Helping a sportswear giant become customer-obsessed
Most people think about the iconic three stripe products, but adidas hasn’t been just a retailer for a long time. The rise of e-commerce has evolved adidas into a service organisation – offering an ecosystem of services like ‘click & collect’, store staff tools and radical new circular service models.
Livework has been helping adidas on their journey to becoming a customer-centric (or as they would say ‘customer-obsessed’) service organisation.
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Challenge
Positioning the customer experience as the common denominator
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To deliver great services across the globe, teams need to collaborate across silos and work towards a single, shared, end-to-end experience; not just a ‘slice of the experience’ owned by the IT, Sales, Digital or the Logistics department.
Over multiple years, we supported adidas to develop a systematic approach to putting the customer at the core of everything they do.It all started with a visionary leader who was looking for ways to bring the abstract customer-centric strategy into the day-to-day reality of product owners.
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Approach
From outside service design consultants to a permanent in-house team
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This transformation started as a grass-root like movement, where we as external advisors focused on bringing in the service design through training, coaching and proof projects within one department.
Over the years, we scaled the work outwards (to different departments) and upwards (from operations to strategy levels). This proved the (in)tangible value of customer centricity in a wide variety of projects. To ensure a structural and ongoing presence, we embedded customer centricity into critical organisational routines, practices and structures – including the hiring and onboarding of a permanent in-house service design team.
From strategic imperative to day to day reality
We ran 20+ service design projects, developed Customer Centric strategies for B2C and B2B areas, embedded Customer Centricity in business routines and coached 200+ employees – from product owners to change managers and senior leadership.
We have seen customer centricity move from being a strategic imperative towards something that is lived and practised across teams on a daily basis. It has become part of the culture of the organisation. As an example – in a recent company wide strategic meeting the customer had a prime position across all presentations – in the form of customer north star visions, journeys and language used by presenters.
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To date, most teams understand how and where they contribute to the customer experience, how in-direct it may seem. These teams are equipped with (design) tools to uncover unknown and unmet customer needs and integrate those insights in the development of (new) services, roadmaps and strategy.
On an organisational level we established a structural integration of the customer perspective in key change frameworks, decisions routines and management tools. Including the design of a customer journey architecture – a living library of customer journeys that serve as a sole source of ‘truth’ across the organisation.
The transformation is not done. It is a continuous journey that needs to evolve, be fuelled and fully embedded into a wide range of (organisational) routines.
“We have achieved great things together and we are only here with an internal team and established Customer Centric practice due to your expertise, support and guidance over the past years.”
“We have achieved great things together and we are only here with an internal team and established Customer Centric practice due to your expertise, support and guidance over the past years.”
- VP Business Transformation
I am a lead service designer and a researcher with a strong interest in human behaviour and user research. I work on the crossroads of service design, human behaviour and business to create meaningful customer experiences that deliver value to both the customer and business.
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