how much fun this was.

2. Results Now

You have to show quick results. People move through different roles in the way they deal with company – depending on what they need. If you get them what they need quickly – you’re more likely to be able to sell them more things in the future. The process increased car insurance sales by 20%. Customer satisfactions went up across the board. Focus on small projects, not the whole thing.

3. Eat and Breathe Insights

Test against customers. They made an extensive mapping of customer needs. They visited all sorts of customers to determine exactly how they built their own systems to mange everyday life. The mapping created a very clear picture of what the customer needed. But… that made the bank feel like it sucked.

4. Empower

There was some great qualities already – long term relationships, handed down through generations. Real trust and loyalty had been built up. If that could replicate the good quality of all those encounters through all touchpoints, then they had a winning proposition. This brought back inspiration and enthusiasm in the staff. They started creating the business stories, because they realised they knew this stuff. It was a great tool for anchoring.

5. Bring the Strategy to Life

The stories needed to sell the idea to the rest of the company. How does it look to a person looking o buy car insurance using just their phone? How can we reduce the number of meetings we have to sell a product? HOw can we prepare better or bring the right information or colleague to a meeting? You need to focus on how to deliver this from a customer experience perspective.