October 7 the first CEN-Xchange took place. We were very happy to welcome «veterans» from the Customer Experience Fair in September as well as CEN «newbies». Guests from GE Money Bank, Kuoni, PwC, Raiffeisen, Sulzer and Swisscom gathered to discuss two case studies.
The project «Future of E-Banking» which we had the pleasure to implement with Raiffeisen was about having a glance at the future and develop personas and scenarios for an e-banking environment in 5 to 8 years. Although we couldn’t go too much into the details of the results we shared some interesting learnings about the procedure and methods. Key element was motivating a project team of volunteers to break free from operational limitations and use their creativity to imagine what customers will want to have in the future. We identified visualization as a major success factor during workshops as well as in presenting our results to the organization. Instead of «death by Powerpoint» presentations we chose to conduct info vernissages which allowed visitors to explore the results in their own time and comment on them directly on posters. This way we reached many people from across the organization and invited them to enter into dialog. Raiffeisen was so convinced by the format that other teams use it now as well.
Frank Lubatsch from GE Money Bank presented his approach to keep the customer perspective throughout the software development process from gathering requirements to launching the product. Frank argues that companies invest heavily into research and design to meet customer needs but face great danger of destroying that investment when gradually deviating from the original vision in the realisation phase. Frank identifies the lack of understanding of the product and customer of the software developers as a main source of that risk. Product quality planning is a set of tools and methods that mitigate this risk and help product managers keeping the quality level high from a customer point of view. Anybody interested in learning more about product quality planning can give us a buzz. We will arrange contact with Frank who is happy to share his insights.
We thank all participants for the engaging discussions and the good time we spent together.
In the style of Sepp Herberger I’d like to point out that after CEN-Xchange is before CEN-Xchange. The next event will take place on November 4. Don’t hesitate and register here.