From wholesaler to business partner
Summary
As part of rethinking corporate strategy, our client set the goal to move from being a wholesaler to become a strategic business partner – meeting underlying customer demands and enabling them to thrive financially.
With empathy and customer centricity as core values, the transformation was characterized by the use of customer journeys, prototyping, insight work and in-depth interviews.
The result? A customer-centric business transformation providing long lasting digital services based on the voice of the customers.
Background
Our client, a market-leading wholesaler, set the goal to move from being a passive service provider into an active strategic business partner – by supporting their customers throughout the entire user journey and provide an unbeatable customer experience. The project comprised of:
- Insights translated into customers' needs and behaviors
- Alignments to the client’s strategic agenda
- Development of digital services through co-creation, prototypes, and insight work
Much effort was devoted to involving end users and understand the stated as well as voiceless customer needs, creating solutions that surpass expectations and meet the true underlying needs.
“It is a waste of resources to develop solutions customers do not care about.”
What we did
Insights, emanating from customer journeys and in-depth interviews, exposed gaps and helped place customer needs and expectations in relation to the client’s current offerings. A combination of trend analyzes and internal drivers created new opportunities, idea innovation and prioritized solutions within the customer organization.
Filtered out from a wide range of customer needs, two materialized into digital, customer-oriented services in the shape of:
- An app for the customers to get an easy-to-use financial overview to ease decision making and support the improvement of their bottom line
- A community platform for the customers to share insights and jointly contribute to a more sustainable market
Result
The project laid the foundation for our client to completely remodel the customer experience by moving from a passive wholesaler to an integrated business partner. Project insights helped shed light on actual customer needs and how to create value by listening and understanding, to provide long lasting digital services based on the voice of the customers.
The author Lisa, a Management Consultant at Influence with a passion for outside-in thinking