User Centricity unlocked: Examples for the pragmatic entry into user-centred decisions

Our client sells, implements and operates IT security products worldwide. So far, the focus has been on direct sales. In order to secure and increase the company’s growth, a successful business with business partners is now to be established. All partners should sell, operate and implement the company’s products in the same way as direct sales.

However, the development of this partner strategy proved to be difficult. The reason for this was the DNA of direct sales, whose most important business moment is the negotiation with the customer. Partner strategies, however, look at long-term cooperation, with long-term perspectives and thus other requirements for business success. The biggest success factors here are not the negotiation moments, but the long-term motivation and empowerment of the partner.

To create the right strategic basis for this, eStrategy Consulting used the concept of the Partner Journey, a B2B variant of the Customer Journey Map, an established tool from the User-Centricity Framework. This approach allowed the clear identification of the steps to be taken by the partner. It was possible to find out which skills were needed for each step, whether our client supported these skills sufficiently and which gains and profits resulted for the partner in each case. The Partner Journey was not only a tool for identifying the partner’s requirements, but also for communicating the requirements of the partner strategy within the company. The results led to a solution portfolio that focuses on the partner, i.e. the user, and his or her requirements.

Our client is a German manufacturer of premium power tools that are distributed globally and through multi-level distribution channels. To support its retail partners and, of course, to digitally build and expand its own brand, our client has already established an User Centricity can be piloted on a project basis and lead to rapid initial success. On the basis of this entry, User Centricity can then be rolled out more broadly, including the change process required for this.t and set up a broad portfolio of online marketing initiatives, including social media, apps and initial CRM activities and marketing automations.

In order to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of these initiatives and thus also to extend the lead of online marketing maturity over most competitors, a long-term strategy for digital marketing is now to be developed, including e-commerce and comprehensive service offerings. The strategy also aims to increase cross-team synergies and reduce the risk of team silos. In addition, the focus is on developing the right directive for the alignment and further development of the technical infrastructure and the operational way of working.

In order to properly align this complex task, we placed our client’s leads, customers and fans at the centre of the initial strategic foundations. Methodically, we worked with “Moments of Matter”, i.e. the moments in which users have particularly important points of contact with our clients and their products, from which special expectations are derived. We developed these Moments of Matter for leads and for our client’s existing customers, in all phases of the customer lifecycle. All Moments of Matter were also structured and evaluated multidimensionally, according to their value for the individual user groups, their commercial value for our client and their current and future feasibility.

In a collaborative process, more than 100 such Moments of Matter were developed and evaluated together with different teams of our client along the entire process of the customer relationship: creation, development, monetisation and protection. The result was a multi-dimensionally prioritised and tangible elicitation and documentation of customer requirements. This then served as a usercentred work order to all further steps of our marketing strategy elaboration.

Our client is a traditional, medium-sized steel construction company. The high regulatory requirements for our client’s products require precise documentation along the production process. In the past, this documentation was completely paper-based and had to be extensively digitised afterwards. This led to a high stock of undeliverable products , as the paper-based documentation took too much time, was prone to errors and led to many documentation gaps. Now this documentation was to be captured completely digitally and integrated into the production process.

The particular challenge here was to identify the best possible tool that could map the individual requirements of the production process and integrate the documentation into the client’s core systems, especially the ERP.

In order to capture these requirements holistically, eStrategy Consulting placed the worker in the steel mill at the centre of the requirement design. This also included classic user interviews, but especially innovative methods such as shadowing, i.e. walking along in production during the documentation process. This approach also made it possible to identify requirements that were taken for granted afterwards but had been overlooked in advance. For example, the need for a voice interface with dictation function was identified, because the work gloves that must be worn in the factory prevent the operation of any manual interface, whether keyboard or touch display. Based on these procedures, we were able to create a user-centred catalogue of requirements, expressed via user stories reflecting user behaviour. Vendors were then tested, evaluated and selected against this catalogue.

Our client is a fintech start-up that wants to digitise employee advice on insurance products in companies and thus make it scalable. The aim is to replace the current face-to-face consultations, which are time-consuming and difficult to scale, simply because of the lack of suitable and trained employees. Therefore, counselling is now to be mapped in an online counselling and sales funnel. Counsellors will only be used for individual clarification of specific questions.

For this purpose, eStrategy Consulting conceptualized various assumptions for the standardization and digitalization of the online counselling process, refined them through interviews and transformed them into concrete “paper prototypes” in a lean process. Thus, sufficiently concrete visual images of the most important screens of the digital user interface were created.

These prototypes were then tested and qualitatively evaluated in user focus groups. Through this process, after a few weeks, a concrete concept for the digitisation of the guidance process could be provided, because it had already been expressed in the form of visual prototypes and tested with clients.

Our client is a Berlin-based fashion label that specialises in the design, production and distribution of clothes. The company successfully sells through marketplaces and to other fashion retailers.

Now they also want to scale their own online shop and sell directly to customers, which requires further development of online marketing in order to achieve the necessary reach. Also important is the further development of online services that help in choosing the right dress and thus reduce return costs. For both fields of activity, one question was in the foreground: What do customers actually want in addition?

For this purpose, eStrategy Consulting developed personas of the company’s most important target groups in compact but intensive workshops together with the entire team of the company. In a second step, these personas, which were initially described qualitatively, were tested quantitatively for presumed market size and sales potential. The result helped our client to have a clear common target picture in mind for all strategic and conceptual considerations and thus to massively accelerate all marketing activities.