The Challenge

SES is a very successful and highly technical organization. Every one of its clients—from broadcast, to aero and cruise lines—wants the Apple experience. But, the organization hadn’t implemented design thinking best practices to improve the customer experience. Our client, the head of global product design and engineering, came to us for help with a transformation effort that was running into silos. He saw customer-centricity as a key way to drive service innovation and growth.

Our Approach

We started with an insights research effort to understand the customer experience and the existing culture of the organization. We spoke to customers across the world to uncover their unmet needs, experience with SES, and thinking styles. As part of this process we identified allies throughout the organization, including the global head of CX, who was a champion of service design. This gave us additional leverage to introduce more cross-functional thinking and doing to the organization. We created detailed customer journey maps based on the research, and used these in a prioritization workshop to identify a key pain point to redesign: customer onboarding. Focusing on this critical phase allowed us to demonstrate a win and build momentum for additional change.

Role

Strategist
Researcher
Service Designer

Key Deliverables

Strategic Recommendations
Customer Journeys
VP Job Description

Outcomes

Our work improved customer onboarding by reducing silos, shifting from a transactional to a relationship sales and account approach, and reframing how the then-new medium Earth orbit product should be positioned to customers. We continued our work with SES, helping them assess and improve their UX maturity and integrate learnings into a critical product launch.

At the conclusion of this project, our client received a promotion to VP of Innovation. I helped to write his job description.