Kone is a global manufacturer of elevators and escalators – that all need maintaining. Maintenance was neglected in favour of the new product cousin, yet delivers higher margins and is more scalable.

To ‘win with customers’ this service needed to be clearly better than the competition. We set out to find out what they really needed.

We visited over 40 customers in Europe and North America, interviewing key people and shadowing their work. We also surveyed customers to understand their key value drivers. We found that overall customers felt that the service was oriented to the equipment not to them or their business needs. This core insight – captured in profiles, video and narrative – drove our strategy. We translated this analysis into a segmentation of customers by business and by relationship preferences. This enabled us to tailor a range of offers that better fit customer needs.

We defined a new approach that ensured sales teams understood their customers and were able to meet their needs. We wanted to create ways to enable the sales teams to listen, then translate what they heard into an offer and a contract.

To do this, we built a tablet app that sales reps would use to capture client context and needs during their conversation. This app then created an offer that the customer could adjust and see how different features affected costs. This enabled a totally new customer engagement. It also led to significant time savings for the reps. More consistent contracts also meant more efficient delivery.

In our research we also saw how the customer experience of on-site maintenance could be vastly improved. Most of the issues did not have to with the quality of the work but with a lack of clear communication. We wanted to put control into the hands of customers and defined a customer app for ordering and tracking service delivery and an online care centre aligned with the call centre.

This new strategy and design required a lot of investment and organisational change. Successful digital tools and the adoption of new ways of working were critical to implementation. To support this, Livework led a phase of prototyping where versions of the tools and processes were tested with staff and customers in controlled trials. These improved the designs and also built advocacy among the teams.

We also provided support to Kone through the design development phase of the service. This was enabled by a service blueprint that defined the target customer experience and the channels that were in development (app, online etc). It then aligned the operational functions and team to this target, calling out where there were new requirements. This covered all aspects of the business from field staff to enterprise systems.

To sustain the change capability Livework worked with the Kone team to recruit and train the Kone design team and provide ongoing capability to redefine and modernise services.