Swisscom Human Centered Design transformation

Back in 2003, the visionary Carsten Schloter, CEO of Swisscom at the time, had a brilliant hunch. He knew that as a technology provider, it will become important (and, indeed, essential) to differentiate the company by providing relevant customer experiences, instead of delivering just more MB/s.

This raised a tough question: how is it possible to shift a technology-driven internal culture towards a more customer-centered one? He sent Christina Taylor to Silicon Valley to find answers.

Five years later, Christina came back to Switzerland to start the transformation journey with a small team. This was the beginning of the Swisscom Human Centered Design story.

(If you are new to the term Human Centered Design, we recommend you first read our blog article about Human Centered Design)

But one more thing was clear, too: newly designed working areas do not change culture on their own.

Methods, tools and processes were another piece of the puzzle. The HCD team realised that it was necessary to articulate, visualise and communicate the methods, tools and processes so that these could be easily shared within Swisscom. To achieve this, the HCD team and Creaholic worked together for the first time (long before we eventually joined forces).

The result of this collaboration was:

• Definition of the Human Centred Design process ('Hear', 'Create', Deliver')

• Review and selection of tools and methods to enable the newly designed HCD process

• Simplifying the tools and methods into three easily understood guidelines, ‘When to use it’, ‘Why use it’ and ‘How to use it’

We undertook a similar project for SwissLife, as well

Culture transformation is not an exact science, but every top management team wants KPI tracking and management possibilities. Because there was no benchmark or KPI set available, we developed a KPI framework ourselves, which allowed us to measure the status of our Human Centered Design transformation.

For one part of this effort, we cooperated with the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences (HSLU) to create an empirically derived score that measures customer centricity within the company. The resulting Customer Centricity Score enables us to show how we have progressed over time, both within the company and in specific departments.

We also turned the employee survey completely upside down. We developed a digital tool to ask employees fewer questions, but more frequently. And in addition, we made the comments on the respective topics transparent for the entire company. With this tool, Pulse, we were able to stimulate feedback culture and shape the improvements in the work environment.